That was certainly the case in Russia's five days of military operations in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in the Caucasus from Aug. 8 to 12. According to Ilya Kramnik, the widely respected RIA Novosti military correspondent, the Russian army suffered only 71 killed and 19 missing and four aircraft destroyed, as well as no more than 10 to 15 Main Battle Tanks damaged or destroyed. While Georgian anti-air defenses supplied by the United States therefore proved effective to at least some degree, the level of resistance put up by the Georgian army was confirmed as negligible.

However, long wars -- even if they are just large-scale counterinsurgency operations like the two Russian wars in Chechnya over the past 14 years or the struggle the U.S. armed forces have been waging in Iraq against Sunni Muslim insurgents since May 2003 -- use up a lot more equipment than policymakers usually expect, even if the actual casualties suffered in the campaign remain relatively low.

Larger wars between major industrial powers, of course, destroy lots of weapons systems as well as lots of people. That is why major powers still need lots of soldiers and lots of relatively cheap, easily manufactured and easily replaced weapons systems.

Carl Von Clausewitz, the greatest theoretician of modern war, warned nearly 200 years ago that one of the most defining characteristics of war was what he called "friction." The inevitable and unavoidable chaos of war means that the more large-scale operations are meticulously planned from beginning to end, the more likely they are to go wrong.

The legendary 19th century physicist Lord Kelvin recognized this same principle of order inevitably decaying into disorder as one of the basic characteristics of the universe and enshrined it in his Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The mythical Irish-American philosopher Murphy put it more succinctly in Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

When this friction or entropy principle is applied to the clash of major nations in war, the unavoidable lesson emerges that combatant nations have to be able to produce as many effective weapons systems as possible and get them to their combat armies in order to win. The United States and the Soviet Union both applied this principle with overwhelming success against Nazi Germany in World War II.

In the 21st century, however, this fundamental principle of the need to mass-produce -- or retain the industrial potential to mass-produce -- as many weapons as simply as possible has been heavily eroded in the United States.

The United States' industrial base is only a fraction of the size, variety and complexity it was 30 years ago. It was first eroded by competition from Japan, and over the past quarter-century it has been devastated by hundreds of billions of dollars of imports from the People's Republic of China. Both Japan and China retained very strong protectionist barriers, primarily by drastically artificially undervaluing their currencies, while successive U.S. governments -- Republican and Democrat alike -- refused to respond with similar or symmetrical measures.

Second, the preponderance of high-tech specialist defense companies in the U.S. economy, with their concomitant influence on the political process, has led successive congresses -- once again of both parties, and of liberals and conservatives alike -- to prefer to pursue cutting-edge research and development rather than giving priority to maintaining a large, lower-tech industrial base that can mass-produce automatic weapons, light infantry vehicles and other equipment.

Third, both political and military decision-makers far prefer to invest in the most expensive, ambitious, high-prestige items possible rather than the much smaller, humbler weapons systems that usually prove far more crucial in wars.

These processes have applied, if anything, far more to the U.S. Air Force and Navy than to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. However, U.S. ground forces have suffered greatly over the nearly 17 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The first Bush and Clinton administrations allowed investment in heavy land forces equipment to fall off because of the perceived "peace dividend" and lack of apparent major threats to challenge the United States around the world through the 1990s.

(In Part 4: Mislearning the lessons of Iraq)

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