“The scale of this war is out of proportion with all of our recent thinking,” said Cavoli, who is also head of US European Command. “But it is real and we must contend with it.”
One lesson is the importance of an adequate defense industrial base capable of providing the necessary equipment and supplies to satisfy the voracious appetite of large-scale, high-intensity warfare. The US, Russia, and Europe are already scrambling to ramp up production of artillery shells after letting their munitions stockpiles and factories run down after the Cold War.
“Production capacity remains vital, absolutely vital,” Cavoli said. “A healthy and elastic defense industrial base is just as important” as the number of troops.
Cavoli also took aim at the belief — until recently touted by Germany and other countries — that soft power has become a substitute for military power.
“Hard power is a reality,” Cavoli said, adding that diplomacy, cyber-warfare, and economic strength are important, “but the great irreducible feature of warfare is hard power, and we have to be good at it.”
“If the other guy shows up with a tank, you better have a tank,” Cavoli said.
Interestingly, Cavoli pointed to Ukraine’s surprising battlefield successes as evidence that “precision can beat mass.” But there’s a catch: It takes time for quality to beat quantity, and “that time is usually bought with space.
Ansell - it is incredible how posters like caww utterly distort if not downright lie about what was said
Cavoli said “The scale of this war is out of proportion with all of our recent thinking,
And caww distorted it to “.”Losses in Ukraine are ‘out of proportion’ to what NATO has been planning for””
Constant lying is bad, caww