The Army, Faced With Its Limits
ONE million men and women serve in the United States Army, so why is it proving nearly impossible to keep a mere 150,000 of them in Iraq?
What we see from this side of the pond is an Army projecting it’s force and attempting to force it’s will on an entire country…but what does that involve? What does it take to mount an operation of the size and scope of the war in Iraq…especially with that war coming up on it’s third anniversary? (Mission accomplished, indeed….)
Well, it all starts with numbers- huge, outsized, larger-than-life numbers. Whether, it’s manpower, materiel, or moeny, there are no small numbers when it comes to running a war seven times zones away…and therein lies the problem.
No matter how large, mobile, and well-equipped an American fighting force may be, in the current political and financial environment it will continue to face significant limitations. Yes, we may be the world’s last remaining superpower, but that hardly means our military is immune to the limitations created by issues that have faced generals and polticians since cavemen discovered that they could lob rocks at their enemies.
The Pentagon expects to face many Iraq-type conflicts in the coming years, wars that involve battling insurgents and restoring stability. As a result, a debate is beginning to churn in defense policy circles: Should the government enlarge the military so it can more easily fight these wars? Or should the government alter its policies, so as not to fight such wars as often, at least not alone?
Senior Pentagon officials argue that neither shift is necessary, that reorganizing the Army’s existing combat units into stronger, faster and more flexible brigades will have the same effect as adding more soldiers. But some analysts doubt these adjustments alone will go far enough.
Lawrence Korb, who was assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, states the issue baldly: “We cannot fight a long, sustained war without a larger ground force.” He defines a “long war” as lasting two years or more. The Iraq war has gone on now for nearly three.
To even the most uninformed observers, simply doing the math will indicate that we have a problem. At current levels of funding and manpower, there simply isn’t enough Army (not to mention money and materiel) available to project our power around the globe in the manner military planners would like to be able to. Yes, the United States may possess the most powerful economy and military in the world, but even being #1 with a bullet (no pun intended) means dealing with some serious limitations.
Of the Army’s one million soldiers, fewer than 400,000 are combat troops (the rest are support personnel). Only about 150,000 of those combat troops are on active duty; the rest are in the National Guard and Reserves.
Then there is the matter of rotation. Combat units, at least in an all-volunteer force, cannot be deployed for much longer than a year. (To do otherwise would risk exhaustion and demoralization.) Replacements come while the battle-weary go out for rest, retraining and resupply. Therefore, to sustain one active brigade (about 3,500 troops) in a war zone, one or two additional brigades must be ready to replace it.
Finally, Iraq isn’t the only foreign country where American combat troops are stationed.
In a study published in October, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that given all these factors the military could not sustain more than 123,000 troops in Iraq for much longer.
Additional forces, the budget office concluded, would require the United States to “increase the size of the land forces, terminate some other commitment or rotate forces to Iraq at more demanding rates.” In the past year, the Pentagon has already stretched the rotation cycle in Iraq, for both active and reserve forces; and it has redeployed one brigade from Bosnia and another from South Korea. “There isn’t much more leeway for simply moving people around,” Mr. Korb said.
So whatever is the world’s only remaining superpower to do? How long can we extend tours in Iraq and issue stop-loss orders until the erosion of morale becomes a very real and profound issue? At current levels, today’s American military is running at speeds it was never designed for. How long before things begin to break? And how much should Americans reasonably be able to expect their military to do?
We should keep in mind that an army is at it’s most basic a collection of people. While the vast majority of the people in the American military serve ably and well, any human being has a breaking point. How many of us have experienced burnout? It’s bad enough in the civilian world, but on the battlefield, it’s truly a frightening prospect. Yet if we continue to stretch and push our military to ever greater, riskier, and farther-flung missions, how long before the human beings we are demanding this of simply burn out?
This is why I am convinced that we will see a push to reinstate the draft before the Bush years are over. At some point, I believe the Defense Department will simply lose the desire and (more importantly) the ability to continually juggle the numbers as they are currently constituted. We will then be subjected to a huge propaganda effort designed to convince us that, in the wake of 9.11, our security interests demand a military force of the size that can only be produced by an annual draft of 18-year-olds. It’s a horrible prospect, and I hope I’m wrong…but I don’t believe that I am. For how else will the numbers be made to work?
If this Administration will lie, fabricate intelligence, and break the law by spying on it’s own citizens, how can we not expect the worst?
