Tired of Winning Yet?

Here's a quick summary of some of the American military problems revealed by the war with Iran. Even though the fancy hardware has worked well, for now, we might not have the staying power required for successful asymmetric war. The longer we fight, the less likely we'll "win" (whatever that means when Donald Trump changes the goalposts every day):

The United States for many years has exhibited a deep-rooted bias toward quality over quantity. The same tendency, to a lesser extent, was on display at the beginning of World War II, when the Navy preferred to build large fleet destroyers instead of the vessels it needed to defeat German submarines. As a result, even Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the wartime chief of naval operations, concluded that “the Navy did not obtain adequate means to deal with the U-boat until late in 1943.” The solution lay in shifting production to smaller destroyer escorts, the ancestors of contemporary frigates—smaller, slower, cheaper, and quicker to build. More than 500 were built for the Navy alone during that war. In the current case, the Navy now has so few vessels that the loss of even one ultra-valuable major warship would be a humiliation; the loss of several, a catastrophe. But history suggests that in naval wars, ships sink.