Remember when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was lambasted for saying you go to war with the army you have and not the army you wish you had? I thought that he simply stated a blindingly obvious fact and couldn't understand the outrage of anti-war people who sputtered in rage.
Hey, here's how you get the army you have--at some point people in charge wished to have that army. Here's a discussion of the "Strategic Choices and Management Review" that will give us the Army we'll have:
Q: The -- one of the options for the size of the Army that was covered in this review was 420,000 to 450,000, I believe. It said that the -- it had been determined that the strategy could be carried out with that sized Army. Does that mean that, regardless of what happens with sequestration, the Army is likely to fall to that level?
SENIOR DEFENSE OFFICIAL: So, I mean, I think it's fair to say that, just as the secretary said in his -- in his remarks, that coming out of the war in Afghanistan, this is a -- this is an opportunity to relook at the force that we need. And one area that we do think we can look at is the size of the ground force. And so we've asked the Army to take a look at what size they can achieve within the fiscal guidance that we have given them, as they build their budget. And so that'll determine what level we come out at.
Q: So the -- the Army's assessment will determine that level?
SENIOR DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Well, the Army will bring in a proposed budget and a proposed level that they can operate in, and then we will do an assessment in the fall where we look to see what the impacts are, what were the tradeoffs that they made, if they preserved structure. What were the other things they did within their budget to trade off against that?
Q: So I don't understand, though, what in the opening statement that that meant. Because that 420,000 to 450,000 to five tactical squadrons and C-130s of the Air Force seem to be presented separately from the two choices under the sequester. So it seems like -- I read that as, going forward, we have to look at -- that there will be a cut, and we don't know where between 420,000 and 450,000 it will be, but it will be somewhere between those numbers, which is a substantial cut from 490,000. So is that correct? The future will be somewhere between 420,000 and 450,000, as opposed to 490,000?
SENIOR DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yeah, I mean, that's certainly what we expect to come out of the budget. It's been part of the deliberation that we did in the Strategic Choices and Management Review. It's certainly conversations we've had with the Army, as they looked at that themselves and what they would have to live with, with a smaller budget. So I think that's our expectation it's where they will -- they will be.
And, again, the reason those were called out separately is the first thing we did was to try to live with all of the tenets that are currently in the defense strategic guidance and -- and so what we did was we asked, are there any places in the budget where we can find either forces or some modernization efforts that we don't need? And what we identified was we thought we could take some -- reduce some of the -- of the ground forces and the tactical aircraft.
Q: (off mic) what areas of risk did you identify going from 490,000 down to 450,000, or areas, missions that we wouldn't likely do under the lower scenario?
SENIOR DEFENSE OFFICIAL: So, actually, as -- (inaudible) -- pointed out, that level is really most closely aligned with the current strategy. And in the current strategy already, we're looking at level of COIN in the future and coming out of large-scale, irregular warfare COIN, where you do require large numbers or sustained -- over many years -- large-scale rotations. So really coming out, that's -- that's really where it's -- it's aligning more closely with the strategy we have. [emphasis added]
So we are dropping the Army to 490,000 with as many brigades as we had in 2001, and may keep going to 420,000. But no worries, under the strategy we have, we don't plan on fighting counter-insurgencies (COIN).
We won't mention that we didn't plan to fight counter-insurgencies in 2000, either. But they happened. And Democrats blasted the Bush administration for not having an Army built for COIN.
Remember, our pre-9/11 Army of 480,000 was short about 40,000 to fill out its paper structure. While it is true that during the war we reorganized to eliminate Cold War artillery and support units to create new brigades within our manpower limits, that just allowed us to drop to 490,000 and the same number of pre-reorganization brigades without thinning them out.
But if we keep dropping the size of the Army (and there is even talk of 380,000 active component troops), the Army has to eliminate combat brigades or risk keeping force structure that makes it appear we have an Army while shortchanging training, readiness, and procurement for the units we have. I'd rather have a smaller Army of units capable of fighting than a larger Army that looks good only on paper.
Hey, my old Military Review article on integrating active Army and Army National Guard brigades to hedge against a longer conflict might be applicable today (see page 91 of the September-October 2000 issue).
As I've long lamented, Military Review stripped out the charts that were actually integral to the article. To keep within word limits, some important parts of the article were included in the charts when I submitted the article for publication. Without the charts, the article loses some points and reads as if something is missing. I put the original article as submitted with links to charts on my old GeoCities site, which is preserved here. Unfortunately, the background is now all screwed up. But if you right click on the page and select all, you can at least read it.
