The DoD writes up plans to attack 50+ countries every year. This is a useful exercise in part because doing so well take a long time and show where capability might be lacking. But, it's also simply a good way to train for the current war instead of falling into the trap of preparing to fight the last one.
PS: It's also not clear how serious this stuff is. The DoD does a lot of stuff simply because it's budget and manpower is insane. And nothing says people are not simply taking the plan written in 1983 changing the name of the aircraft and dating it 2016.
> train for the current war instead of falling into the trap of preparing to fight the last one < This is likely true, but they haven't done all that well in the last few they started. The completely flat-footed occupations have been more than a little humbling I'd have thought.
All the plans in the world won't do you any good if your political masters refuse to follow them. I'm sure the DoD had good plans for the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. And I'm sure those plans involved things that the administration refused to consider, like sending four times as many troops as we actually did.
The US occupations have been pretty successful from a military prospective. I'm not sure you could do a much better job in the 21st century (without resorting to insane brutality).
It was the geopolitical result that was disasterous. Blame that on the administrations that ordered the occupations, especially, the state department and intelligence agencies.
The occupation of Iraq was a stupid move, but the military could have sustained it indefinitely.
The ability to sustain losses is very different to what the GP was discussing - learning from the past to deal with the present. Of course the US can sustain losses easily - that has been a hallmark of the industrialised world. However the US did not pay attention to the experiences of others with experiences when occupying Afghanistan or Iraq. This did not appear to be an easy learning experience with IEDs, suicide bombing and insurgency being a departure from what the US expected to face. At least that's what it looked like from afar.
Our political leaders sold Iraq on the basis that it would be cheap and easy and that we would be welcomed as liberators. Fighting an insurgency requires abandoning those assumptions, which was politically nearly impossible. The problems we faced there weren't with planning, they were with ignoring planning.
