The Russian arm of decision is the artillery in various forms; infantry exists to consolidate gains by the artillery blasting the path clear. Artillery includes Air. You may or may not include tanks in this equation. Its firepower clears and then people consolidate. Or auxiliaries clear, snipers clear or hold as economy of force, but regular troops are precious.

The American arms of decision are Armor officially and Infantry with Artillery and Air in support.

This plays out in the battlefield already, not just in Syria but Ukraine. The Russians don’t like wasting lives.

In the US Army the internal politics may well have the Infantry, with its love children SOF/SOCOM, in competition with Armor for who’s on top (usually the Infantry in some form), but Artillery is not really in the running.

Also, the Russians are deep into drones, and we are nowhere near as deep into drone or counter-drone, despite the urgency of the latter. Wait and see, it is quite urgent to get a good counter-drone capability. We’re “talking” about it with “doctrinal review” and a “holistic approach”. We have all the tech; they just don’t field it.

It doesn’t help that we’ve been playing — and only playing — at counterinsurgency for the last 20 years, and, yes, Luttwak is right; it’s military malpractice.

As much money as we spend on the military we should have 50,000 of those armored mules with rockets, 3,000 ships, powered armor for the troops. Someone is just stealing all that money. It’s not going to where they say it does.

They whole entire, I mean every single one, staff of generals in the US armed forces need to be let go. At some point things become so corrupt the only thing you can do is tear it down and rebuild from scratch.