What would a full scale modern day war look like? Assume that tomorrow, the United States entered a World War like we did in WWII. What would the war look like? Would it be a similar way with soldiers running around and hiding in trenches and all of that or would the war be cruise missiles shot from hundreds of miles away and no soldiers fighting against actual professional armies? What is today's war look like?
War in the modern day will be deadlier than ever before. With the advent of nuclear arms programs in the hands of countries that we'd rather not see with nukes, and the new age of technology since the last global conflict, the death tolls will be high.
However, the real battles are fought with intelligence. The whole reason WWII ended the way it did in Eastern Europe was because we cracked the Germans Enigma machine, and used their info against them. So the real winners are not the guys with the biggest guns, but the guy who knows who has the guns. That guy knows how to hit his opponents in places that will cripple thier fighting forces.
Not the frontlines, the factories supplying the frontlines.
Not the nuclear silos, the man with the button.
The soldiers, fighter jets, and naval ships will have the same roles. Infantry is the backbone of any war. Air support is vital. Water is 70% of the Earth's surface, a Navy is a must! But nukes are a terrible thing, a last resort, and even then, only to defeat the greater evil. Now that they are here, nukes aren't going to go away. Again, information warfare is the key. If you hear that a guy is gonna nuke you, nuke him first, but make damn sure you hit him, or the war will be taken to a new level.
The war of tomorrow is already here. The "war" in Iraq isn't as bad as the situation presented here, but close enough. America may be winning, but she sure fell on her [censored] enough times to make her look stupid. Our troops are training Iraqi police forces to keep the peace. That is fine.But some troops might still be looking for Osama, and, in terms of intelligence roles, we can't find him because we don't know where he is. It's a glorified and deadly game of hide and seek.
In conclusion, our troops are still in the trenches they dug themselves on foreign soil, our aviators are still our eyes in the sky, and our Navy still does what it can for the ground effort. But this whole damn thing, the whole... damned... war... could have been averted.
If we had just known.