Yesterday, Rick Moran graced our humble pages once again asking the question which I have placed once again in the title of this response. (You can find another copy of the essay at his home page, with plenty of interesting comments from readers.)He also recommended the new History Channel series, World War II in HD. (I’m watching additional portions of that today, and it’s truly worth a look for any of you who missed it.) And while it shall always be important to remember the glory, the honor, the sacrifice and the horror of WW2 and the Greatest Generation who set forth to save the world, we must recognize all of the changes which have taken place between then and now in the world, in our own government, in our people and in the way we wage war.

Let’s first look at one of the questions Rick asked. Could we put 1.6 million soldiers in uniform to take up arms in defense of their country today? For the moment, let’s leave aside the politics and sociology and just look at the logistics. Yes, if the need and threat were great enough and our government could impress that upon the populace, we certainly have the manpower available to dredge up such a force. But we wouldn’t. Not for lack of will, but for lack of need. That’s simply not how we fight anymore. There are a couple of powers left in the world (primarily the Russians and the Chinese) who could seriously challenge us, but none of us have much interest in that sort of a doomsday scenario. The other opponents who we seem to express any interest in fighting are far smaller and simply don’t stand a chance against a full blown military assault by the United States.

Think back for a moment to the beginning of the current Iraq war. (And for that matter, the same may be said for the original fight in Desert Storm.) Yes, we did actually engage in a real “war” in the traditional sense of the word, with the government of Iraq. It lasted roughly six weeks. (And it only took that long because we had to stop and ask directions so often because none of the signs were in English.) We lost, in relative terms, only a handful of soldiers. The real losses we encountered came later during the peace keeping and “stabilization” efforts in the cities, long after we had defeated the Iraqi army and taken control of their capitol.

We don’t fight battles the way we did in World War II. There are no vast armies, moving in formation across foreign lands to charge into the fray with equally large masses of men. We monitor the movement of troops and armor from space and send in our high tech air power in advance to pound the enemy to a pulp long before the grunts on the ground show up. And forget about any fixed weapons batteries or collections of mobile armor such as tanks. We take them out with missiles, stealth fighters and Blackhawks long before the troops arrive. I say this not to denigrate the work and sacrifice of our troops today and in these modern wars, but as a simple observation. In open battle, our troops today are called on more to do “mop-up” work than to engage in any land battles with enemy forces of sufficient size to wage a pitched battle. So a 1.6 million man army would be more of a hindrance than a help in the wars we fight today.

We’re a high technology force, against which the simple, dog-face ground troops of most nations stand no chance. This is why they adapt strategies which many of us label as cowardly, running and hiding out of uniform among civilians, and fighting with improvised explosive devices. They can’t compete with us, so they adopt the strategies of the Vietnamese, the Somalians, and others who have found varying degrees of success through guerrilla tactics. For our part, we don’t have much use for gigantic columns of troops trundling across foreign lands in the numbers we deployed across France so long ago.

At the other end of the scale is the possibility of such a war with Russia or China. Again, it’s unlikely that massive armies of ground troops would be effective. Those enemies are equally high tech and would deploy hellfire from above on any such assemblage of troops and armor. Plus, there is the always extant threat of nukes bring broken out if things begin to go badly for either side. Destruction can be carried out on a far more massive scale than the death which can be dealt by a few thousand men carrying rifles. These would be far more massive and potentially world ending wars, but they would be fought primarily in the theater of technology. The idea of an actual land invasion of either China or the United States seems improbably in the extreme.

Now to the other major question: do we have the will as a nation? Are we made of the same stuff that molded the Greatest Generation? Again, I think the will is still there, but the threat would have to be real and understandable by the vast majority. Unlike the WW2 era, people are better informed and perhaps more skeptical of the government’s actions and motives. (Which is a good thing, by the way.) We don’t automatically accept the government’s call to arms and feel free to debate the issue at length. But if we were faced with an actual threat to our nation from a strong opponent, much the same as we drew together as a nation on Sept. 12, 2001, I believe we would rise up as we have in the past and do what needed to be done.

As to having “the right stuff,” this is a question which probably doesn’t need to be asked. Soft times make soft men. Hard times produce grizzled warriors. When the time came and it was “do or die” our forces would be molded into the warriors we required. Great deeds would be done, tragedies would unfold and the stories would write themselves over the ages to come.

But I don’t believe it’s ever going to happen. We have a few, big school hall monitors on the planet. If two smaller countries start a war, the big kids will condemn the action, convince the rest of the world to condemn it as well, and stop it from spiraling out of control, nation to nation, as it did in WW2. If one of the big nations such as the United States goes to war against a smaller one, such as Iran, it will be another case of enemies who slip away into the night and fight us one car bomb at a time in the streets of their cities. And if two of the big parties do decide to go all in, it will be a high tech war of destruction more than armies of individual men with rifles and grenades.

And more’s the pity, really. If we did have to face the massive scale of personal carnage that we saw back in the day, we might think a bit longer and harder before going to the mat. But the world has grown up and moved on. We just don’t fight that way any more.