Interesting piece on what the future military might look like:
The Pentagon’s most senior planners are challenging the longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at a time. Instead, they are weighing whether to shape the military to mount one conventional campaign while devoting more resources to defending American territory and antiterrorism efforts.
The consideration of these profound changes are at the center of the current top-to-bottom review of Pentagon strategy, as ordered by Congress every four years, and will determine the future size of the military as well as the fate of hundreds of billions of dollars in new weapons.
The intense debate reflects a growing recognition that the current burden of maintaining forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the other demands of the global campaign against terrorism, may force a change in the assumptions that have been the foundation of all military planning.
The concern that the concentration of troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan was limiting the Pentagon’s ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts was underscored by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a classified risk assessment to Congress this spring. But the current review is the first by the Pentagon in decades to seriously question the wisdom of the two-war strategy.
The two-war model provides enough people and weapons to mount a major campaign, like the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while maintaining enough reserves to respond in a similar manner elsewhere.
This dovetails nicely with this piece at the Belgravia Dispatch:
The 1993 and 1997 QDRs enshrined over 50% of our combat arms, including artillery, special forces, and other combat support units were in the Reserve and Guard. Still about 60% of Armor and Infantry were active duty, but that means near 40% were part-timers. This is the military inherited in 2001. A conscious decision was made in the 90s to do this. We could not afford to pay those enormous amounts for defense without a public threat. (Where do you think the Clinton economy came from? Not Defense spending. Remember the Peace Dividend talk?)
So blaming stop loss and other shortages on Bush shows ignorance of the facts. It is the public’s and Congress’ fault for believing there was no threat despite the UBL edicts and North Koreans promising to turn LA into a “lake of fire”. (Read your newspapers. The stories were there. I remember them. Everyone else seems to have been reading something else.)
Makes you remember what a tough job the military and the security establishment have- not only trying to predict the future security threats, but what is needed to face those threats.
