By and large, intellectually the services have been pathetic for decades about less than total warfare. Since WWII ( at least ) wars have been in low rent, politically messy, population rich third world countries. The military bureaucracy just doesn’t want to think about it. They’d much rather have Army Times discussions for a year about a new uniform change, or Regiment structure.
Those were the words of Pete Schoomaker, then chief of staff of the Army, to General David Petraeus, who at the time (2005) was commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The context of Schoomaker's remarks was that the war in Iraq, which had been going on for more than two years, wasn't going well. The trajectory of events was, in fact, alarming. So Schoomaker tasked Petraeus, the leader of a group of intellectual-warriors in the Army, to rethink our counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The job was to determine the right overarching concepts and intellectual underpinnings of the war -- and then to put them into practice.