Name a war in the last 100 years when the US went in with all of the weapons they wanted or needed. Go ahead. I'll wait.

<chickets chirping>

We went into WWI without a single airplane that was suitable for combat. We had to get them from the French and British. We didn't have enough light machine guns, so we ended up getting a horrible French made weapon that was a true POS.

We went into WWII without enough of anything. Not enough ships, not enough planes, not enough troops, not enough weapons. Go see if you can find pictures of the great 1941 Lousiana War Games, where the troops had to use trucks with signs declaring them as tanks and wooden machine guns because they didn't have the real thing. Those games were played just a few months before Americans were in combat. In the Pacific, our planes were grossly outclassed in most areas by the Japanese Zero (armor plating and the ability to dive rapidly being about the only advantages). In fact, going up against a Zero while flying a Brewster Buffalo (the Navy's first monoplane fighter) was tantamount to suicide. The P-40 and F4F could outdive a Zero, so the strategy was to dive, attack, and run away. If you tried to stay and dogfight, you would soon die. Our tanks were engineering disasters almost to the end of the war. The Sherman tank was nicknamed the "Ronson" by the cynical crews after a famous brand of cigarette lighter whose motto was "Lights every time." One hit from an 88 and a Sherman was a fireball. It wasn't until late 1943 that better fighters like the P-51 Mustang entered service, and late 1944 that a combat worthy tank entered service in limited numbers.

We entered Korea with a lot of worn out weapons left over from WWII, many of them unsuited for the Korean combat conditions. Our troops went into Vietnam with boots that would rot off of their feet and weapons that jammed in the jungle environment.

You go to war with the Army (and Navy and Marines and Air Force) that you have, not the one you want. Too bad the military was gutted so mercilessly during the 1990s (starting in 1992 with the Bush 41 administration). Maybe if the cuts hadn't been so severe, we'd have the troops people claim we need. Those who keep complaining that we didn't send enough troops just don't understand - we don't have any more to send. The general rule is that you can't deploy more than 1/3rd of your combat troops at a time because you need to be able to rotate some out of the combat area to rest and refit while keeping others in reserve to handle potential emergencies (like North Korea).