The Department of Defense is focusing its preparations less on counterinsurgency and more on large-scale battles with more sophisticated adversaries as a result of Russia’s protracted invasion of Ukraine.
According to a Washington Post report, the Pentagon has been working on a classified analysis of the Ukrainian war for the past year in order to set the stage for the upcoming national defense policy.
Under the direction of nearly two dozen military officers, the project concentrated on five main areas: air power, ground tactics, long-range fire capabilities, information warfare, and methods for increasing and maintaining force strength.
As part of that initiative, Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, conducts simulated war drills in the Mojave Desert to help American forces get ready for actual combat by leveraging intelligence gathered during the invasion of Ukraine.
Military authorities claim that troops are finding precision weapons, drone fleets, and digital surveillance to be significantly more useful than they were in other major conflicts.
Drones, in particular, have “fundamentally changed” aerial reconnaissance, according to Army Chief of Staff Randy George.
With respect to the Post, a senior defense official who wished to remain anonymous said, “We immersed them in this conflict to make sure they were really understanding the implications for warfare.”