Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., President, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
... The Army's leadership has rightly concluded that it needs a force capable of performing across the full spectrum of conflict at a high level of effectiveness. But in its attempts to become equally effective across a range of conflict types, it risks becoming marginally competent in many tasks, and highly effective at none. In attempting to increase the size of the Army to field forces large enough to deal with a range of contingencies, the Service risks becoming incapable of creating the needed scale by building up the capabilities of America's allies and partners, a key part of the defense strategy. It also risks a catastrophic leadership failure of a kind not seen since the late stages of the Vietnam War, a failure that took the Army over a decade to repair.
Dr. Peter Mansoor, Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair in Military History, The Ohio State University
... The transformation of American land power for the wars of the 21st century remains incomplete. In Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Allan Millett lays out three prerequisites for effective military innovation: revised doctrine, changes in professional military education, and the creation of operational units that meet real strategic needs. The U.S. Army has met the first two fundamentals, but not yet the third. Although bulky divisions have given way to smaller, modular, more easily deployable brigade combat teams, these units remain largely configured for conventional combat -- and imperfectly at that. Brigades that are tailored for counterinsurgency operations would include more infantry; a full engineer battalion; a large intelligence section built mainly around human and signals intelligence, with significant analytical capability; military police, engineer, civil affairs, information operations, and psychological operations cells; a contracting section; adviser and liaison sections, with requisitelanguage capabilities; human terrain teams, with the capability to map tribal and social networks; explosive ordnance demolition teams; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets—particularly armed reconnaissance units that can engage the people and fight for information, along with armed unmanned aerial vehicles and ground sensors. The need for more infantry and engineers is especially critical, so much so that the Army should forgo the creation of additional brigade combat teams until existing units are reconfigured with the addition of a third maneuver battalion. The paucity of the current brigade combat team structure has forced brigade commanders to attach armor and infantry companies to the reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition squadron, which is otherwise too lightly armed to act as a combat force. A triangular organization would be more effective not just in counterinsurgency warfare, but would give our maneuver commanders the resources they need to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts as well.
And at the House Armed Services Committee, Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee:
Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Senior Managing Director, Enterra Solutions LLC
... the U.S. Navy faces severe budgetary pressures on future construction of traditional capital ships and submarines. Those pressures will only grow as a result of the current global economic crisis (which--lest we forget--generates similar pressures on navies around the world) and America's continued military operations abroad as part of our ongoing struggle against violent extremism. Considering these trends as a whole, I would rather abuse the Navy--force structure-wise--before doing the same to either the Marine Corps or the Coast Guard. Why? It is my professional opinion that the United States defense community currently accepts far too much risk and casualties and instability on the low end of the conflict spectrum while continuing to spend far too much money on building up our combat capabilities for high-end scenarios. In effect, we over-feed our Leviathan force while starving our SysAdmin force, accepting far too many avoidable casualties in the latter while hedging excessively against theoretical future casualties in the former. Personally, I find this risk-management strategy to be both strategically unsound and morally reprehensible.