Sure, but it’s also true that the vast majority of military jobs aren’t combat jobs either.
I think what drewder is suggesting is something along the lines of the Swiss or Israeli systems, not some sort of vaguely 18th century style militia.
I think that would be a hard sell, although I wonder if there would be some utility in having a third tier of trained and drilled troops that have lesser peace-time obligations than the National Guard. Like say… people who’ve been through their basic training and branch schools, but who might require 6 weeks of refresher training before they were useful if called up.
For what possible purpose does it serve to force millions of Americans to spend weeks and months training to shoot rifles and march in formation?
I kind of feel like there is a general lack of understanding of the geopolitical landscape here. The purpose of America’s large military is not to protect us from invasion. It is to serve as a global force of stabilization and deterrence. As much as people say they hate the idea of the US being the “World Cop”, the last time we tried isolationism and maintaining a small army, we ended up with two world wars.
Who said anything about force? I was thinking of a volunteer third tier, myself. I mean, I wasn’t ever quite ready to commit to the National Guard, having seen the level of committment that it required of a few friends in college, but I think had there been something with less of a time committment, I would probably have pulled the trigger on that.
Sure, but is it really necessary to have the active duty force levels we maintain today in order to do that? I could very easily see a force of a small handful of active brigades backed by a bunch of readily available NG brigades, and then a similar or even larger number of reduced-readiness brigades.
Of course, I’m mostly talking about the Army; the Navy and AF wouldn’t fit well into that scheme I’m proposing.
I’m generally quite in favor of a larger National Guard role for combat units, but yes, the size of the active Army is not unreasonable for the commitments the US has made.
For anything short of total conventional war, the Army has to have roughly two or three units in various states of training for each unit that is deployed. So to have one brigade in say, Afghanistan, there’s one brigade that has just returned from Afghanistan and is unpacking their shit; there’s one packing their shit up to go to final training to get ready to go to Afghanistan, and there’s one unit that’s somewhere in the middle of those two units in terms of getting new gear, spending time with their families, etc.
For the National Guard, you’d be looking at something more like six or seven units needed for each one deployed, as a general rule. That’s because employers seem to be pretty okay with a Guardsman being deployed for a year or so every five years, but they wouldn’t be happy if their employees worked one year on/one year off.
A strong Navy is still a large standing military, as is a large air force and presumably nobody is proposing that the ICBM force be run by part time militia’s, nor naive enough to propose abolishing nuclear weapons in the same breath as shrinking conventional forces to reduce the temptation to use them.
In the latter part of the pre-WWII era of small standing Army, the US kind of cheated on the Founder concept of no large standing military by having a formidable standing Navy. Not as active a force as post WWII, but the steel ‘New Navy’ from 1890’s (when it began to really come to fruition after its start in the '80’s) built up to a much larger size than the peacetime Navy of the wooden ship era, most of whose vessels were ‘in ordinary’ (in mothballs in 20th century terminology) or incomplete in the navy yards for decades during peacetime.
And in basic political concept, how is the Republic to be run?, there really isn’t a fundamental difference how big the Army, per se is as opposed to the military as a whole. That’s really more of a narrow defense policy issue. Should the US emphasize air/sea/space power more than land power at this particular juncture? A reasonable discussion, but it mixes apples and oranges to then start discussing drafting everybody. There’s no military purpose for that. That’s strictly on the high level topic of nature of the Republic.
And in the US defense situation of the post WWII era, if you don’t need a relatively large (by pre WWII standards) but professional and ready peacetime army, you certainly don’t need a much larger half ass militia army. That original ‘Minuteman’ concept gradually went out of favor more than anything else because it didn’t work. US militia’s or state volunteers were often tragicomically ineffective in the 19th century, though national catastrophe was avoided by other circumstances, such as British reluctance to set aside the resources to re-colonize the US, the fact that ineffective green volunteer units were on both sides in the early Civil War, and Spain wasn’t a serious threat in that war. But there was clearly some truth to von Moltke’s characterization of the American CW armies as ‘armed mobs’, at least for a good partl of the conflict.
I guess the question comes down to what force levels of active duty soldiers you need to actually be able to deploy quickly, versus what force levels of National Guard/Militia soldiers are needed to serve as a sort of deterrent effect?
In a related, and interesting note, I saw some articles about where the Army Chief of Staff is recommending that either the entire NG, or at least part of it ramp up from 39 days of training a year (the classic “one weekend a month, two weekends a year”), to somewhere between 60-100 days of training per year, since it takes 3-4 months to ramp up an NG unit for combat once they’re federalized right now.
So maybe they could do the three tiers I’m talking about, but with the 39 day NG as the lowest, and most numerous tier, and the 60-100 day NG as the middle-tier, and the active duty troops as the top tier. Would that change the force mix that would be the best intersection of minimum cost and highest effectiveness?
Most military jobs, other than direct combat roles have civilian counterparts. People can fall into the jobs that match their civilian careers. I find that national guardsmen, who do their jobs in the real world, are far better at such jobs than regular army soldiers in the same positions.
From what I have read, the largest contributor to excess DoD costs is unnecessary facilities. If they could divest the excess bases and consolidate operations at the number and location of facilities that make operational sense, we’d save a meaningful percentage of the total DoD spend. At *zero *impact to readiness or combat power.
That is a huge win-win with none of the tradeoffs you propose. The only problem is that this requires many Congressman to vote to induce a recession bordering on depression into their districts when a huge Federal payroll moves out.
The difference between a large standing Navy and a standing Army is that it is hard to invade a country if you’re stuck on the shore and more to the point hard to perform a military coup on mainland USA with a Navy.
Depends who you ask. American doctrine since WWII has been to maintain the ability to simultaneously fight 2 major wars. In practice, that really means fighting one major war while having the reserve capacity to fight a second should an enemy want to take advantage of our being preoccupied with the first.
But I don’t work for the Pentagon. I have no idea what the ideal force strength for such a doctrine should be in terms of brigades and carrier battlegroups.
But aren’t the direct combat roles the most critical ones? Okay, I can accept the idea that somebody who’s a surgeon or a cook or a warehouse manager in their civilian life can do the equivalent job in the military with minimal crossover problems. But skills like firing an artillery piece or driving a tank or navigating a submarine or flying a fighter jet - or being an infantry soldier - do not have civilian equivalents. You need to learn these jobs by training and experience in the military. That’s why we need full time professionals in these jobs.
I was involved in training Guard and Reserve after mobilization 2009 -2014. If you can believe the numbers on my award I had a significant role in ensuring the training and validation of over 14,000 Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen.
That’s an ambitious schedule for trained and experienced troops already formed into collective units prior to mobilization. Pre 9-11 my unit’s required readiness rating listed us as requiring 60 days post-mobilization training. That was a highly rated unit (compared to like units in the Guard nationwide) that already had most of their equipment and personnel and had been working together, in many cases for years. Early after 9-11, two to three months was possible. My post-mobilization training to deploy to Bosnia was 2.5 months.
During my time as a trainer, we were able to get post-mobilization down to two to three weeks at the mobilization station late in the war but there were a couple things contributing:
Units were identified far out and would spend basically all their training time before mobilizing actually fulfilling requirements. We’d just make sure the paperwork was in order for tasks they trained before arrival.
It was not uncommon to be able to use both two week annual training periods for the two training years before mobilization depending on when their MOBSAD (Mobilization Station Arrival Date) fell in the fiscal year. On top of it many units all of the 24 days available for their “one weekend a month” in a tight cluster prior to mobilization. As an Example a unit mobilizing in JAN might do two weeks of annual training in SEP. They’d then have 38 days, even before approval of extra funding for additional training days, to cram into the 3-4 months right before mobilization.
Those units already had trained and experienced leaders.
By late in the was significant chunks of these units consisted of personnel that had already deployed.
Most of their equipment was already located in theater greatly simplifying their logistics. That simplification saved a lot of time.
There’s another giant issue I see. Where do we get the NCOs and Officers? Your third tier wouldn’t be leaders trained and proficient in their leader tasks. If you just tried keeping an active stub with lots and lots of cadre leaders, they aren’t getting the experience of actually leading troops conducting real world training on mission essential collective tasks.
A better planning time frame is probably more in keeping with the National Guard mobilization for World War II. They had some training challenges that don’t exist today - one 4 hour assembly a week instead of one weekend, and less rigorous standards for use of their two weeks. Still they were at least as ready, likely more, than your third tier. We Mobilized them in August 1940. We still paid a cost in blood for battlefield ineffectiveness in early ground actions.
South American navies have often been involved in coups, or even in brief internal wars with their armies (and/or air services) where one service or the other was supporting the govt and other(s) trying to overthrow it. And that would be all the more likely if an army were to be a very small one comparatively.
Having small land forces to prevent their being ‘misused’ in foreign wars is more a matter of opinion. However having deliberately ineffective land forces for that reason is simply a stupid idea, with all due respect to everyone. A mass conscription army at this point in the US would be an example.
And practically speaking the US public has been put off from significant foreign ground wars for a long time. The whole concept is basically closing the barn door after the horse. Besides which it would be a nice world if ‘never get involved in ground wars’ was a simple gteed formula. But in some cases more trouble can be created by extreme reluctance to deploy ground troops but being willing to get involved, with money, proxies, air forces etc. Nor is just not getting involved at all gtee of an acceptable situation either.
And if you have an obviously imbalanced capability, adversaries will exploit it.
As someone who has been either active duty or National Guard my entire adult life I can say with some certainty the exact opposite is true. National Guardsmen are far better at doing jobs that have no military equivalent. Like my unit did when we ran the Green Zone in Iraq. 90% of our slots were “MOS not specific.”
There may be many miliary jobs that have similarities to civilian jobs but they are not the same. A car mechanic may know the basics of maintenance but it will take him time to learn how to fix a tank. While he’s learning people are dying. And now that most conflicts will probably be low intensity conflicts or asymmetrical warfare everyone needs to know how to be soldiers first. No standing army means lots of body bags in the beginning of any conflict.
Apparently the Obama Administration/Pentagon scrapped that doctrine in about 2012 according to a bunch of news articles I read.
I guess what I’m trying to figure out is what our strategic goals actually are, and what sort of force mix we need to accomplish them. I mean, it’s still pretty clear we need a sizeable Navy and Air Force to project power, but I’m not sure that the current 8 active/10 National Guard division mix (or whatever it shakes out to in BCTs) is where the Pentagon is going. Without a standing conflict like Afghanistan going on, just how many active-duty divisions DO we need? I realize we need some, but what is that number?
For example, they’re talking about something called a TAA brigade (“train, advise and assist”) which is basically a brigade composed entirely of the officer/NCO structure of a normal brigade, with no junior enlisted personnel. The idea is that they would be useful in terms of training allies and in an advisory capacity, and then in case of a major conflict, they could be filled out with junior enlisted units (platoons, I assume) straight from AIT.
This sort of discussion along with enhanced readiness Guard units makes me think that a smaller active-duty force is the way of the future, even if only due to reduced budgets.
Also… I imagine that some of the civilian/military jobs overlap- maybe a civilian mechanic doesn’t know how to work on a gas turbine engine, but I’d suspect that a civilian semi truck mechanic could adapt to working on military trucks awfully quickly. Same for signals people with respect to the computer network side of things (I actually had a good friend do that in reverse; he used his signals officer training to basically effect a career change into civilian IT once he got out) I’d imagine the real trick would be to identify which ones have a lot of crossover potential and which ones don’t, and make a point of training and retaining in the non-crossover jobs, under the assumption that you could draft or recruit qualified diesel mechanics/cable monkeys/etc… or just hire them as contractors if need be.