[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.