The United States is in a league of it’s on when measured in military spending; hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Yet this stupendous expenditure seems to translate into surprisingly little actual effective force. We’re straining, badly, to keep one hundred t
housand troops in action against a foe with next to no conventional military power. We’ve all read reports on how we’re having to use Reserves and Guardsmen to provide the logistical support the regular forces simply don’t have. And how poor military families often are.
What’s the problem? Have we overinvested in multibillion dollar weapon systems, like nuclear submarines and bombers, at the expense of conventional forces? Is our money buying mainly strategic position, rather than immediate force? Are we overfocused on having not just better but overwhelmingly better weapons, because it’s politically necessary to minimize personnel losses? Are we still thinking in Cold War terms of defeating an enemy in 30 days, or else the nukes come out?
Point being, you can spend all you want on hardware, if you don’t know how or when to use it, it ain’t gonna do you no good anyway. The money should be spent, if it’s going to be spent at all, on small quick response forces, and on good intelligence. WWII showed that you don’t need to have all the latest stuff, as long as you have the capacity to produce it when needed. Another lesson that’s been lost.
Sure, our budget is huge, but so are our armed forces and our international commitments. And not only do we have large numbers of forces, we have the highest quality of forces in the world, both in terms of training and equipment. That costs.
We could easily increase the number of troops we have (assuming they enlist; remember, it’s an all-volunteer force), just by getting rid of all the hightech gear the average grunt gets. No more GPS. No more secure radios. No more night vision. MRE’s may be tasty and nutritious, but we can make do with canned sardines and crackers. High-tech uniforms? Eh. Go back to the old Khahki outfits. Up-armored Hummers to ride around in? God gave you feet, use them! Helicopter medivac? Nah, your buddies can carry you back to the aid station. By the way, the aid station is about 10 kilometers further back, since we have fewer of them. Cost money, you know. Et cetera. If you want top-rate infantry, it costs. A lot. If you don’t want top-rate, give the bastards few AKs, maybe a RPG, and send 'em off. If they all die, who cares? You spent a couple of hundred bucks equipping the whole squad, whereas a US-style squad probably costs upwards of $50,000 to equip.
To a degree, I agree with that we are too ‘last war’ oriented. But so does the DoD. Love Rummy or hate him, he is overseeing just the sort of transformation that you are talking about: More readily deployable troops (stick 'em in Strykers instead of Bradleys), more high-tech surveillence gear (UAVs), smaller ships more able to operate near the coast (Littoral Combat Ships). More ‘brilliant’ weapons and GPS-guided weapons. Less troops, since it all costs an arm and a leg.
Also, you want to implement those changes at a steady pace. Following the end of WW2, in which we went toe-to-toe with the massive war machines of the Germans and Japanese, we promptly scrapped the divisional organizations we successfully used, and started dorking around with all sorts of odd organization concepts. That probably hurt us in Vietnam, and kept hurting us until the current system came about in the late 70’s. We shouldn’t make the same mistake twice; Change can be good, but it needs to be wisely implemented.
[QUOTE=pantom]
Excellent thread topic. I was thinking of starting something along these lines, having read the following:
Brecher has some decent articles, and he has some totally batshit insane articles (Read his post 9/11 article). These come close to batshit insane. The RPG-7 may not be terrible. It is certainly cheap, and may even be reliable. But that’s about it. He needs to take into account the thousands that have been used since the start of GWII, and how many tanks they actually knocked out. Not to mention, how many RPG gunners got themselves good and dead, because the thing only has an effective range of 500 meters. Well within rifle range, much less .50 cal range.
I get the gist of the second article, and agree with some of it, but our M1s are doing splendidly in city fighting. They become high-tech mobile bunkers, supporting the infantry. Not glamorous, but it works.
As I said above, we are in the process of fairly sweeping reforms to the military. Probably take 10-15 years to really implement, but change is a comin’.
The days of ‘surge production’ are long gone. We damned well better have enough F-16’s, because we cannot turn on the spigot, ala WW2, and start spanking out hundreds per month. Ditto the Abrams. We don’t even make Abrams any more, just upgrade kits at the Lima plant. And that is slated to close in 2005, I believe. Given that high-tech takes so long to build, and needs parts from all over the world, surge production just isn’t going to happen with anything more complicated than the infantrymans M-16. Actually, not even. The M-4 that the Army now uses is made in Canada by Diemaco (Colt contract). The M-16a4 that the Marines use is made by Fabrique Nationale, but they have a plant in the US that does that.
I think the OP has missed a few details, which are actually important for the subject.
1 - We’re straining to keep somewhere between 100,000 and perhaps 150,000 troops in Iraq for the long term. (I use this range because troop levels could still go up a bit, and possibly could go down a bit) That is very different from sending 300,000 to 500,000 troops into a battle that would last weeks to a couple months. And we’re trying to keep 100 to 150 thousand troops in Iraq while balancing all other commitments, with an Army that’s about 490,000 soldiers strong, and Guard and Reserve of roughly another 600,000 or so. (Sailors and airmen aren’t going to be that great help in stabilizing Najaf or Baghdad.)
2 - Somewhere around a quarter to a third of the defense budget is dedicated to pay and benefits for those willing to volunteer to serve in the armed forces. This is significantly more than we spend on purchasing weapons (excluding R&D) This personnel cost has been expanding greatly for the last five to ten years, as people turn to thinking of the military as being in competition with the civilian job market. True or not, a big portion of our military budget is for people.
3 - The heart of the problem is not our forces, but the mission.
Maybe if we didn’t get involved in everything we wouldn’t need a multibillion dollar per year military (equivilant to the next 50 or so nations’ military spending COMBINED) and then maybe we could socialize healthcare or bring our education system up to somewhere near where it should be for a nation so advanced as ours.
But that takes a bit longer to explain than it takes to wave a flag, and bombs are easier to drop than paperwork is to fill out…
Dead on right. US troops are sadly under trained for peacekeeping… if at all. Flower throwing civilians don’t need peacekeepers ? They pack punch but are light on other less “macho” tasks.
If a true coalition had brought in more 15,000 troops that would be 15k less US troops and less 15k replacement troops. Long term commitments means you need to rotate troops and that means doubling the number you use.
Afghanistan was largely sucessful due to the small number of US troops present during the "invasion". The northern alliance was more palatable to locals than GI's and did the work pretty well...
I wouldn’t call Afghanistan a success. While the troubles in Iraq have distracted us, Afghanistan has been allowed to stagnate for the last 18 months. Warlords control the countryside, there’s a record opium harvest, the infrastructure remains in a shambles, the Taliban still lingers on, and aid workers are pulling out because of rising violence levels.
Well of course Afghanistan is a big mess. But as Brecher points out, it’s pretty much been a big mess all along anyway. It’s a success from OUR point of view: We’ve got Bin Laden hiding in a cave somewhere, at a minimal cost in American casualties.
BTW: Brecher’s 2003 Claymore Awards coined the funniest adjective I’ve heard in a long while: “War-Horny”
I disagree with the OP. As I just finished typing in another thread - the military lived up to its end of the deal; when called upon, it blew through the mission like there was no Iraqi army in the first place (neverminding that there largely wasn’t). I don’t blame the military or the soldiers for their lack of control of Iraq - they have a very small body count, and that is due to good training and medical care (I started a topic about this last month). We got what we paid for there.
What we are lacking in Iraq is a plan. We took over, now we’re standing there scratching our asses while the soldiers are getting tired of being target practice, and are starting to show it. We have a complete failure by the Bush Administration to have an exit strategy. In a word, the military got there on the blind faith that there was a destination. From a number of reports, they are pretty pissed at the civilian leadership about being left hanging (and for that matter, so is the State Dept, whose plan was ignored).
Back onto the OP… effective strength? I think we get what we pay for. The real question is - do we need it? We needed it during the Cold War, but is there a situation where we’ll need all the stealth bombers and legions of tanks and junk? Do we need massive military bases in Germany and Japan and Iraq? Do we need an uber-expensive plane like the F-22? What kind of wars will we fight in the future, and how will they be fought?
I’m a bit torn on the issue. Clearly, we need to maintain the capability to invade and occupy another country. However, the “conventional” methods of the Cold War are obsolete.
The fact that the size of the Defense budget is inversely proportional to our military strength and effectiveness is compellingly established by Col. James Burton in his extraordinary book: The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard
Burton’s reports of the analyses of arguably the most brilliant and successful minds the Pentagon has ever seen reveals that the cheaper and less complex weapon system will always outperform and “out-defend” the more expensive and more complex system. These analyses make plain that, for example, the Reagan shopping spree was one of the very worst things ever to happen to our military strength and our national defense! Dubya’s has doubtless had the same strength-sapping consequences for precisely the same reasons: complexity and high cost yields far fewer, far less reliable, far less effective weapons.
