Thomas Donnelly, a Resident Fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, appeared today before the Senate Armed Services AirLand Subcommittee. SWJ has posted a transcript of his prepared remarks and an excerpt of his bottom line follows:
...Creating an adequate land force will not be cheap. But it's a price we're already paying now: when adding the Army's "baseline" budget to the constant and predictable cost of mobilizing reserve personnel and doing back-door procurements in the supplementals, the United States is paying about $200 billion per year for Army land forces. The costs of the Marines, which include weapons systems and other items included in the Navy budget is harder to estimate. And in fact, Marine costs can and should remain relatively constant; the difference is and should remain in Army expansion. But it would be far better to continue to grow and modernize the Army under a long-term plan rather than on an annual, ad hoc basis through supplemental appropriations and unending reserve call-ups. In very rough terms, I would estimate the cost of a large-enough Army to be about $240 billion per year. By 2016 -- the time it would take to expand, equip and configure the force we need, and if President Obama's economic projections are correct -- that would account for just 1.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. A million-man land force would be a third of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
Without doubt, this is a force we can afford. Conversely, the strategic costs of not rebuilding America's land forces would be very great indeed. We cannot expect to exercise leadership in the international community if we are unable to guarantee the stability of the greater Middle East; in addition to the economic value of the region's resources, the political volatility of the Islamic world, and the prospects for jihadi terrorism, make it a cockpit for many conflicts -- not just regional, but potentially between global great powers. Nor can we expect, at this juncture, to stabilize the region by "offshore balancing." That moment has passed, both militarily and geostrategically; the clock cannot be turned back. Land power is not the answer to every problem, but it is an essential answer to this problem.
Tom Donnelly is the author of The Military We Need and coauthored Ground Truth and Of Men and Materiel with Frederick Kagan and Gary Schmitt respectively.