We are building the military we will have because right now we wish to have that military:
We’ve had nearly two years of hearings about how hard the automatic budget cuts called sequestration would hit the Department of Defense. Yesterday, we saw something new. For the first time, the uniformed chiefs of all four services publicly told Congress that they have big problems with their civilian bosses’ plan to cope with sequestration, the Strategic Choices and Management Review.
The SCMR, they said, makes dangerously optimistic assumptions about how big the next war will be, how long it will take to win, how big a force we need to win it, and how quickly that force can be made dready to fight.
Secretary Chuck Hagel’s SCMR – pronounced “skimmer” or “scammer” depending on your degree of cynicism – laid out a range of options that are supposed to guide Pentagon planners as they thrash out two alternative budgets, one assuming full sequestration and one assuming lesser cuts, for fiscal year 2015 and beyond. It’s also become the de facto first step of the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).
With the Army’s money, manpower, and missions coming under the heaviest fire inside the Pentagon, it’s no surprise that the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, has already made public some doubts about the SCMR: It makes “somewhat rosy assumptions” that are “somewhat dangerous,” he told a House Armed Services Committee hearing in September. But at Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Odierno went much further – and was joined, for the first time that I’ve seen, by the other three service chiefs. Literally sitting in a row, they chimed in one after the other to back Odierno up.
“That a war in Korea would last less than a year, there’s nothing that makes me feel that that’s a good assumption,” Odierno said, responding to a question from Nebraska Republican Deb Fisher. As Odierno and other critics describe them, the SCMR scenarios further assume that the enemy won’t use weapons of mass destruction – such as North Korea’s nukes or Syria’s sarin gas. It also assumes that US forces will quickly converge on the war zone from both US bases and commitments around the world, quickly prevail with minimal casualties, and quickly pull out again without any prolonged and messy clean-up afterwards.
If the war does drag on unexpectedly, Odierno said, the SCMR “also makes rosy assumptions about our ability to quickly build a larger force.” In the last decade, he noted, it took 32 months from the time the Bush administration decided to grow the Army to the time the new units were all ready. “You’ve got to recruit them and you’ve got to train them,” Odierno told the senators with rising passion. “You can’t do that within a six or eight month period, it’s impossible to do, and we made assumptions that we could magically build this huge army in a very short period of time.”
There is much more on the other services. I just quoted that Army portion since the Army always gets the shaft in peacetime. Perhaps that is justified, but it is the obvious truth.
Actually, an old paper of mine addresses the problem of assuming a quick war and finding yourself in a long war. (I'm amazed my paper is still housed on that site since I haven't used that Internet provider for years. Thanks!)
Still, when in the future somebody heatedly asks why we aren't prepared for the war we face, remember that in this era we wished to have that future military. Well, that’s nice, eh?
No worries, our 10-year rule will work out just fine. It works on paper, after all. We have rock solid assumptions backing this up! What more do you want?
