The continuing costs of Clinton troop reductions
...There is more. It is hard to understand Biddle's assertion that today's battlefield is more lethal when you consider that overall casualties in Iraq are still less than that of several individual battles in world War II, to say nothing of much more lethal battles of the Civil War and World War I.The debate over alleged Bush administration errors in Iraq - failing to send enough troops to Iraq in the first place, inadequate planning for stability operations after the fall of Baghdad, etc. - largely misses the point: America's ground forces are too small for what our foreign policy demands of them.
As a number of defense experts have observed, the problem - an Army that is too small - is systemic, transcending individuals and administrations. Its cause can be traced to the denigration of land power after the Gulf War of 1991.
In his classic study of the Korean Conflict, "This Kind of War," T.R. Fehrenbach expressed the conventional wisdom on land power's importance: "You can fly over a land forever; you may bomb it and wipe it clean of life . . . but if you desire to defend it; protect it; and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did . . . by putting your young men into the mud."
But that view came into question in 1991, after the U.S.-led coalition crushed Saddam Hussein's forces in Desert Storm with what seemed a combination of air power and information technology. Influential observers argued that this proved that a "revolution in military affairs" was underway, with information technology diminishing the importance of land power.
Some went so far as to suggest that traditional ground combat had become a thing of the past, that future U.S. military power would be based on precision strikes delivered by air or space assets, perhaps coordinated and directed by a handful of special operations soldiers.
...
Iraq has revealed several important things:
* Land power remains as crucially important as it was in Fehrenbach's time. Indeed, for the kinds of war we're most likely to face in the future, we need a larger Army.
A key assumption behind today's Army force structure is that, when any conventional war ends, U.S. forces will execute an "exit strategy." But Iraq and Afghanistan show otherwise: The United States requires a land force that can not only win conventional wars but also carry out stability operations afterward, engaging in complex, irregular warfare. Realistically, this requires the equivalent of at least two more combat divisions (plus support).
* The "revolution in military affairs" wasn't as revolutionary as once believed.
As Stephen Biddle of the Army War College has argued, today's battlefield is not qualitatively different from those of the last century but merely far more lethal.
...
Still, the Clinton troop cuts have hurt our flexibility in the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan, as well as our ability to respond to emerging threats. It is time to acknowledge that the cuts wer a mistake and start to add infantry units to our force structure.
Comments
Post a Comment