An Army of Lots More Than One
by Frederick Kagan
07/07/2003, Volume 008, Issue 42
THE ARMED FORCES of the United States are too small to support the missions required of them in the post-9/11 world. In many of the situations we now face, using troops on the ground is nonnegotiable, and America has too few of them. If that assertion seems counterintuitive given the impressive performance of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, two numbers may help drive it home: Of the 495,000 troops in the U.S. Army, 370,000 are already deployed around the world.
The destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq has always been rightly seen as only the first step in a reorientation of America's security policy toward the Middle East. If the United States proves to have eliminated the Baathist regime in Iraq only to replace it with chaos and violence, we clearly will have failed to enhance our security. The threats, to be sure, will be different. The imminence of Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens at home and abroad. Chaos in Iraq will pose a less obvious threat, but the danger to Americans will be no less substantial.
We have already seen how chaos and civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s provided the breeding ground for terrorists and a haven for the bases where they trained. If U.S. forces are reduced or withdrawn too soon, similar conditions in Iraq will nurture the al Qaeda operatives of the future. The U.S.-led attack could end up bringing about the very threat that prompted it in the first place--the proliferation of Iraqi weapons to terrorist organizations--if we do not finish what we have begun by establishing a stable and peaceful regime in Iraq.
This will not be accomplished, however, without the prolonged deployment of significant numbers of American ground forces. Smart weapons cannot keep peace. They cannot get schools and hospitals running, or keep electricity and water flowing, or keep hostile neighbors from attacking one another, or provide a police presence to deter looters and criminals, or hunt down and capture individual terrorists, interrogate them, and learn from them the nature of the organizations to which they belong, or find traces of a WMD program hidden carefully in a country the size of California. Only soldiers and marines can accomplish these tasks, and, given the size and complexity of the country, only in fairly large numbers. Given the unrest and political chaos that currently engulf Iraq, it is hard to imagine that the United States will be able to withdraw any significant portion of its 146,000 troops from that country in less than a year without compromising our vital objectives.
The problem is that we cannot maintain such a large force in Iraq for a year without seriously damaging the Army and harming our ability to pursue other critical objectives. Given the normal requirement to have two units at home for every one deployed, the 11-division-equivalent U.S. Army could support a three-and-two-thirds division commitment to Iraq indefinitely--at the cost of having no forces available for operations anywhere else in the world. But the current deployment is the equivalent of more than five divisions (the 101st Airborne, 4th Infantry, and 1st Armored divisions, two brigades of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 2nd and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiments, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and elements of the 1st Infantry and 10th Mountain divisions).
In addition, more than 200,000 reservists and members of the National Guard have been called up to support the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the home front. Some of these troops have been deployed for more than a year, many of them earning a fraction of their civilian pay. There is reason to fear that the hardship on them and their families may damage recruiting for the Guard.
Within months the U.S. leadership will face a difficult choice: reduce the commitment to Iraq regardless of whether the country is ready for such a reduction, or extend the deployment of many of these units indefinitely. The first choice is unacceptable because it may well compromise our ability to achieve our objectives in Iraq. The second will do great harm to the Army.
It is not merely that soldiers in Iraq are under strain from having to be peacekeepers and warfighters simultaneously and from coming under periodic attack at the hands of the populations they are trying to police, or that morale in those units will deteriorate as their deployments extend with no clear end in sight. Units engaged in peacekeeping (if it can be called that) in Iraq are not training for war. The more forces we maintain in Iraq, the fewer we have available to face other potential enemies. Right now there is hardly a single division in the U.S. Army that could take the field as a unit without our hurriedly withdrawing important elements from Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, or Afghanistan and sending them to war without the opportunity to retrain them. That is an unacceptable situation.
Nor can we look to our allies to help us. All of the European states have cut their armed forces so dramatically over the past decade that they are not capable of deploying large forces to Iraq. The British are already maintaining half of their deployable forces there. Virtually none of the European states has the command, control, and communications facilities required for the job, let alone the strategic transportation capabilities needed to get forces to Iraq and sustain them there. Furthermore, states like France and Germany that vigorously opposed the war have demonstrated an equal unwillingness to support the peace we have imposed on Iraq.
It is time to stop pretending that the United States can prosecute a war on terror, conduct peacekeeping operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and maintain the security of the homeland without a substantial increase in the size of the armed forces. General Shinseki, the recently retired Army chief of staff, warns us to "beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division army"--and even he understates the problem. In truth, the armed forces need an increase in size of at least 25 percent.
The current military structure was designed in the 1990s when all the talk was of a "strategic pause" and a prolonged period of peace. What pause there was has vanished, and it is not peace that now looks likely to be prolonged. Expanding the armed forces to match the missions they must perform is an urgent task.
Is the U.S. Military Too Small?
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Re: Is the U.S. Military Too Small?
Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost
Let's not start that shall we.
Could some military experts or those who were/are in the military explain to me what are they doing with all those treasure troves being budgeted to them every year? Is it a blackhole or are we just trying to keep a tech lead? Does it require such money to actually work?
Rotorgun.Finland wasnt part of of NATO,neither Warsow pact. There is still talk in here about joininig NATO,but majority of people are against that.Im not sure what are the reasons behind that we dont want be militarily allied.We just dont.
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