| Page 2 of 2 < |
Don't Grow the Army
If this is about invading Iran, or carrying out a land war in China, as The Post has suggested, then maybe we need to have a national debate about that strategy, not slip it in sideways by expanding the Army without agreeing on the mission. The experience of Iraq has clearly dulled America's appetite for continuing in the role of designated global occupier and nation-builder.
Historically, our military's mission is to fight and win America's wars -- decisively, with overwhelming force -- not to invade and occupy distant territories to create empires or settle local conflicts that we can barely understand, let alone referee.
  A U.S. Army soldier awaits the start of a mission to monitor a mosque in Baghdad on Friday. (Darko Vojinovic -- Associated Press) |
Iraq represents the latest sobering reminder of a lesson for Democrats and Republicans alike in the post-Cold War world: Even the world's only remaining superpower, with forces unmatched by any other military on the planet, is limited in what it can do with its troops.
Donald Rumsfeld used to say that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces were troubled, but he neglected to consider the implications of his own statement: That even 140,000 U.S. soldiers -- just about the largest force that the United States could sustain in Iraq over several years -- could not pacify part of one country. The world's lone superpower, spending more on defense than the next dozen nations combined, has all that it can handle -- indeed, more than it can handle -- trying to deal with unrest in part of a single country the size of California. At nearly half a trillion dollars and counting, our power, skill and money buy us a losing outcome in one small corner of the world.
The point is not to belittle the extreme difficulty of the mission facing our troops but to highlight it and come to grips with the limits even of formidable military power set amid hostile populations. Our enemies, well aware of the dominance of conventional American forces, cordially decline our invitation to fight on our terms, under the traditional rules of military force-on-force, with defined battlefields largely separated from populations.
Terrorism is not a political movement so much as a logical weapon of choice for political extremists facing a superpower. There will always be a military component to meeting this threat. But as administration spokesmen have testified, the primary role in this "long war" may well belong not to the military but to the State Department, foreign assistance agencies, and the Treasury and Justice departments, supported by the appropriate application of force (usually in small numbers and with Special Forces troops, not Army brigades). The Army does not need to grow to perform this mission; it needs to refocus.
The question the new Congress must deal with is one not of enlarging the Army but of redefining the armed forces' mission in today's world. Do we want an Army big enough to invade and occupy Iran or Syria? Or do we want a tailored, restructured force designed to play its role in the pursuit of terrorist organizations (along with other tools of statecraft) and with enough heft to play a part in peacekeeping operations, deter potential adversaries and decisively win intense but brief conventional conflicts? This strategic alternative is hardly an endorsement of the "Rumsfeld doctrine." The U.S. military as currently sized can still "go heavy" when needed. What it can't do is remain indefinitely bogged down in a static mission with inadequate body armor and no strategy.
A program of troop reductions and phased redeployment from Iraq would in effect increase the size of the Army by relieving the force of a burdensome, costly and unproductive mission. There will be opportunities to retrain and reequip to redress the shortcomings in armor and tactics so neglected by the Rumsfeld Pentagon. These are the issues the new Congress and the White House must deal with, not an elusive search for an irrelevant and costly capability for a mission that the nation does not want to pursue.
Gordon Adams is a fellow and John Diamond a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
