Korb, of course, isn't qualified to offer advice on anything related to national defense, as far as I'm concerned.
But let's get to his ground force recommendations:
We recommend cutting the Army and Marine Corps back to their pre-Afghanistan-and-Iraq levels when we withdraw from those theaters because, as Secretary of Defense Gates noted in the May/June 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, “the United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Iraq and Afghanistan anytime soon — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire.”
The reasoning of Korb and people like him who want to reduce our ground forces is stunning in its audacity. Their logic is that we don't need to buy sophisticated weapons or train for large battles because Iraq and Afghanistan prove that we need to focus on counter-insurgency rather than a force-on-force high intensity conventional conflict. And then they argue that after our Iraq and Afghanistan experiences, who thinks we'll fight another counter-insurgency? So why bother maintaining enough troops to fight a counter-insurgency we'll never fight?
Ah, logic. It's like they hope we won't notice that it is a two-step process to effective disarmament. Never mind that we never wanted to fight the counter-insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan. But that's what we got.
Hopefully, we should understand that we don't usually get what we plan for. But we'll have to fight the wars we don't plan for anyway, no matter how unlikely Korb thinks such a war is. Hopefully, we don't take Korb's advice on our ground forces.
As an aside, let me mention his Navy suggestion, which I suppose should be compared to the Vulcan Death Grip if I'm to maintain the Star Trek allusion:
We also recommend reducing the Navy’s fleet to 230 ships and argue that this can be done by reducing the number of aircraft carriers from eleven to nine (something that Secretary Gates has also suggested)[.]
I'm not against reducing the number of carriers, but I want to do that to free up surface ships and submarines for action apart from defending carriers, which should no longer be our primary weapon. Korb clearly thinks the reduced number of carriers should be our primary weapon at sea since he also calls for reducing the Navy by about 80 other ships, along with the three carriers, thus leaving us even more reliant on a smaller number of carriers. That makes the situation worse than the status quo. Our Navy won't be in any condition to come to grips with any enemy and kill them with this suggestion. Really, Korb is just getting on my nerves.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to Korb. Perhaps he isn't trying to argue that we can maintain national security with lower defense spending and a smaller military as he advocates. Maybe he just wants a smaller defense budget and a smaller and less capable military. And the rest is just mumbo jumbo to convince the gullible that he's some type of defense genius (Reagan hired me! A long time ago!) who can maintain adequate defenses while decimating the military. The idea that defense will only be part of massive deficit reduction in the non-defense side of the budget is delusional at best and willful deceit at worst. Only defense will be cut, and everyone knows it.
If simply slashing our defenses is his objective, then bravo, Mr. Korb. I blow a vuvuzela to celebrate his budgetary prowess.
Korb's ideas on national defense will gut our military might quite nicely.
