Tom Ricks's Inbox

Marine Maj. Gen. Larry Taylor, now in Iraq, recently wrote to a young Marine to warn him against assuming that the country's next war will be like those in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. I was particularly struck by his last point -- that the danger of being wrong about a big war is far greater than the danger of being wrong about a small one.

You say the next conflict will be a guerrilla conflict. I say, it depends. In my lifetime, we have been in 5 big fights and a bunch of little ones. In only one of those 5 big ones (Desert Storm) had we prepared for the type of war we wound up having to fight. It is one thing to say that a certain type of fight is more or less likely; it is quite another to say it is certain to be one or the other. In war, the only thing certain is uncertainty.

Complex, irregular warfare may be the most likely fight . . . but are you prepared to guarantee that? It may be that nobody can beat us in a conventional fight today, but what we buy today is what we will have to fight with in 2020. Furthermore, advertising that our focus of effort is on the low-to-mid intensity fights of the future reduces the deterrence that powerful conventional capabilities demonstrate to traditional state actors. Remember, phase 1 of the plan for any big fight is to, hopefully, deter the enemy from even starting the fight. Non-state actors, guerrillas, terrorists, whatever, are not likely to be deterred by our capabilities. Nation-states are. We had better damn well have the capability to fight the guerrilla and the nation-state, regardless of which of these is more or less likely.

Also, IMHO, the risk of being unprepared to fight the nation-state is much greater than the risk of being unprepared to fight the guerrilla.

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Tom Ricks is a special military correspondent for The Washington Post. This feature aims to give readers a snapshot of the conversations about Iraq, Afghanistan and other matters that play out in Ricks's e-mail inbox. Have an interesting document? Send it to TheInbox@washpost.com.