When the Army was developing the M-1 tank, it didn't build a weapon that would only work in Central Europe. Instead, it designed and tested the vehicle until it would work just about anywhere from the frozen tundra of Alaska to the sands of the Middle East. They do the same thing for all of the weapons they buy.

The key to weapons procurement is to consider the environments where the weapon might be used and to make sure they'll work in all of those places. In addition, joint service operations require interoperability. We don't need things like we had in the early 1980s where Army radios were incompatable with Navy radios, so a soldier in Grenada had to use his phone credit card to call in a Navy artillery strike. Fortunately, horror stories like that are a thing of the past. The fact that they existed at all was due to a failure to plan.

The key to fighting any war is logistics. All the soldiers and weapons in the world are useless if you can't get them to the battlefield. That means avoiding decisions like having to remove the turrent of an M-2 Bradley APC so it can fit into a C-141 because they made the Bradley too big to fit in the plane. That means looking to new technological developments and seeing how they can both be useful and a threat.

I went through some training in 1986 with a Captain Cox who'd just transferred in from Wright Patterson AFB. He'd worked on crew protection systems at Wright Patt, including nuclear flash blindness protection and laser eye protection. He had a hard time selling the need for laser eye protection to a certain Air Force general who kept saying, "I flew down the streets of Hanoi at streetlight level and no one could touch me." The general couldn't seem to grasp the idea that lasers travel at the speed of light and can easily blind a pilot, causing him to either miss his target or to crash. He was fighting the last war and couldn't see the need for preparing for the next one.