By HELENE COOPER TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — Kilo Company of the Third Battalion, Second Marines was deep in a simulated firefight on a recent morning here in the high California desert. A group of Marines on the aptly named Machine Gun Hill unleashed round after round of live fire as another group of Marines tried to seize the surrounding valley from an imaginary enemy. “They’re dug in,” shouted Brian Somers, the chief warrant officer of Kilo Company, describing the “enemy” forces, supposedly supported by a real state with real resources and who were theoretically returning fire. “This is conventional warfare.” After 15 years of fighting terrorists, the United States military is learning how to fight big armies again. From the Middle East to South Asia to Africa, American forces for the past decade and a half have fought counterinsurgency and counterterrorist campaigns — essentially smaller-scale guerrilla warfare — rather than the large land wars of the past. But Russia’s invas
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