Repeating History Already

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld took great heaps of scorn for his declaration that you go to war with the army you have and not the army you wish you had. That was such a basic truth that I found it hard to fathom the outrage. What I didn't like about Rumsfeld was that pre-Iraq he planned a small, high-tech army able to go anywhere around the globe and rapidly smash an enemy. Rumsfeld at least recognized the problem with that when we found ourselves embroiled in insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. What' our excuse today for planning the same kind of Army?

Secretary of Defense Panetta summed up our military strategy, and it sounds awfully familiar:

For the United States, look, we're going to be smaller. We'll be a leaner force. We're going to be -- obviously, we just ended the war in Iraq. We'll be drawing down here in Afghanistan. But we've got to be agile. We've got to be deployable. We've got to be able to move fast. We've got to be on the cutting edge of technology.

Huh. The tide of war--and our memory of them--really is receding.

But this is nothing new. Indeed, it's very recent.

So remember that one day in the future, when we decide how to use the Army we have, remember that back in 2012 we wished to build that Army. It will be too late for a do over:

When you wonder why we must go to war with the Army we have and not the Army we wish we had for the crisis at hand, remember that whatever Army we have was once designed to be the Army we wished to have.

We haven't even finished the ground war in Afghanistan and already we're shoving the Army off to the side in the belief that punishing firepower--this time with pilot-less drones!--can achieve all our military objectives.