January 5, 2012
PREPARE TO FIGHT FUTURE WARS, NOT PAST ONES:
The Coming War Over the Pentagon Budget: How the president's new defense strategy could spark an existential crisis for the Army and the Marines. (Fred Kaplan, Jan. 5, 2012, Slate)
[C]ertain inferences can be drawn from some of their statements. The biggest one is that the Army and Marine Corps will soon be facing an enormous--one might even say, existential--crisis.Take a close look at these remarks:Obama: As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--and the end of long-term nation-building with large military footprints--we'll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces.Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta: The Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support large-scale stability operations.The president and the secretary aren't stating merely that they don't intend to get involved in something like Iraq or Afghanistan in the foreseeable future. They're saying that when the Army and Marine chiefs calculate how many troops they need for various contingencies, they are not allowed to assume that one of those contingencies might be a long war that involves lots of troops engaged in "stability operations."
One of the main lessons of the post-Cold War period is that even trivial losses are unacceptable to many, so we're not ever going to fight another war where we have significant ones. Troops that will never be put in harm's way aren't needed.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2012 9:02 PM
Tweet