We still need more troops

The NY Times makes a good call on the need for more troops in its lead editorial.

Put aside its nutty idea that Iraq has been a disaster. That is just left wing nonsense. Iraq has been difficult, but it would have only been a disaster if Obama and Democrat policy had been adopted two years ago. Instead al Qaeda suffered a significant strategic defeat in what it called the central front in its war against us. We also removed a genocidal despot and have given 25 million Iraqis an opportunity for freedom and democracy. The Times has not been so callous toward a people since it pretended that Stalin was not engaged in genocide in the Ukraine.

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More ground forces: We believe the military needs the 65,000 additional Army troops and the 27,000 additional marines that Congress finally pushed President Bush into seeking. That buildup is projected to take at least two years; by the end the United States will have 759,000 active-duty ground troops.

That sounds like a lot, especially with the prospect of significant withdrawals from Iraq. But it would still be about 200,000 fewer ground forces than the United States had 20 years ago, during the final stages of the cold war. Less than a third of that expanded ground force would be available for deployment at any given moment.

Military experts agree that for every year active-duty troops spend in the field, they need two years at home recovering, retraining and reconnecting with their families, especially in an all-volunteer force. (The older, part-time soldiers of the National Guard and the Reserves need even more).

The Army has been so badly stretched, mainly by the Iraq war, that it has been unable to honor this one-year-out-of-three rule. Brigades have been rotated back in for second and even third combat tours with barely one year’s rest in between. Even then, the Pentagon has still had to rely far too heavily on National Guard and Reserve units to supplement the force. The long-term cost in morale, recruit quality and readiness will persist for years. Nearly one-fifth of the troops — some 300,000 men and women — have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan reporting post-traumatic stress disorders.

The most responsible prescription for overcoming these problems is a significantly larger ground force. If the country is lucky enough to need fewer troops in the field over the next few years, improving rotation ratios will still help create a higher quality military force.

New skills: America still may have to fight traditional wars against hostile regimes, but future conflicts are at least as likely to involve guerrilla insurgencies wielding terror tactics or possibly weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon easily defeated Saddam Hussein’s army. It was clearly unprepared to handle the insurgency and then the fierce sectarian civil war that followed.

The Army has made strides in training troops for “irregular warfare.” Gen. David Petraeus has rewritten American counterinsurgency doctrine to make protecting the civilian population and legitimizing the indigenous government central tasks for American soldiers.

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Maintain mobility: In an unpredictable world with no clear battle lines, the country must ensure its ability — so-called lift capacity — to move enormous quantities of men and matériel quickly around the world and to supply them when necessary by sea.

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Much of the transport equipment is old and wearing out. The Pentagon will need to invest more in unglamorous but essential aircraft like long-haul cargo planes and refueling tankers. The KC-X aerial tanker got caught up in a messy contracting controversy. The new administration must move forward on plans to buy 179 new planes in a fair and open competition.

China is expanding its deep-water navy, much to the anxiety of many of its neighbors. The United States should not try to block China’s re-emergence as a great power. Neither can it cede the seas. Nor can it allow any country to interfere with vital maritime lanes.

America should maintain its investment in sealift, including Maritime Prepositioning Force ships that carry everything marines need for initial military operations (helicopter landing decks, food, water pumping equipment). It must also restock ships’ supplies that have been depleted for use in Iraq. One 2006 study predicted replenishment would cost $12 billion plus $5 billion for every additional year the marines stayed in Iraq.

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The Marines have already met their new quota two years ahead of schedule and the Army is also running head of its recruiting schedule. Both are doing much better than anticapated in retention. Still I believe we should grow the force up to the pre Clinton levels. What we have found is that the Clinton cuts were a mistake when the operational tempo increases as it did in Iraq. We were eventually able to succeed in Iraq, by modestly increasing our forces and substantially increasing the Iraqi forces to the point where we had an adeaquate force to space ratio needed to defeat an insurgency. We were also able to take advantage of some technology that acted as a force multiplier, especially through the use of UAVs. We still need to expand our fleet of UAVs.

What we need is a military that is large enough to fight two regional wars and still train for future conflicts, be they kinetic combat persisting operations or counterinsurgency operations.

We need these things regardless of the left's nutty position on the Iraq war.

We also need to replace many of the aircraft. Besides the F-22's that need to be added, we need a replacement for the aging A-10's that have been the workhorses of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The A-10 or its replacement is also needed in major combat operations to deal with enemy armor. The Apache helicopters that the Army expected to use for that task showed themselves to be inadeqauate for those operations against Iraq's relatively weak military.

The Times argues that our military expenditures are large by some comparisons, but as a percentage of GDP they are still relatively modest to small. We must resist the Democrats' tendency to cut military ependitures to pay for their sinkhole social programs.