Win or lose a big ground war, I've noted that the Army can't win the post-war budget battles.
The Army knows that:
Last fall, when he appeared before the House Armed Services Committee, then-Vice Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli also invoked the memory of Task Force Smith. There’s a tendency after every war, he said, to believe large-scale ground forces won’t be needed again.
During the early 1990s, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the U.S. Army, made “No More Task Force Smiths” almost a mantra as he navigated the post-Cold War drawdown.
“The institution failed to keep an eye on the future because it thought it was in a post-war period,” Sullivan said in an interview with POLITICO.
Now, the Army is being told no more large-scale counterinsurgency operations.
“As soon as you finish up a long-term engagement, you always hear the same thing: We’re not going to do that again,” said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a former commandant of the Army War College. “You heard it in 1954, 1972, 1989 and 1993. We’re saying it again now. It must be part of our cultural DNA.”
While the challenges are tough, Sullivan said, he’s confident the Army is thinking about today’s drawdown the right way.
Odierno’s “saying that what he keeps — he’s going to keep trained and ready. That’s step No. 1,” Sullivan said.
I hope civilian leadership allows Odierno and the Army to keep our troops trained and ready--regardless of how many and what weapons they have. Because one thing we can be sure of even when we are told that we won't ever use the Army again in a perfect world, is that one day the Army will be told to send what they can right now to save the day in a far-from-perfect world. If we don't keep our Army solid, what we will send will be another Task Force Smith.
Even in the age of Air-Sea Battle in the Pacific, there is a need for a ready Army. We don't live in a perfect world, whether it is the Army, Asia-Pacific, or the Earth in general.
