Increasing our ground forces

The Washington Times ^ | January 26, 2005 | Masthead Editorial

[neverdem]

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The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

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Increasing our ground forces

Published January 26, 2005

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This is the first in a series of editorials on the state of the American military.

    

    Official Washington is quickly reaching consensus that U.S. ground forces need to be bolstered by a significant margin over the long-term. The proposals are in the range of 40,000 to 150,000 more troops. We're inclined toward the high end of those proposals, and maybe even higher.

    Historically speaking, expenditures on ground troops are absurdly low, even by peacetime standards. As the Congressional Budget Office's September 2004 report on long-term defense spending showed, U.S. expenditures on ground forces are about half what they were at the height of the Reagan defense buildup in the mid-1980s, when the United States was without a hot war to fight and waged the Cold War mostly by proxy.

    That decline -- most evident at the Cold War's end and reaching a nadir during the Clinton administration -- was unsustainable well before the September 11 attacks. All the more is it unsustainable afterward, in an era with new and challenging commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

    As retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales pointed out on the opposite page yesterday, these days, if all Army and Marine infantrymen were collected together in one place, they wouldn't even fill FedEx Field. It hasn't always been this way. Five years after World War II ended, amid the postwar "peace dividend" and a pre-Korean War retrenchment, the end-strength of the U.S. Army was almost 700,000. Right now, it's about 480,000.

[F14 Pilot]

ping

[John Locke]

He calls to increase the number of Army brigades to 50 from the current 33

It's deja vu time again.

This is almost exactly what the successors of Septimus Serverus proposed - to increase the army from 33 to 50 legions. In the face of rising costs, a falling tax base, and the increasing sophistication of the barbarians, they tried very hard.

The military result of their failure was the Battle of Adrianople. The fiscal result was the incremental collapse of the economy of the Western Empire, as the taxpayers abandoned their fields and factories.

[Valin]

Do we? Or do we a different force?

[SunkenCiv]

The main problem IMHO during the 90s was Clinton's wretched leadership; the reservists I knew then were not going to re-up because of him, and said that everyone they knew who was not going to re-up said that also.

The all-volunteer armed forces work fine, but obviously when there is a long war going on (with 1/400 in the armed services having died from it; Civil War death rate was highest, at 1/20 or thereabouts) there will be pressure on manpower by those who don't want to re-up in (for example) the reserves for fear of being called up for Iraq duty. Particularly if they were more interested in the reserves in order to get college money.

FWIW, I'd oppose a draft under most circumstances, and our current circumstances isn't one of them when I wouldn't.