And while I share his concerns for the views of some transformationists who believe wrongly that ground forces are obsolete, I have trouble with his calls for a much larger Army and Marine Corps when we are adding brigades without raising end strength, and when I am not yet convinced that having the Army abroad at war is going to be a continuous feature of our Long War. I have no desire to force our population to endure needlessly when our will to keep the fight going for years or decades is required to win the Long War.
And I especially have problems accepting his criticism when he mischaracterizes our assumption of how much we can fight with our forces. He says in this article:
FROM 1991 to 2001, American military forces were in theory sized to be able to fight and win two simultaneous major regional conflicts. It is far from clear that the armed forces ever really were large enough to accomplish that mission, but such at least was the stated strategy. In the first Bush QDR in 2001, the force-sizing construct was changed to a program with the unlovely moniker "1-4-2-some." The military was to be able to defend the U.S. homeland; maintain presence in four critical regions; win decisively in two "overlapping" military campaigns; and engage in "a limited number" of "smaller-scale contingencies."
The 2006 QDR changes this formula yet again. The armed forces, it declares, must perform three key missions: "Defend the Homeland"; "Prevail in the War on Terror and Conduct Irregular Operations"; and "Conduct and Win Conventional Campaigns." It breaks each mission down into "steady-state" requirements that the armed forces must perform all the time and "surge" capabilities needed only in a crisis. Thus, the armed forces should be able to "conduct a large-scale, potentially long-duration irregular warfare campaign including counterinsurgency and security, stability, transition and reconstruction operations" (such as the war in Iraq) and "wage two nearly simultaneous conventional campaigns (or one conventional campaign if already engaged in a large-scale, long-duration irregular campaign)." In the case of the conventional war, the armed forces must "[b]e prepared in one of the two campaigns to remove a hostile regime, destroy its military capacity and set
conditions for the transition to, or for the restoration of, civil society."
First of all, from 1991 to 2001 our military was not in fact designed to fight two wars simultaneusly. It was designed to fight two wars "nearly simultaneously." I mocked this in a publication and paper I presented in 1997 at the Association of the United States Army's annual convention. I asked, why can't we with similar logic declare we have the capability of waging 100 wars "nearly sequentially?"
By nearly simultaneously, it was meant that we could respond to an enemy attack on an ally (say Kuwait) by building up forces to blunt and stop the attack and then build up to counter-attack to retake what was lost. During that time, we could react to a second attack against an ally (say South Korea) and absorb and stop the attack. But we could not counter-attack to retake the lost ground until we could move the forces necessary for that counter-attack from the first successful war. Hence "nearly" simultaneous.
In 2001, we had the requirement to win in "overlapping" wars where in one we would absorb the blow on the defensive and stop it short of critical objectives while in the second one we would be able to go over on the offensive and drive on the enemy capital for total victory. While retaining the "overlapping" or "nearly simultaneous" feature of previous assumptions, we actually upped the goal to seizing the enemy capital instead of just restoring the pre-war status quo as we had done in Desert Storm in 1991. Instead, we planned to overthrow the regime as we did in 2003 with Iraq. Doing the same in the first war would require forces from the second war.
The 2006 QDR again describes our recent past, saying we must be able to fight an ongoing counter-insurgency (Iraq and Afghanistan combined) while having the ability to change the regime in another country (say North Korea but really Iran in this case). Again, this is fighting a defensive war while being able to go on the offensive for a regime change in another. Or, absent a long-term counter-insurgency campaign, be able to fight two conventional wars with only one being a regime change offensive. And we are reorganizing our National Guard brigades to supply that surge capacity when up until now most of the Guard has not been ready for war--just the enhanced brigades. So we will have more combat brigades readily deployable even though the total number of brigades will go down.
So our goals have not really changed that much through fifteen years of force planning--only the way we characterize it based on recent experience. And indeed, with the goal of regime change replacing restoring the status quo ante, we have increased our goals rather than reduce them as Kagan suggests. And we are increasing our active brigades by about a third.
Really, when he can't get our force sizing goals right, I have no reason to assume he is right about expanding our end strength so dramatically. We may yet need to do so. But Kagan has not persuaded me in this piece.
