Should The US Military Be Larger?

[jyl]

The regular Army is around 400,000 strong, plus around 150,000 active-duty Marines. 550,000 troops in total, the majority being non-combat troops.

It seems like the Army / Marines are being stretched too thin by the 140,000-troop Iraq war/occupation. Large reserve call-ups, stop-loss orders extending soldiers' enlistments, units being sent back to Iraq just a few months after returning.

If a second war broke out now - say, in Korea, where we are reducing our forces - could we handle it? Depends on what kind of war, I guess, but what margin of safety do we have?

I remember when we were supposed to be capable of fighting and winning two major land wars at the same time. Then I remember when our high-tech firepower was supposed to dispose of conflicts with a minimum of actual soldiers involved. We were also supposed to be fighting alongside allies. I'm not sure any of those are "highly reliable" assumptions today.

What do you think? Should we have a larger military? Why do we need one? How would you pay for it - dropping some new weapons systems, cutting civilian programs, repealing some tax cuts?

To toss in someone else's point of view, here is something I read on a blog - although I don't know if the writer knows what he is talking about, frankly. I think it was written in Jan 04.

The U.S. Army in conjunction with the absolute air superiority of the U.S. Air Force is -- or was, rather -- a fighting machine that can destroy any military, anywhere, when outnumbered 10:1 by the enemy. As I noted back in the actual Iraq war, when it seemed the U.S. advance was stalled, it didn't matter whether the U.S. Army had to pause and wait for gas because they'd gone so far, so fast -- the poor Iraqi draftee bastards didn't have a bat's chance in hell. They were not even cannon fodder. They were getting bombed immobile by American air power and artillery and couldn't do anything except hug the ground and pray to Allah and desert whenever they got the chance. The U.S. Army could hit them when and where they pleased, and there wasn't a damned thing the Iraqis could do about it. The end result was that the U.S. Army (and Air Force) destroyed the Iraqi army -- completely, utterly, with minimal casualties. It'd be like Fred Rogers ("Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood") going up against Mike Tyson in a bar-room brawl -- absolutely no contest at all.

The problem comes in after the war: when a U.S. military designed to destroy our nation's enemies was, instead, asked to perform occupation duty.

First of all, let's get rid of a common assumption -- that of the 480,000 or so soldiers in the U.S. Army, all of them are combat soldiers. They're not. The U.S. Army that won WWII had a 10:1 tail-to-teeth ratio. That is, for each soldier that was pointing a gun and killing enemy, there was ten people behind him making sure that he got his fuel, rations, bullets, shells, uniforms, boots, and orders in a timely fashion. By Vietnam that had risen to a 13:1 tail-to-teeth ratio. The vast majority of military personnel, then as now, barely know which end of a gun a bullet comes out of. Their job is to make sure that the people who DO know which end of the gun a bullet comes out of, have those bullets (or shells and gas, in the case of tankers and AFV crew).

I've seen assertions that the tail-tooth ratio of the current U.S. Army has been reduced to 8:1 thanks to modern information processing technology and heavy privatization of many functions. If so, that means we have around 60,000 actual combat soldiers -- tankers, AFV crew, riflemen -- out of a U.S. active component of around 480,000 soldiers. These are divided amongst 31 combat brigades (i.e., around 2,000 combat soldiers per brigade). Of those 31 brigades, 19 (or roughly 2/3rds of all combat brigades in the U.S. Army) are currently deployed in Iraq as of January 15, 2004 (data courtesy of John Pike's well-respected GlobalSecurity.org). One is in Afghanistan. Four are unavailable due to conversion, training, or reconstitution. This means that we have 8 combat brigades to handle any crisis such as North Korea exploding. This is a dangerous over-extension of the Army's capabilities, but is not yet a dire situation because we have the National Guard and Army Reserves to throw into Korea as a stopgap while the Iraq brigades are pulled out and sent to a more critical theater (and believe me, Korea is more critical -- over 3/4ths of the U.S. economy is now based in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, as vs. Iraq, which is and always has been a decrepit sand pile of a nation of not much use to anyone, even its oil is not a big contributor to the world economy).

The most dire consequence is the wear and tear on front-line combat equipment. The equipment of front-line combat brigades was designed to destroy our nation's enemies. It was not designed with occpuation duty in mind. We have literally worn the treads off of our tanks and armored fighting vehicles. We've stripped the entire U.S. Army supply system of repair parts for the M1 tanks, which break down rapidly in the desert sand, averaging only 150 hours per engine according to some sources. The vast majority of our attack helicopters are incapable of flight because they've ingested so much sand that their turbine blades are literally worn out. The M2 Bradley AFV's are faring better, but they are still having serious tread wear issues and problems with sand getting into their delicate electronics and disabling them. Other than the two combat brigades in South Korea, this is the totality of U.S. war fighting equipment in the South Asia theater. This was our strategic reserves, stashed in Kuwait and prepositioned kits at Diego Garcia, and we stripped the equipment statesides to repair them once they got disabled by the desert sands. We literally have no war-worthy equipment anywhere in the South Asia theater, and fewer than 8 brigades worth of war-worthy equipment anywhere in the world.

In recognition of this fact, the Pentagon is rotating out virtually all of the units currently in Iraq starting in April. Their equipment will go down to Kuwait to be completely overhauled and refurbished by U.S. contractors over a 6 month period. They will be replaced by Reservists and National Guardsmen, primarily equipped with HMMV light vehicles and a few Stryker armoured fighting vehicles (which, with their big rubber tyres, should be less succeptible to being disabled by the sand). So what this means is that for about 6 months, starting in March, we will have virtually everybody in the NG/Reserves who knows which end of a gun the bullet comes out of in Iraq -- and most of the U.S. Army in the United States, completely unequipped while their tanks and AFV's get rebuilt in Kuwait.

In other words, if Korea explodes in June, what was once the best Army in the history of the world will be reduced to pointing their fingers at the enemy and shouting "Bang bang, you're dead!". There will be less than a dozen fully equipped combat brigades in the U.S. Army. The rest will be utterly useless -- a tanker without his tank is like mac'n'cheese without the cheese, it just don't work.

Most people focus on the fact that we have "only" 120,000 troops in Iraq, or less than 1/4th of the authorized strength of 482,000 active duty troops. The truth, alas, is far more dire -- 2/3rds of our combat brigades stuck in that tarpit -- and will become even more dire in May, when the reserves that were supposed to be able to stop anybody else from making trouble get rotated into the tarpit to relieve combat brigades that have utterly exhausted their war-fighting capability doing duty they were neither trained nor equipped for.

Pray for our nation, people, for our leaders truly do not know how they have destroyed what was once the best fighting force on the face of the planet -- and the press, ignorant of military matters, lets them get away with this willful ignorance. Let us hope our nation's real enemies in Southeast Asia are equally blind, or we may find ourselves with far more problems than those posed by some tin-pot dictator in a fetid sandpit of a nation that possessed, apparently, "sharpened pencils of weapons of mass destruction related activities" rather than anything that posed any threat to our nation.

[jyl]

Oops, meant to post in OT. Please someone move it?

[kstar]

Wha?

[nostatic]

I think Leon is getting larger...

[Ed Bighi]

Sure our military should be larger. That way we can spend even more money on taxes. After all, we cannot expect to have a police state on the cheap, can we.

[K. Roman]

China has 1,000,000,000 more people than us, with the majority being men.
Whoa.

[k9handler]

no....just let the people who manage and lead the military do the job they are paid to.

[azasadny]

No, alot of "wasted" resources (too much administrivia and bureauocracy). Whatever the tax payers give the military, they'll ask for more, it never ends!

[Ed Bighi]

If you don't get it in the ass from the left, you get it from the right. Both parties seem to have their little expensive hobbies like reckless wellfare spending, reckless military spending, and so on. This is the nature of the elephant and donkey show I always talk about on this forum. No matter who leads the country, bend over you will.

[jyl]

It just seems alarming that one medium-sized war is tying up the majority of the Army's combat brigades. Okay, arguably its the "occupation" that is consuming troops, not the "major hostilities" part, but can we assume we're not going to have occupations in future wars?

I heard that Kerry is now proposing an additional 40,000 active-duty Army troops.

[araine901]

Is there a reason you have exculded the Navy? The aircraft carrier and tarawa class carrier has changed our war making capibilties.

[BigD9146gt]

Its manditory in this day and age to "weed" out the bad guys, not just bomb the ***** out of everything in sight, and ask questions later. To do this, we need troops. But if we just hold back on the urge to build so many bombs, we might be able to send our future soldiers to decent schools.

[jyl]

Originally posted by araine901
Is there a reason you have exculded the Navy? The aircraft carrier and tarawa class carrier has changed our war making capibilties.

No reason. Do you think the Navy should be larger or smaller or different?

[araine901]

Smaller as technology improves. we will need less men to man our ships and perform the same tasks. In WWII we had 2500+ships in the water, During the Regan years we had 600+ ships in the water. We now have 300. We have 11 CV or CVN carriers, there is not one other country that has ONE that is comparible to any of these 11. Each one of the CV-CVN's has a complement of 75-85 aircraft that can take the war to anywhere in the world within just a few days.

Can you imagine the public "Support" we would get in the middle east if we put MORE troops in Iraq? That will go over like a fart in chruch. We may need more special forces but the big army mentality is gone. Shoving bodies in front of machine guns died out a long time ago. I think the current situation requries a restrained approch. We could solve it with a sniper and a rifle or with an ICBM. Both could bring a resolution but with varried results.

[jyl]

I thought we needed more fast ro-ro transport ships to move heavy equipment. For example, if we had to move one or multiple armoured divisions, men and vehicles, somewhere quickly.

[araine901]

I think you will find that the Military is following the Price Waterhouse Coopers mentality of identifying the core competancy and outsource the rest. Transport should be left to trasportation experts. I can tell you that we did receive notice that the navy reserve was going to be down sizing in an effrort to optimize active duty funding.