[Steel Wolf]

When one combines this news with the fact that roughly one-third of the active Army is deployed (and thus presumably ready for combat), the math is simple but the answer alarming: The active Army has close to zero combat-ready brigades in reserve.

There's a reason we're not sending more troops to Iraq or Afghanistan. We're doing all we can just to keep up with the current rate of deployments. While our military is a perfect size to knock out other militaries and governments, it's simply not large enough to maintain long term, large scale occupation duties.

[91B]

A bigger Army allows us more options-the simple military dictum that covers this is that "it is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it".

Rummy has resisted increasing the size of the Army because he is enthralled with the arguments of the "transformationists". Part of the way that he is trying to address this problem is in how he has reorganized the Army into brigade combat teams. This is a good reform, but we probably should have added another 100,000 actives to the Army and Marines after 9/11 (and provided whatever incentives needed to get up to that strength). It doesn't help that it often seems like he is playing chess without looking at the pieces.