Top American military commanders wish for conventional war

[Rogue 9]

America's finest news source

U.S. Military Desperate To Be Handed Just One Solid War It Can Knock Out Of The Park

March 28, 2012

ARLINGTON, VA—Reportedly fed up with complicated and protracted operations overseas, top Pentagon officials acknowledged this week they were desperate to be given just one straightforward, no-nonsense military engagement they could really knock out of the park.

"Given all these messy, ambiguous conflicts we've been fighting against enemies you can't even put your finger on, what we could really use right now is a plain old war against a clear-cut bad guy employing conventional tactics and weaponry," said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "No roadside bombs or plainclothes militants hiding out among innocent civilians—just a fair fight where two sides shoot at each other and someone wins. That's it."

"If Congress or our commander in chief could pull a few strings to make that happen, I swear we could totally nail a war like that, no question," Dempsey added. "The sort of thing where you go in, blow up a number of actual tanks and jets, declare victory, plant a flag, and then exit—that's all we're asking for."

Citing the country's long history of winning wars against sovereign nations with actual standing armies, the Pentagon's top brass repeatedly assured reporters they would "completely wipe the floor" with such an opponent if given the chance, and promised they would make America "very, very proud."

Additionally, military leaders said that engaging in such a conflict "would be a huge confidence boost for [them] right now."

"We'd be really grateful if the United States became embroiled in a war requiring us to bomb munitions factories, engage in aerial dogfights, or torpedo battleships," said Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Amos, noting that when it comes to facing actual armies with actual naval and air weaponry, the U.S. is "great at that stuff." "I guarantee it would be an absolute slam dunk for us."

"Come on," the four-star general added, "we really, really need this."

Admitting they "can't even look at a map of the Middle East anymore," members of the Joint Chiefs also said they were still skittish about Southeast Asia and would prefer to "stay as far away as possible" from any situation in which the term "insurgency" might apply.

Additionally, the nation's top generals stressed it was vitally important that any new conflict have a clear standard by which to measure victory, front lines "that are actually lines," and conditions under which dropping bombs actually weakens the enemy instead of rallying more people to its cause and making it stronger.

"While we'd gladly take almost any conventional military confrontation, we'd really prefer to liberate an oppressed citizenry that would be unconditionally happy when we arrived," said Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command. "Ideally, we'd like to avoid that whole mixture of violent loathing toward us as occupiers and utter dependence on us as peacekeepers. That's not really our strong suit."

"I should also point out that it's been a while since we last had a good old-fashioned European war," Mattis continued. "Because that sort of thing might just do the trick for us. We know the area, the culture, and all the languages real well. Give us a war with a nice, dependable Western front, and we could bang that sucker out in our sleep, no problem. Just something to think about."

Pentagon leaders also said they were open to the option of a sovereign nation attacking the United States directly, stating that nothing mobilizes a country or boosts troop morale faster than the defense of one's home soil. In addition, they noted that a war in which America is not seen as the aggressor is "exactly the type of thing we're talking about here."

"Ultimately, we just want a chance to unleash our full land, air, and sea power on actual uniformed soldiers for a change," Army chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno said. "Believe me, if America let us do that, I've know doubt we could totally lay waste and come home victorious."

As of press time, the Navy had positioned its entire Atlantic fleet along the coast of Portugal and informed the president and Congress it was "ready to go" if given the word.

[Guardsman Bass]

Good stuff. This in particularly made me laugh:

Admitting they "can't even look at a map of the Middle East anymore,"

Like most good Onion articles, it does touch a serious note amidst the humor. We're still designing and building weapons for the next conventional war, and while having those weapons allows us to actually prevent such a war from taking place, it's a bit more difficult to explain that. I remember trying to explain to someone how having cutting-edge fighter jets actually saves the lives of Americans, since it means that enemies are much more reluctant to go head-to-head with them in the face of certain defeat.

[Iroscato]

Hehe, it actually had me fooled for a moment, I love the detail they put into the article, like the [them] in square brackets, and the last line actually made me burst out laughing. Gotta love me some Onion

[dragon]

Sad thing is that I know several high ranking officers that believes along the line. Of course when I asked them who they had no idea. Afterwich I pointed out that while we we focused on a convential war in one location it opens us up for terroists attacks from the rear.

[Bakustra]

Or, to look at this from another perspective, the perpetual war economy of the Cold War provided an excellent way to suppress dissent by providing a hearty helping of jobs and fear to keep the American populace united, and with the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex is trying to justify itself, and failing, because the mechanisms for winning guerrilla warfare are not ones that can be rolled off Northrup Grumman or Halliburton production lines. So then we can see the emphasis on China as a potential threat to be guarded against (e.g. in the latest Pentagon budget proposals) for what it really is- an effort to manufacture a new enemy from a rival to prop up the military-industrial complex. The Onion manages to carve deep in its satire, though probably unconsciously.

[Guardsman Bass]

It's more a product of re-focusing on East Asia, where we have allies willing to work more with us on military matters to counter-balance the increased regional power of China (particularly with regards to certain issues, like sovereignty issues in the South China Sea). Any conflict in that area except an unlikely North Korean invasion is going to be biased towards naval and air combat, at least in the beginning.

[Skgoa]

Hehe, it actually had me fooled for a moment, I love the detail they put into the article, like the [them] in square brackets, and the last line actually made me burst out laughing. Gotta love me some Onion

Yeah, satire is best when is indistinguishable from reality.

[Raw Shark]

It's more a product of re-focusing on East Asia, where we have allies willing to work more with us on military matters to counter-balance the increased regional power of China (particularly with regards to certain issues, like sovereignty issues in the South China Sea). Any conflict in that area except an unlikely North Korean invasion is going to be biased towards naval and air combat, at least in the beginning.

The conflict in East Asia is not new. We have always been at war with East Asia.

[Crateria]

It's more a product of re-focusing on East Asia, where we have allies willing to work more with us on military matters to counter-balance the increased regional power of China (particularly with regards to certain issues, like sovereignty issues in the South China Sea). Any conflict in that area except an unlikely North Korean invasion is going to be biased towards naval and air combat, at least in the beginning.

The conflict in East Asia is not new. We have always been at war with East Asia.

You damn thoughtcriminal, read the ending of the trustworthy news source's article-

As of press time, the Navy had positioned its entire Atlantic fleet along the coast of Portugal and informed the president and Congress it was "ready to go" if given the word.

Clearly they're preparing to launch a liberation of Eurasia. To Room 101 for you.

[MKSheppard]

Apologies to everyone for a little bit of necroing, but I saw this when I was on vacation in Florida, and it was so eyebleedingly STUPID that I had to comment on it no matter what:

Or, to look at this from another perspective, the perpetual war economy of the Cold War provided an excellent way to suppress dissent by providing a hearty helping of jobs and fear to keep the American populace united, and with the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex is trying to justify itself, and failing, because the mechanisms for winning guerrilla warfare are not ones that can be rolled off Northrup Grumman or Halliburton production lines. So then we can see the emphasis on China as a potential threat to be guarded against (e.g. in the latest Pentagon budget proposals) for what it really is- an effort to manufacture a new enemy from a rival to prop up the military-industrial complex. The Onion manages to carve deep in its satire, though probably unconsciously.

Buck-ustra; do us all a favor and shut the fuck up before you make yourself look even more stupid than you already are.

the military-industrial complex is trying to justify itself, and failing, because the mechanisms for winning guerrilla warfare are not ones that can be rolled off Northrup Grumman or Halliburton production lines.

I guess someone completely fucking missed the last ten years of war in Vietraq and Afghanam?

The US military ordered 10,000 MRAPs at a unit cost of $500,000> each for $5 billion....in 2007 alone; because guess what, Humvees designed for fighting the SOVIET HORDE were unable to protect the WARFIGHTER from guerillas who could be ANYWHERE, rather than in clearly defined front lines.

What's even better, is that MRAPs designed in the initial rush to get protection to the troops in Iraq were totally unable to handle the Afghanistan theater, due to their extremely high center of gravity making them prone to rollover and other fun things; requiring yet another MRAP competition to design a lighter, smaller vehicle specifically for A-stan.

We ended up spending $44 billion to buy over 15,000 of the damn things in 36+ different variants to fight a bunch of derka derka guerillas. Then we talked about simply putting them all away in warehouses and forgetting about them, since they were so heavy and had shitty fuel consumption; a liability in peacetime; totally wasting our investment in them. The Army then later decided to keep a bunch around just in case.

What's more, the military has announced plans to buy over 25,000 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles to completely replace the Humvee in any projected combat role; because the Humvee is just too vulnerable to guerillas and insurgents.

Then there's stuff like the $30 million Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizer which was a remote controled lightning gun to fry IEDs from a distance. Link.

On the naval side of things, you have the Little Crappy Ship; designed explictly to fight the naval equivalent of a guerilla war in the littorials; which is nothing but a huge gigantic pork product -- $600+ million dollars for a 40 knot speedboat with a 57mm gun and RAM; because the mission modules have yet to be delivered, and it'll be years before they'll ever be delivered.

We were supposed to downselect to just one LCS design, but the Navy decided to buy BOTH; and waste our money.

I can go on for a while like this; but take it from me, going back to conventional war will save a shitload of money.

[Simon_Jester]

The critical difference is that in conventional war, if you blow something up, it stays blown up, and nobody shouts at you for blowing it up.

This makes for a lot of cheap-and-nasty brute force solutions to problems. For a conventional army to come out of a guerilla war without being totally defeated takes finesse or tremendous brutality. If you don't use brutality (as, say, 19th century European imperialists did), you're going to be spending a lot of money.

[Alkaloid]

I think you might be being a little naive there Shep, if you really think that someone wouldn't come up with some way to spend hundreds of billions developing the next generations of multiple variants of Bradleys and Hummers and combat helicopters of all stripes because "the last ten years have clearly proven that all weapons need to be equally capable of fighting the Soviet Horde, terrorist insurgencies and multiple land wars in East Asia at the same time" or some such similar bullshit.

Honestley, western military procurement is so byzantine these days I'm surprised that anything actually gets deployed at all, I half expect all the M-16s are in the shop having their new 12th generation hand grip ballast attachment Mk. 3 fitted because it turned out the Mk. 2 was the wrong shade of puce.

[Simon_Jester]

Actually, I don't think this surprises him at all; if you'd known Shep longer I suspect you wouldn't think so either.

But it does surprise people who think the military only needs to spend small amounts of money to fight wars in Iraqistan and so has to go looking for a conventional enemy to justify spending vast sums of money. That's simply not true; guys like Halliburton can make an enormous amount of money off guerilla wars, as can the weapons manufacturers who are mostly just as happy to sell ten thousand armored cars and a hundred UAV kill-drones as they are to sell a few hundred tanks and a few jet fighters.

[Alkaloid]

Oh, I totally get why COIN done with ethics gets expensive, especially if it means reforming a military poorly structured to do it. My point is that the US military has been given over a decade and spent trillions of dollars and has failed to make that transformation, it is now less prepared to fight a conventional war (although still entirely capable of rolling anyone else in one, so I question whether this really matters, especially given conventional war with anyone they can't will involve a nuclear exchange at some point) and still incapable of effectively fighting COIN. In fact, because of it's relaxed recruitment standards in the years after 9/11, it has likely taken on a large number of people now in positions especially as NCOs that will make it almost impossible to be an effective COIN force because they simply don't understand or care why things like pissing on or posing with the corpses of the enemy is unacceptable even from a purely military perspective. The MRAP is a good example because while they largely do what they were designed for, vehicles that did similar things had already been designed, proven to work well and offered for sale to the US, but the MRAP project went ahead anyway. Now, the MRAP was ultimately slightly different to those other vehicles, true, and may have given slight advantages to them, at the cost of things like fuel increased fuel consumption and speed, but if billions weren't spent on it they could have been directed at areas where the US army is still sorely lacking in capability rather than equipment. More translators from the get go, increased wages to try and attract more educated recruits better able to use tact with locals, someone explaining to the DEA why nothing they did helped at all. They may well still have failed, I think the strategy of knocking over the government, installing a new one and slapping at anyone failing to get in line was a poor one, but they would have needed to do all these things to have a chance at success. Instead we have billions going to defence contracts which are only slightly advantageous over what is already on offer, but cost billions more in development.

[Bakustra]

Shep, please stop before you hurt yourself. All the toys in the world can't help you win a guerrilla war- in fact, the more toys you have, the less your chances are of winning. Guerrilla warfare is ultimately a psychological contest for the loyalties of the populace you fight among, and indiscriminate use of artillery causes you to lose no matter how many people you shred. Furthermore, the means to win those loyalties are, as I said, not things that can be turned out on an assembly line.

That is why "conventional" warfare (actually the Cold War) is superior to guerrilla warfare for the purposes I was talking about, because the weapons need never be used and the more you have the more likely you are to win in an actual shooting conflict (in theory), thus justifying the massive transfers of money and labor to the production of the instruments of death without ever really risking much in the way of public morale.

In other words, Shep, despite the fact that you have probably devoted orders of magnitude more time in your life to study of warfare than I, I understand much more about it than you do. Frankly, you have wasted your life away, because you have studied without ever learning anything beyond the barest surfaces of the thing you study. I feel kinda sorry for you now.

[Grumman]

Shep, please stop before you hurt yourself. All the toys in the world can't help you win a guerrilla war- in fact, the more toys you have, the less your chances are of winning. Guerrilla warfare is ultimately a psychological contest for the loyalties of the populace you fight among, and indiscriminate use of artillery causes you to lose no matter how many people you shred. Furthermore, the means to win those loyalties are, as I said, not things that can be turned out on an assembly line.

In his defence you appear to be addressing different points. He was talking about fighting an asymmetrical war; you're talking about winning an asymmetrical war. Trying to win such a war might be a poor reason to buy more wunderwaffe, but it apparently makes a good excuse.

[Bakustra]

Shep, please stop before you hurt yourself. All the toys in the world can't help you win a guerrilla war- in fact, the more toys you have, the less your chances are of winning. Guerrilla warfare is ultimately a psychological contest for the loyalties of the populace you fight among, and indiscriminate use of artillery causes you to lose no matter how many people you shred. Furthermore, the means to win those loyalties are, as I said, not things that can be turned out on an assembly line.

In his defence you appear to be addressing different points. He was talking about fighting an asymmetrical war; you're talking about winning an asymmetrical war. Trying to win such a war might be a poor reason to buy more wunderwaffe, but it apparently makes a good excuse.

Read my second paragraph- the point is that such weapons are built under the aura of conferred invincibility and superiority. A guerrilla war, where their inherent defects become apparent, thus damages the social effects of the military-industrial complex, since it justifies itself on the grounds that it is essential for the security of the public. If it fails to provide security, then it is no longer justifiable and that is why when the US has faced its most grueling wars (Philippine-American War, WWI, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan) public anger against the military-industrial complex has become prominent- and this is all because the products of the complex cannot win guerrilla wars (or trench warfare like in WWI) and therefore cannot live up to their implied promises of invincibility.

[Simon_Jester]

Public anger against the military-industrial complex didn't become marked until after World War One, and it was more a reaction against the slaughter and profiteering (both on an industrial scale unprecedented in human history) than against the failure of the military-industrial complex to provide tools for breaking the stalemate. Which it did, in the end- just not soon enough to prevent the slaughter that really got people angry.

Vietnam and Iraq are better illustrations of your point.

There, though, Grumman's right, you and Shep are talking past each other. His point is that the military-industrial complex is very good at profiteering off of a guerilla war for a decade or more at a time, as Iraq and Afghanistan have proven. Popular discontent becomes an issue eventually, but even now, ten years after 9/11, it hasn't stopped the US from running up massive defense budgets. Vietnam really didn't either; it just put an end to conscription and deterred the government from any more major expeditionary warfare for about fifteen years. The guerilla war can keep running for an incredibly long time, and it makes people feel no less insecure to have a guerilla war set up and fail than it does to have a nuclear arms race set up and succeed. It's not like people weren't nervous and deeply ambiguous about the scope of the military in the 1950s.

Your point is... well, you can speak for yourself, but surely you wouldn't be arguing with people you agreed with, so it must be something different.

[Rogue 9]

You seriously think we can't build weapons to win trench warfare? Everything else in the thread aside, that's just hilariously pig-ignorant. We can, do, and have; that's why trench warfare hasn't been a viable method of fighting a war for the past ninety years or so.

[Alkaloid]

That's kind of the problem man. Everyone can build weapons to 'win' trench warfare, so no one will actually win it, you just get a stale mate. Having those weapons has stopped being the way to win trench warfare, and become the way to not lose it.

[Simon_Jester]

...Of course there are weapons to win trench warfare.

They're called tanks. They've been around for about ninety-six years this September. You might have noticed them here and there. Then there are other things, such as radios. Radios help a lot. Seriously, the complete inability of trench line defenses to cope with technological weapons of the mid-20th century was one of the big surprises of the Second World War. If trench warfare really were a recipe for perfect stalemate under all conditions, France would have come out as one of the big tough heroes of World War Two, and the 1991 Gulf War would have been a horrible failure for the US.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Iraqi defenses in 1991 are vastly overrated, in many sectors it was literally one trench line which was never effective even in WW1 with no AT mines or AT ditches, never mind the quality problem of the defenders. The level of fortifications in Korea says trenches are as awesome as ever; hell I don't think anyone has built such large WALLS since maybe the 1850s? Maybe earlier than that given that some of the suckers are over sixty feet thick. Kursk was also a rather massive endorsement.

Static positional trench warfare is a product of certain conditions, related to troop density and predictable avenues of approach as much as anything else, rather then any really distinct technology since the rifle was invented, though even in earlier eras positional warfare as very common, just not in continuous lines. The US had a considerable technological superiority in Korea in 1951, far beyond what broke the deadlock in 1918, but the war still ended up deadlocked because the US would not accept the shear level of effort required to push forward. In 1973 the Israelis and Syrians deadlocked on the outskirts of Damascus because the IDF lacked the forces to outflank or overwhelm dug in Syrian defenders. Iran-Iraq deadlocked because the sides lacked density of firepower to overwhelm each other. India and Pakistan now sustain positional warfare at 22,000 feet because neither will risk nuclear war to dislodge the other, but nor will they reach any settlement. Ethiopia and Eritrea lost around 70,000 thousand people in largely positional warfare.

The French BTW likely would have avoided defeat in 1940 had they in fact stayed in prepared trench spam defenses along the border. They ensured defeat because they moved out of those positions, and into Belgium in a mobile fashion.

Alkaloid - some of your comments are just painful to read. Do you understand that 'MRAP' is just a heading under which about a dozen different vehicle designs have been thrown, some of which did in fact exist before the US Marines and then Army asked for them? The RG-31 for example is just as South African Mamba with the Mercades diesel replaced by an American diesel. The Cougar already existed, Buffalo was a prewar new design, and several of the others are existing truck chassis simply given armor. The reason so many different ones exist is because no one supplier was capable of producing the required number remotely quickly enough. That's why the single most common one by far is the International MaxxPro, coming from a commercial truck maker who was geared up to build lots of things quickly, and actually had little previous involvement in defense contracts. The Army never really wanted the things either because of the excessive size, Congress pretty much told them they had to be bought and low and behold the IED threat kept going up so it proved a wise idea. The Marines were more enthusiastic but also had less armor to start with. If you think fighting COIN was done poorly... think about how bad it would be if you had to do it will all the infantry already killed and wounded. Talking about wasting money on MRAPs years into the war, as having been better spent on 'more translators from the get go... you know I don't disagree on needing more translators but that's a complete reality disconnect on the funding. You can't send money back in time like that.

[Simon_Jester]

The Iraqi defenses in 1991 are vastly overrated, in many sectors it was literally one trench line which was never effective even in WW1 with no AT mines or AT ditches, never mind the quality problem of the defenders. The level of fortifications in Korea says trenches are as awesome as ever; hell I don't think anyone has built such large WALLS since maybe the 1850s? Maybe earlier than that given that some of the suckers are over sixty feet thick. Kursk was also a rather massive endorsement.

Noted. That said, what I'm getting at is that it's not a question of industry being unable to 'solve' trench warfare; it's a question of time and willingness to commit the scale of resources required to break the line- resources more than manpower, since World War One.

That's doubly true since World War Two- since military aviation and in theory nuclear weapons make it possible to pretty much totally bypass a belt of trenches for purposes of doing damage to the enemy behind their front line.

If both sides are too poor to afford enough modern weaponry to crack the line, or if the attacker lacks the willingness to do so, then yeah, trench warfare can become a stalemate. But it's not an inherent condition of trench warfare: "digging trenches" doesn't guarantee that the enemy will be stuck and banging their heads futilely against an unconquerable foe. In many ways it's even less likely to slow a modern army down than guerilla warfare- the Iraqi guerilla war gave the US trouble for about ten years, when it's totally impossible that they could have held the US up that long using fixed defenses, even assuming the bravest and most determined troops in the world to do it with.

[Bakustra]

You seriously think we can't build weapons to win trench warfare? Everything else in the thread aside, that's just hilariously pig-ignorant. We can, do, and have; that's why trench warfare hasn't been a viable method of fighting a war for the past ninety years or so.

The weapons of the military-industrial complex of the time were unable to break the stalemate of the trenches in WWI, you stupid fuck. They were only broken by innovations developed outside the aegis of the military-industrial complex- the tank of France and Britain, the stormtrooper units of Germany, and the presence of fresh American troops. Only the tank is a material development, and the tank was proposed by a French army captain, not by an arms manufacturer. WWI was not won by the evolutionary development of new weapons, but by revolutions in thought developed from direct battlefield experience, or more specifically psychological factors.

Public anger against the military-industrial complex didn't become marked until after World War One, and it was more a reaction against the slaughter and profiteering (both on an industrial scale unprecedented in human history) than against the failure of the military-industrial complex to provide tools for breaking the stalemate. Which it did, in the end- just not soon enough to prevent the slaughter that really got people angry.

Vietnam and Iraq are better illustrations of your point.

There, though, Grumman's right, you and Shep are talking past each other. His point is that the military-industrial complex is very good at profiteering off of a guerilla war for a decade or more at a time, as Iraq and Afghanistan have proven. Popular discontent becomes an issue eventually, but even now, ten years after 9/11, it hasn't stopped the US from running up massive defense budgets. Vietnam really didn't either; it just put an end to conscription and deterred the government from any more major expeditionary warfare for about fifteen years. The guerilla war can keep running for an incredibly long time, and it makes people feel no less insecure to have a guerilla war set up and fail than it does to have a nuclear arms race set up and succeed. It's not like people weren't nervous and deeply ambiguous about the scope of the military in the 1950s.

Your point is... well, you can speak for yourself, but surely you wouldn't be arguing with people you agreed with, so it must be something different.

Jesus fuck, your shtick of "everybody is just misunderstanding each other" is really tiresome when you don't bother to read my posts. Again, the military-industrial complex in the US runs on both fear and assurances of invincibility. These interact- the fear provides people with a need for security which the weapons of war fulfill. But these weapons run on the idea of military invincibility. Actually using them runs the risk of losing this aura of conferred invincibility, and indeed, in every shooting war beyond the most one-sided (Panama, Grenada) during the Cold War, the products of the military-industrial complex have failed to live up to their promises.

So that's why guerrilla warfare is markedly inferior- the two parts, fear and security through dependence, must work together, and when put to the test, the second part always fails to live up, and the longer the test continues, the more this becomes apparent, which is why you had the massive protests after Vietnam rather than Korea.

The proto-complex of the pre-Cold War world relied first on the idea of a "mission of civilization" in the Philippines, later on "securing American economic interests" in South America, and then finally settled on the highest-minded "making the world safe for democracy" in WWI, which is where the fear component was introduced and put to immediate use. So yes, it is entirely relevant, as even though it was not yet fully developed, there were the same components- grandiose claims about the power of modern weapons that failed utterly, a long, bloody struggle, and so on, that we can see in Vietnam and Iraq. So in a sense, conventional wars fail too. This is why the military-industrial complex is parasitic as well as being a vile and inhumane industry- because it only runs well when its products are not being used.

[Rogue 9]

You seriously think we can't build weapons to win trench warfare? Everything else in the thread aside, that's just hilariously pig-ignorant. We can, do, and have; that's why trench warfare hasn't been a viable method of fighting a war for the past ninety years or so.

The weapons of the military-industrial complex of the time were unable to break the stalemate of the trenches in WWI, you stupid fuck. They were only broken by innovations developed outside the aegis of the military-industrial complex- the tank of France and Britain, the stormtrooper units of Germany, and the presence of fresh American troops. Only the tank is a material development, and the tank was proposed by a French army captain, not by an arms manufacturer. WWI was not won by the evolutionary development of new weapons, but by revolutions in thought developed from direct battlefield experience, or more specifically psychological factors.

None of which means you can't build weapons to win trench warfare, because we can, do, and have. The huge messy stalemate that was World War I had more to do with commanders failing to adapt to the weapons at their disposal than the war inevitably being a stalemate in and of itself. Ordering a massed infantry charge into machine gun fire is a product of not understanding that new technology has made old tactics obsolete, not the failure of new technology.

As for the tank, Captain Levavasseur submitted his design for armored, self-propelled field artillery in 1903, it's true. I fail to see how this disqualifies the tank as a weapon that can neutralize trench warfare, or how a captain in the army is not part of the military-industrial complex.