As laws of history go, the one counseling nations not to fight the last war is fairly sound; at the root of most military disasters is a desire to correct past mistakes and an unwillingness to adapt to the realities of the present. Take the Maginot Line as an obvious example. The problem wasn’t that the thing didn’t work, but that it was irrelevant: Once the enemy hooked around it, a network of forts and trenches made little sense as a defensive measure.

Yankee officials are looking more than a bit like French generals right now. After losing the ALCS last fall for want of a good third starter, the Bronx brass became convinced that the team’s great off-season need was for new arms in the rotation. But even granting that Randy Johnson, Carl Pavano, and Jaret Wright will turn what was an occasionally suspect rotation into a great one – and that’s granting a lot – acquiring them won’t allow the club to go back in time.

Nor will the new arms do nearly as much as expected to put them back in the ALCS this year. In fact, Johnson and Co. don’t even address the most pressing issue facing the 2005 Yankees. Just as the real problem the French faced was not an inadequately defended Eastern border but the hostile, militarized nation across that border, the Yankees’ real problem is not inadequate starting pitching but the fact that they just don’t have as much talent as the Boston Red Sox.

It should be remembered that last year, the Red Sox were superior to the Yankees not only during the last four games of the ALCS, but also during the regular season. The Red Sox, given how many runs they scored and allowed, would have been expected to win 98 games, which they actually did. The Yankees would have been expected win 89, and in fact won 101. That’s not purely due to luck – more like luck, good managing, and smart play – but it’s unlikely to continue.

The Yankees needed to get vastly better this winter to have hopes of keeping up with Boston. They didn’t. Last year’s pitching staff, was actually quite decent – account for defense and park effects, and the Yankee pitchers were the fourth-best in the league in 2004. The recently departed Javier Vazquez, Jon Lieber, and Orlando Hernandez, are all very good pitchers; the latter, you may recall, was the team’s best pitcher after the All-Star break.

According to one set of early projections for this season published at www.baseballprospectus.com, Johnson, Wright, and Pavano will pitch 534 innings of 4.05 ERA ball this season. That’s an improvement over the 4.62 ERA Vazquez, Lieber, Hernandez, and Jose Contreras provided last season in nine fewer innings, but not much of one over the 4.37 ERA in 437 IP they project to provide this season. Even figuring that the 100-inning difference could be made up by a random scrub with a 5.00 ERA, the difference amounts to just 30 runs over the course of the season.

A much better way for the Yankees to improve would have been to solidify their lineup. The offense didn’t exactly need help – although the Sox outscored them by more than 50 runs, the Yankees actually had the best hitters in the majors taking park effects into account – but better position players would allow the Yankees to both score more runs and allow fewer.

Going into this season, though, the Yankees have clear offensive holes at first base, designated hitter, and second base. They’ll be lucky to get a collectively average performance from those positions, where the likes of Tino Martinez, Ruben Sierra, and Tony Womack will be firmly planted in the lineup this summer. Martinez and Sierra are more or less league-average hitters; this is not a virtue in two men who should get somewhere around 700 at bats at first and DH. Womack is an awful player, who if he plays a full season will cost the Yankees something around 30 runs compared to an average second baseman. Combined, these three players will likely cancel out the improvement in the rotation.

There should also be some concern over Jorge Posada – as a 33-year-old catcher, it’s exceptionally unlikely he’ll keep hitting as well as he has over the last few years. And Bernie Williams is among the worst defensive center fielders in baseball, and he will no longer be an offensive asset if his decline continues. The team just has to live with risk behind the plate, but solutions at each of the other positions could have been had. The Yankees chose instead to pay unfathomable sums for pitching.

Those choices will exacerbate the defensive nightmare faced by Yankees pitchers. Last year, atrocious fielding probably cost the staff something between a quarter and half a run per game. This year, Williams, Posada, Derek Jeter, and Gary Sheffield, who range from mediocre to terrible in the field, will all be a year older. The miserable Womack replaces the underappreciated Miguel Cairo; Hideki Matsui and Tino Martinez should provide above-average fielding, but at unimportant positions. Alex Rodriguez will be the only good defender at a skill position on the whole team.

Add in an appalling lack of depth and the team has real problems, especially as compared to the Red Sox. As of now, the best players on the Yankee bench are Bubba Crosby and Rey Sanchez, a fine defensive middle infielder who will be put to little use considering how rarely Joe Torre makes defensive substitutions. Meanwhile, the Red Sox’ reserves will include players like Jay Payton and Doug Mientkewicz, who could start for contending teams. In fact, Payton might actually be a better player than Williams at this stage in their careers (though this says more about the latter’s decline than the former’s skill).

It’s hard to believe that the money that went into making the upgrade to Johnson from Vazquez, a very good pitcher who suffered through a bad second half, will improve the team’s run prevention more than putting Rodriguez at shortstop and fielding a real centerfielder would. And with half the lineup comprised of suspect-to-useless hitters, the run prevention will have to improve significantly for the team to keep pace with the Red Sox.

In all, this is a sad state of affairs for the Yankees, the lamentable consequence of having convinced themselves that they had to, at all costs, prevent a recurrence of what happened to them last year. Their new additions may do that, but the neglect of the rest of the roster seems likely to ensure worse will happen this year. Maybe next winter, Yankees officials will occupy themselves as thoroughly with looking to the future as they did this winter with looking to the past.