Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, many world armies, including US armies, have moved away from concepts of symmetrical employment to increase their effectiveness in campaigns where counter-insurgency engagement was required. Little by little, the armies became lighter, to gain mobility and responsiveness, and concentrated their investments on immediate needs, such as drones or armored vehicles protected against IEDs, to the detriment of heavy skills, such as heavy mechanized combat, electronic warfare or maneuver beyond the brigade level.
While Western armies adapted to commitments in Afghanistan, Iraq or Mali, China and Russia maintained their efforts to equip themselves with new high-intensity skills, to the point of now surpassing the forces of the Russian Federation in many areas. NATO and their allies. After the first alert given by the annexation of Crimea and the construction of artificial defensive islands in the China Sea, the United States began, from 2015, a gradual shift to reconfigure the armies and their doctrines in order to be able to regain predominance in high-intensity combat. With global tensions accelerating and intensifying, how is the Pentagon preparing to face future military challenges facing adversaries as competent and well-equipped as American forces and their allies?
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