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That hypothetical was pretty much what happened in Korea. The US Army was pretty much written off at the end of the 1940's, since it was believed the Air Force would simply nuke any rival into submission, and ground forces were outdated for any offensive war (the Navy had to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant and keep its air branch). As a result, with the Army being such a low priority, they were vastly unprepared for a conventional ground war whose doctrine forbade the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, with many lessons learned in WWII having to be relearned, and most ground units being unequipped relative to what you'd expect of a superpower.
If we were to get into a war tomorrow we'd definitely be looking at a degree of unreadiness. We've been solving most of our problems with minimal commitment since the war on terror wound down, with the name of the game being "no boots on the ground," which really means "special operations and aviation assets only." (Although right now there's very little even of that going on.)
That error seems to come up again and again for the last 100 years. Strategic bombing proved to be useless, "just nuking the enemy" proved to be a fallacy, the ideas about "we don't need tanks and artillery, we will just destroy the enemy from afar" have been thoroughly debunked in Ukraine... And yet, somehow the galaxy brains of strategy still don't learn the lesson.
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I don't think we've been in "off war mode" for long enough to be a significant degree of unreadiness. In the grand scheme of things we pretty much just wrapped up a 2-decade long war. It wasn't against a conventional army by any means but frankly, a lot of that looks easier than the desert fighting of Iraq and Afganistan.
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