After a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama Administration has adopted a new defense strategy that recognizes the need to limit our strategic ends in an era of increasing limits on our military means. The strategy calls for armed forces capable of conducting a broad range of missions, in a full range of contingencies, and in a global context that is increasingly complex. It calls for doing so with a smaller defense budget. Opportunities for savings come from reducing the ability to fight two regional conflicts simultaneously and from not sizing the force to conduct prolonged, large-scale stability operations.

Foreign internal conflicts clearly remain a permanent feature of the U.S. foreign policy landscape, especially since the United States regularly participates in efforts to stabilize countries affected by conflict and then helps them recover afterwards. Yet U.S. government officials and the American public in general have difficulty accepting the inevitability of U.S. involvement in such efforts.

In 1973 General William F. DePuy, first commander of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), emphasized that it was necessary to expose soldiers to realistic battlefield conditions before they experienced actual combat. Doing this should improve the soldiers’ preparation and thereby, in the long run, their effectiveness and efficiency. DePuy’s belief was widely shared and led to the development of new training methods and a training philosophy that is often referred to as “train as you fight”. Ever since, military training programs have continuously been improved and better shaped towards the real threats that soldiers were facing in the theater. A clear example reflecting the new philosophy was the establishment of the US Combat Training Centers (CTCs). The five pillars upon which the CTC program is based, require (1) that participating units be organized as they would for actual combat, (2) a dedicated, doctrinally proficient operations group, (3) a dedicated, realistic opposing force (OPFOR), (4) a training facility being capable of simulating combat conditions, and (5) a base infrastructure.