Answering the Army's Three Questions by Kevin Benson, Real Clear Defense.
In a July 18 blog post, Hoover Institution fellow Kori Schake called out the U.S. Army for failing to make its funding case to the president, Congress, and the American people. “For the Army leadership to get ahead of the train and craft an outcome different from cuts of another 100,000 soldiers,” Schake warned, “it will need to be much more forthcoming and much more analytically persuasive than [Chief of Staff Ray] Odierno has been.”
Schake’s focus was on the size of the active component of the Army and why the number 490,000 is important and relevant to the needs of the nation. Among the more problematic aspects of Schake’s argument was her citation of a state adjutant general’s assertion that the National Guard is more cost effective than the regular Army...
Comments
I think Schake's point's that Army "will need to be much more forthcoming and much more analytically persuasive" is valid to a degree but so much is determined by our political leaders as well world events beyond our control. What would have happened if Bush 41 went for Bagdhad in Desert Storm? What would have happened if Bush 43 had not blundered into Iraq? China may be a threat but do we want to size our Army for a land war in China? I don't know.
What I do know is that it is better to have the best military force possible at any given time, not only to deter enemies, but to stomp on them quickly should they rear their head. Active duty forces are by design the most responsive and so the justification for a large AC force as possible is that we just don't know what the future holds and we create more risk in rapid response the more we put into the Reserve Component. There is a lot of hyperbole coming out of RC leaders as the force of choice, operational reserve, etc. They are finding out that budgets and the end of the wars are forcing them back to their traditional roles as a strategic and operational reserve and NOTHING on the scale of GWOT.
Schake needs to ask an all important 4th question: Why do we have so many Generals, redundant commands and bloated staff structures? I think one of the greatest threats to our national security is the sheer ammount of excessive flag officers and bloated staffs that waste so much taxpayer money. Too many flag officers are protecting their little fiefdoms at the expense of combat power that can be projected rapidly across the globe. Perhaps Macgregor should be SECDEF to address this problem. Bottom line: DoD needs to trim the fat now before combat soldiers on the ground pay the ultimate price in the future. SECDEF Hagel will have to kick some flag officer ass in order to get this done.
I suspect we are far safer now. Great Britain certainly did not recognize or respect or sovereignty until the treaty we enacted with the Monroe Doctrine in the early 1820s. They raided our homeland, they burned our capital and routinely stopped our ships and took our sailors.
The Spanish threatened in the South and the French in the West. The Barbary states were far more dangerous to us then than AQ is now; and the entire continent was populated by a proud and warlike people who had no intent to surrender their land gently to our advancing settlements. The Comanche attacks on women and children and farmers we sent out to settle the west make AQ look like a bunch of girl scouts.
Yet we had no real Army, and truthfully, even in the face of that much greater danger/"threat" had little need for one.
As to radicalized NSAs, we dealt with those as well at the turn of the century. Has AQ assassinated an American President? The Anarchists did. I think our Army was about 100,000 at the time, and of no value for either deterring or protecting us from such attacks.
We need to honestly assess the facts that brought us to where we are today. The true costs of large standing armies are not just a greater risk of unnecessary warfare, but also of huge rolls of retirees who (like you and I) draw heavily on the defense budget before a single bullet is purchased. We also need to honestly assess the nature and degree of today's threats to our nation. Arguably our over-employment of our military abroad has been far more destructive to our national influence and wealth than anything anyone else could do to us.
The politics of fear are not helpful. Terrorist attacks only have the effect given to them by the target populace. We gave 9/11 strategic effect, AQ did not create strategic effect. We need to focus more on conditioning the populace to absorb and process any future attacks in stride. After all, we are the United States of America. We should act like it.
Bob W.,
I am actually undecided, I could support a debate on both sides of this issue. This certainly isn't the 18th century and our founders could not have foreseen the current world order, so while I agree they were exceptionally wise, they were not all knowing. We don't enjoy the same level of security once provided by the oceans for multiple reasons, but what threatens us probably can't be deterred or we can't be protected by the Army, unless you think we need defense in depth. I'm still debating this with my three personalities :-).
I think this article and the accompanying website (I posted in my comment) are interesting. The authors are sharp and Mcgregor exceptionally so, but he seems to be designed an Army for 1992. I was hoping to see more discussion on this, but a lot of posts to the Blog, so it didn't sit on the front page long.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/a-cheaper-stronger-army#comment-40071
Bill,
Yes, the military as a whole helped to deter major war since WWII - but we will never know or be able to assess what role the Army played in that.
When we took on the containment strategy we adopted at the same time the need for a large standing army that all continental European countries share in eras of major threat of land combat. So we did something very un-American - we maintained a warfighting army in peace. We gave up our position of geostrategic strength to adopt the geostrategic weakness of our allies. We continue to do that today with the ROKs, Israel, KSA, etc.
While we will never know what necessary wars that might have deterred, we certainly know what wars of choice it enabled us to engage upon. Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq. If the President and the Congress had been required to go through the full mechanisms intended by our founders as laid out in the Constitution, most, if not all, of those conflicts would likely have been resolved by other means. Certainly having an Army did not deter any of those foreign leaders (state or non-state) from provoking a potential American military response.
The founders were right. The US has no need for a large standing army in peace; and the possession of such a capability leads to unnecessary war. I for one believe we have validated that their concerns then are still equally valid today.
Why the focus on numbers instead of capabilities and the capacity needed for each capability?
Furthermore, I see little discussion on why we need to retain a large force beyond having a viable crisis response capability. In my opinion that does not represent our total requirement. Our military since WWII has been instrumental and relatively successful in deterring conflict and securing our nation’s interests (making safe from attack) around the world, and our diplomacy in some parts of the world would be ineffective without a capable military behind it. It is about more than crisis response. Obviously the value of underwriting much of the global security system is impossible to measure, but I suspect its value would become more apparent if we demonstrated to the world we weren’t willing to play that role anymore. What happens if the current global security system unravels? What if nations that have depended upon the U.S. playing the global sheriff believe we are withdrawing from that self-imposed responsibility? Will see more arms races, new coalitions, and increased risk of war over time? Of course none of us can answer those questions with any degree of confidence, but they need to be considered. There is more to strategy than bean counting, and in many cases the beans defy counting. We could be risking long term national security objectives for short term savings.
Moving on to the article’s points on how much we should have in the active, reserve, and guard components. I’m certainly no expert when it comes to reserves and the guard other than noting like others they’re not as well trained the active duty, so we will assume risk if we feel compelled to employ them somewhat rapidly. However, I think that argument side steps the capabilities needed debate. Based on the projected threats we will face in 2020, to include threats to our homeland can we afford to sustain Guard forces that are not ready for operations in response to crisis? For example, shortly after the attacks on 9/11 the National Guard was patrolling our airports with socks stuck in their magazine wells because their leadership didn’t trust them to have loaded weapons. Admittedly after 10 years of war I hope that has changed for the Guard, but it won’t take long after the war before we get back to that level. Threats to the homeland include Mumbai style attacks, catastrophic terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks, nuclear weapons from a wider range of actors, etc., and of course the enduring risk of major natural disasters and pandemic diseases. Is the homeland the Guard’s domain? If so, does retaining the Guard in a partial state of readiness what we really want? Putting our heavy forces in the Guard will do little to enhance their readiness to defend the homeland unless we expect the Chinese, Iranians, Russians, or North Koreans to somehow conduct a mechanized attack on the homeland. There for it seems logical to me to put more of our heavy forces in the Army Reserve, and look at restructuring the Guard to better defend the homeland against emergent threats.
It seems we may be missing key future force design considerations when we only focus on numbers of personnel and legacy capabilities when we’re supposed to be looking at what the Joint Force 2020 should consist of based on a projected future environment.
I would like to know when that "last time we gave guard units the same mission as active component unite we mobilized them and traned them for a year or more..." was. Not even a remote possibility in recent history where the law requires that the entire time a Guard member is mobilized is less than 365 days. And I will think you will find that the lesson was not to waste so much time on MDMP that no one uses. BTW, I knew a Tank Unit out of Vermont that could outshot active duty on Table 8. Their secret, the same team had been together for nearly 8 years - something that does not happen on active duty. Further, in an age of simulators I think it is safe to bet that they can get comperable training to active duty if their training is designed based on that limitation.
I agree that they need more time. The training process that existed pre 9/11 was pourly structured. There are ways to fix that if the Army want's to. I don't believe they do, but I just may be stuck in the past.
Curmudgeon - No I didn't get that point but I don't agree with it either. It's even harder for Guard units to train on mech tasks during the calendar year. 2-3 days a month don't provide a mech unit time to do preop maintenance, load vehicles, move to a training area (armor tears up the land), return to garrison, clean vehicles and do post op repairs. Then there's gunnery tasks...
The last time we gave Guard units the same mission as active component units we mobilized them and trained them for a year or more away from their home station. There's a lesson there...
Folks expect an awful lot from the Guard while not providing them the time and resources to be prepared to meet the mission. Then again if we did they would have to train A LOT MORE than 34 days a year. Then there are many that think it's much easier than it actually is to be ready to go to war. We have a real tendency to take shortcuts and have been lucky. Some are taking the wrong lessons from the very targeted use of Guard units over the last decade.
I think you missed my point, because I am basically agreeing with you. I believe that the Guard should be predominantly heavy. Light and Airborne on the AC side (except for maybe the Eskimo Scouts). My reasoning has more to do with the time needed to get them into theater. Light and airborne can be deployed in under 30 days. However, a heavy unit takes serious time if you plan on keeping it going for more than a few days after its arrival. That build up offers time to get forces in the reserve ready. So I was not arguing that the Guard is where the Light should be because it was easy -- nor am I arguing that the Guard should have heavy forces because it is easy. It has to do with the time it takes to get forces ready to go into theater.
Curmudgeon, disagree with your second point. Even if the Army only consisted of light Infantry and Airborne forces the Guard simply cannot attain the proficiency necessary to satisfy short term emergencies. Even during the last decade of war Guard light Infantry formations were tasked to conduct static security or repetitive type security ops like convoy security. They came no where close to executing missions across the full spectrum except for isolated and rare instances.
The Guard has done yeoman's work and after serving with them for two years as a trainer I came away with a huge amount of respect and acknowledge that in some way Guardsman are greater patriots than our active component. While their hearts may be willing 34 days a year or a couple of months of focused training will not get Guard formations up to the level of competency needed to execute the full menu of operations expected of our light Infantry formations. E.G. raids, air assault, cordon and search, deliberate attack, establish a defense, delay etc.
Many make the mistake of assuming light infantry ops are easy. The real lesson is our troops make extremely complex missions look that way.
This is a load of ...
"We need an active force of 490,000 because policy decisions are never made in time to meet the alert, mobilization, training and deployment time needed to bring the reserve forces into readiness for deployment. Only a force in being at a high state of readiness can meet this requirement."
This would be true if the active duty consisted only of Airborne and light infantry. Reality is that Heavy forces take a long time to get into theater and, concurrent with that effort you could be mobilizing the reserve. The trick is to have an system that is built to do that. The new ARFORGEN cycle does this as long as it is maintained.