The United States is becoming a different kind of military, increasingly trained for small wars rather than big ones, and for counter-insurgency and nation-building.

That is one message of "Cradle of Conflict; Iraq and the birth of the modern U.S. military," a new book by Pentagon adviser Dr. Michael Knights.

It is the first account of the 15-year campaign against Iraq that brings in the broader changes in U.S. strategic thinking as defined in President George W. Bush's 2002 National Security document on the need to prepare for preemptive strikes against rogue states and terrorist groups in an age of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

His second message is that rather than referring to the first and second Gulf wars, it makes more sense to talk of a single 15-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a conflict that still continues -- and does so far more lethally for the American armed forces.

Knights points out that in 1991, Iraq's million-man army, still battle-hardened by the long war against Iran, inflicted just 184 deaths on the U.S. military -- but the resistance of the last 30 months has killed 2,000 American troops. And this is likely to shape the future kinds of challenges the U.S. military is likely to meet as other countries observe the unfolding campaign in Iraq, just as Saddam Hussein distributed translated copies of "Blackhawk Down,' the account of U.S. forces in difficulty in Somalia in 1993, to his officer corps before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"In this unipolar age, when resistance to the hegemonic and globalizing power if the United States is likely to proliferate, resistance should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon but should instead be diagnosed and treated as a global contagion," Knights concludes. "If the United States moves towards a strategy of preempting threats and changing regimes, it must recognize that its military prowess is under review by potential adversaries on each and every one of these occasions. Such operations need to be considered and undertaken as exemplary deterrent engagements if they are to bolster the deterrent effect of U.S. military power."

Knights goes back to Clausewitz-style basics to stress that the 15-year campaign against Iraq should not be seen as two stunningly successful main force engagements against the massed tank armies of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard, but as a coherent if prolonged political-military conflict of hot war, cool war and containment, and then hot war again in which the Iraqis often proved successful.

"The plain truth is that Iraq frequently managed to prevent the U.S. military from achieving the political and military objectives that it set between 1991 and 2003," Knights claims. "Resistance against United Nations inspections and U.S. military containment was never suppressed.

"The tale is a cautionary one," Knights stresses. "The United States will require more than advanced technologies to truly transform itself into the dominant military power of the 21st century. In a troubled age when the United States will be required to engage at all levels of conflict and display global reach, much more must be done to develop intelligence dominance to match the other areas of U.S. military dominance, to garner multilateral support, and to underpin the use of force with clear and attainable military objectives."

Knights' book, which is circulating widely at the Pentagon, has already been dubbed "a must read" by U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Commander in Chief of Central Command (CENTCOM), and by Lt. Gen. David Deptula, U.S. Air Force Commander at Pacific Air Forces Warfighting HQ. Civilian political advisers also praise it. Bruce Riedel, a former senior director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council in the White House from 1996-2001, calls it "an extremely important book."

Knights looks at the Iraq engagement as a whole, including the 11 years of diplomacy, sanctions and no-fly zones between the two full-scale wars, and concludes that this may well be the pattern of future conflicts, part politics, part intelligence operations and part war. Saddam Hussein's regime won a number of the political and intelligence engagements, Knights suggests, using diplomacy to buy time, to accumulate funds for new weapons through the United Nations oil-for-food program, and to learn how to conceal and camouflage those weapons against U.S. air power.

"The outcomes of Desert Storm were not as one-sided as many analyses suggested," he writes. "In certain fields of the conflict, Iraq's forces displayed strong abilities to limit U.S. military power, creating air defense sanctuaries, frustrating U.S. intelligence collection and frustrating U.S. air attacks.

"The Iraqis displayed three characteristics that may represent a template for the types of adversary the United States will increasingly face in the 21st century: They were highly adaptive. They fought for (and sometimes maintained) intelligence superiority. And they maintained the types of forces that were most useful for resistance," Knights adds.

He notes that massed anti-aircraft artillery forced U.S. pilots to fly higher, where they were unable to tell whether the targets they saw on the ground were real tanks and guns or plywood copies. As a result, he says, "hundreds" of expensive precision-guided munitions were wasted on dummy weapons.

His study of the low-intensity operations against Iraq in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, concludes that Clinton's policies have been unfairly criticized.

"Rather than the character of the Clinton administration, the preferences of military decision-makers and the lack of regional host nation support for U.S. operations were the key drivers behind these types of limited response to the limited threat posed by the Baathist regime," Knights writes.

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