Learning to fight irregular warfare

From Foreign Policy... Here's an issue I've wondered about from the beginning of the "War on Terror". W kept talking about killing the enemy, as if al Queda were an army whose soldiers could be counted and then eliminated. His whole vocabulary always sounded to me like he thought we were fighting another country. I wonder how much of this comes from the Beltway establishment having grown up during the cold war, when the enemy was a clearly defined nation with formal alliances defining their sphere of influence?

On Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed the Pentagon's budget plan for fiscal year 2010. Media attention focused on the many expensive weapons programs Gates cancelled. Gates gave a glimpse of his philosophical approach to the budget with this exchange during the question-and-answer session with the Pentagon press corps:

I mean, the reality is that -- and let me put this very crudely -- if you broke this budget out, it would probably be about 10 percent for irregular warfare, about 50 percent for traditional, strategic and conventional conflict, and about 40 percent dual-purpose capabilities.

So this is not about irregular warfare putting the conventional capabilities in the shade. Quite the contrary: this is just a matter -- for me, at least -- of having the irregular-war constituency have a -- have a seat at the table for the first time when it comes to the base budget.

Gates has felt himself battling against what he has seen as a Pentagon bureaucracy that has been more comfortable with preparing for "big wars," the traditional state-versus-state conventional conflicts. Most of the weapons programs the bureaucracy has promoted, and which Gates killed on Monday, were designed with such wars in mind.