The Army We Need
DONNELLY, TOM
The Army We Need We can't fight The Long War with the forces we have By Tom Donnelly In wartime Washington there is but one point of bipartisan agreement: The land forces of the United States are...
...Just how much depends not only on the number of troops but the nature of their equipment—and that's an equally important question to ponder...
...Even as we await the end of the Castro era in Cuba we know not what turmoil the dictator's passing will bring...
...We fight with new constraints abroad, as well...
...Any expansion needs to be balanced with equal equipment modernization...
...As our war becomes longer, our force has become less sustainable, by design...
...military bases...
...what kind of force...
...what kind of war...
...how much is enough...
...The U.S...
...The larger operational challenges—simply gaining access to the strongly protected North Korean, Iranian, or even Pakistani nuclear facilities—are more daunting still...
...Hurricane Katrina, a larger, regional disaster, likewise precipitated a national military response by all the armed services...
...Perhaps even scarier than a hostile government in Tehran armed with weapons of mass destruction is the prospect of the chaotic implosion of that government...
...As the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review emphasized, these might occur in response to nuclear proliferation, either to preempt the use of nuclear weapons, to respond to their use, or to attempt to prevent their further spread in the event of the collapse of a nuclear state...
...Army units occupied on our borders...
...Thus, the prime directive for U.S...
...National forces have been employed in internal emergencies countless times: from enforcing desegregation to securing the streets of Los Angeles or Washington during riots...
...The right solution is not to deprive the Marines of the people—or the other resources—they need, but rather to restore the Army to sufficient strength to carry a larger load in the years to come...
...ground forces...
...We do not need a draft, and indeed it would be criminal to send a hastily trained, short-service, conscript force to patrol the streets of Falluja or the hills of Helmand province...
...The "small wars" of the 21st century are conducted with modern technologies, to be sure—employed by the enemy as well as by us—but our ability to exploit a "revolution in military affairs" is not as expected...
...In simple terms, the task is to restore the Army and Marine Corps to the manpower levels at the end of the Cold War...
...As a political matter and as a strategic impulse, this is long overdue...
...And the conflict in Iraq is redefining the jihadists' priorities: They see themselves as engaged in a struggle against the Shiite "apostates" and—according to extremist propaganda—their Iranian Shiite masters...
...For example, a recent Congressional Budget Office study of the administration's expansion plans puts the annual increase at $14 billion by the time the Gates Plan is complete...
...Even in relatively benign scenarios, where some elements in the country or region of operations will allow or assist U.S...
...Perhaps a better methodology, if still crude, is to use the Army's estimate of the cost of the "doctrinal" current force—that is, the force as it would be if it had all the right equipment, staffing, and resources—and do a proportional calculation...
...This must be a factor not only in structuring the U.S...
...To win, we must be there...
...That's a good thing in and of itself, and actually would make the Corps larger than it was at the end of the Cold War...
...the Marines rely less directly on their reserves...
...ground forces at home...
...As the report of the 9/11 Commission concluded, a primary task for American strategy is to prevent these regions from either providing sanctuary to terrorist groups or becoming their recruiting grounds...
...land forces will help...
...Hezbollah leaders and Lebanese village militias proved far more committed to the fight than the Arab armies of 1967 or 1973: Revolutionary Islam is a motivator far more potent than old pan-Arab nationalism or Baath-style socialism...
...The new posture in Iraq creates small-unit outposts to better defend the populace and suppress the insurgents, but equally creates a greater number of targets for insurgent attacks...
...The Bush administration's plans for expansion, outlined by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January, do little to solve the basic problem...
...Active Marine strength is 180,000...
...The ambiguities of irregular warfare require a high level of small-unit discipline...
...And there looms the sobering prospect of a still larger catastrophe, in the form of an attack on the United States employing weapons of mass destruction...
...Indeed, U.S...
...The idea that we can simply fight the way we would prefer to fight—rapidly, decisively, and from a distance—is no longer tenable...
...ground forces have been here before: In the 1950s, the Army developed what it called "the Pentomic division" structure...
...General John Abizaid, recently retired as chief of U.S...
...Army to sustain the demands of a new era will require as much thought as money...
...The new partnerships resemble the military portions of the all-agency "country teams" in Southeast Asia during the Cold War more than they do, for example, the successful-but-transitory combined campaign against the Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the Philippines...
...Mitt Romney thinks 100,000 is a better number...
...But although the Arabian heartland is the central front, The Long War is already being waged on other fronts...
...The Marines number of 202,000 is not wrong, but the Army number of 547,000 is wrong in a way that will have consequences for the entire force...
...Thus in Iraq, Marine rotations are seven months while Army rotations have been extended to 15 months...
...An American withdrawal from Afghanistan, already hinted at by the Bush administration's pass-the-buck-to-NATO policy, would not only relieve pressure on Osama bin Laden but also exacerbate all the worst habits and stoke the strategic fears of the Pakistani army and governing elites...
...the front-line relief efforts following Hurricane Andrew in 1992 were a partnership between the state of Florida and the 10th Mountain Division from upstate New York...
...Because the Army and Marine Corps are so consumed by the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan rota-tions—either deployed, recovering from deployment, or preparing for the next deployment—there is precious little land-force capacity immediately available for these day-to-day tasks...
...they avoid them, except in ambushes...
...In sum, a cautionary tale for U.S...
...For them not to trigger a nuclear-fueled wild fire, the United States must stay engaged in the region, "onshore," with sizable land forces...
...But no good deed goes unpunished: By breaking procurement paradigms, the Future Combat System has run afoul of the green-eyeshade crowd in the Pentagon, in the Office of Management and Budget, and in the Congressional Budget Office...
...Without a broader understanding of the missions for U.S...
...garrison there trimmed to a minimum, any crisis or actual war—especially given North Korean nuclear capabilities—would call for a surge in U.S...
...Meanwhile, Iraqi government forces are exponentially more effective in partnership with American forces than on their own, and even the gung-ho Afghan National Army relies heavily on U.S...
...The transformational trend has been to maximize firepower while minimizing manpower, all on the presumption that the enemy would be transparent...
...At the other end of the spectrum lies the changing nature of the traditional "shaping" or "engagement" mission...
...We are embroiled in a Long War without an opt-out option, whether we like it or not...
...The danger is, as Democratic senator Carl Levin has explained, that we will create "a larger version of a less-ready force...
...bin Laden and Zawahiri no longer direct the forces they helped set in motion...
...This does not at all mean that Marines are shirking their load, but it does reflect the fact that they are trained with a very different mission in mind...
...In this case, too, the fundamental problem is to face up to the true nature and extent of the conflict...
...Finally, the emerging nature of land warfare raises new questions about the efficacy of projecting land power from the sea...
...land forces, a number of additional dangers must be considered when determining the size and structure of the Army and Marine Corps...
...Recently retired Army chief of staff Gen...
...But, alas, this was not the end of the story...
...This "total land force" of about 800,000 has been strained to its limits to sustain the demands of ongoing operations...
...Simply put, the U.S...
...Barack Obama agrees, and even the New York Times has editorialized that "larger ground forces are an absolute necessity for the sort of battles that America is likely to fight during the coming decades...
...Sen...
...the Corps is structured around its ship cycle...
...Finally, the United States has long performed a host of global "shaping" and "engagement" missions...
...Of particular concern are regions where religious practice, traditional culture, and political habits are inhospitable to the austere precepts of the Islamist revolutionaries...
...Again, the methodology is far from precise, but absent a better one, it serves as a benchmark...
...land forces will often be their mere presence...
...Regimes of faith are poised to sweep aside the brittle and all-too-earthly regimes of the old order...
...This larger war is being fought with less and less regard for the Iraqis themselves...
...Rumsfeld's vision of "defense transformation" was a pumped-up version of no-contact war...
...While primary responsibility for the land defense of South Korea has been assumed by the Korean army, with the U.S...
...ground forces to reduce their vulnerability to the tactical nuclear weapons then being deployed in Soviet formations in Eastern Europe...
...At least three other qualities are essential for U.S...
...The question is not whether we can afford sufficient land forces, but whether we will choose to have them...
...It is a conflict precipitated by the slow collapse of the ancien regime: the monarchs, autocrats, outright tyrants, and petty dictators whose legitimacy is gradually but inexorably being eroded...
...Even at a faster pace of expansion such growth could well require the better part of a decade...
...land forces, but there is almost no agreement on how to employ them...
...When a land campaign was hastily initiated to attack Hezbollah formations and positions in southern Lebanon, the Israeli army was poorly prepared, either for the level of resistance encountered or for the complexity of the terrain and the quality of the defenses...
...War, it seems, is not the same as battle...
...Often they are simply brief exercises, but the trend is toward longer missions involving land forces...
...The Army's force management and comptroller staffs estimate that the Army has "skipped" about $100 billion in new gear over the past decade...
...But the goal is not to recover the past so much as to adapt to the present...
...The force is not broken, but its institutional basis is cracking...
...For five years, activated reservists and National Guardsmen have been providing 15 percent to 20 percent of U.S...
...Even were the Sunni insurgency defeated, there would remain the need to defend our ally, the government in Baghdad, from external dangers...
...But the larger project of rebuilding the Marines and, especially, the U.S...
...Peter Schoo-maker, in his final congressional testimony, told the Senate that he had recommended a larger increase and a faster schedule, but that Gates rebuffed him...
...Future ground force planning should reflect this longterm effort...
...If the Pentagon's transformation model was geared for rapid, decisive operations, our post-9/11 experience tells us there will be no one-battle war...
...The attacks of September 11 brought a new focus to this traditional mission...
...The Defense Department is wrestling with the force-planning implications of this longterm, partner-building concept, but initial assessments suggest that there are more than a dozen critical states where U.S...
...Further, the Army has done a terrible job of explaining the value of this project in the current combat environment, while resisting the obvious need to move rapidly to adapt to a changing battlefield...
...Given the number and variety of missions and the emerging nature of land war, it is apparent that U.S...
...If the number and duration of operations since 9/11 has been far from our initial assumptions, the nature of these wars was also unanticipated...
...In these regions, the efforts of the Pentagon to solidify alliances and "build partnership capacity" have led to expanded military deployments...
...And if their enemies were tougher, the Israelis were weaker precisely where in the past their advantages had been greatest...
...in Iraq and Afghanistan they need to be with the infantry in their combat outposts, not detached in the larger forward operating bases...
...So far, and luckily, attempts to overrun these outposts have failed, but the enemy well understands the potential political value of exploiting our tactical exposure...
...These range across all the armed services...
...forces would sally forth from and quickly return to their home bases, the future is not only one of forward-deployed forces but is becoming one where forces are forward-stationed...
...Central Command, often described JTF-HOA as a model for success in The Long War...
...disengagement—or "redeployment," to use the term favored by House Democratic leaders—from this central front...
...The Long War is nothing less than a struggle for political power across the Islamic world, though most particularly in the Arabian heartland...
...To properly Tom Donnelly is resident fellow in defense and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute...
...But equally, the al Qaeda revolutionaries will not soon give up the struggle...
...The unstated assumption was that the strategic goal was to contain Soviet aggression...
...We began the fight with the land force we had, but now we must build the land force we need...
...Hamstrung in recent years between irregular-warfare missions on the Palestinian front and the challenges of developing the means to strike at Iranian nuclear targets, the Israel Defense Forces had lost their edge in large-unit, conventional land warfare...
...At the same time, the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan—that is, the central fights on the central fronts—are nothing if not extended land campaigns...
...It is their strategy to spark a civil war within Islam, and their core tactic is the practice of terrorism on a global scale...
...Army and Marine Corps in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has been mixed, although the quality of tactical leadership has surpassed the quality of generalship...
...If we accept the necessity for direct military engagement on at least these two fronts, there is also a need to synchronize an "indirect approach" to other parts of the Islamic world...
...But it is only a starting point...
...Arguably, the principal deterrent to action against Iran is not the fear of missiles and warheads but the very real danger of terror attacks on Americans and our allies...
...We have asked our military leaders not only to fight an unexpected kind of war, but also to make decisions far outside the scope of their training: to act as mayors of cities, to supervise public works projects, to reform local politics, even to conduct diplomacy...
...the possibility of terrorist attack rightly remains a prime concern...
...It is a fight we cannot afford to lose, and a fight that must be won on land...
...The alternative is a liberal and democratic revolution in the name of free people...
...The Gates Plan would increase the size of the regular Army to 547,000...
...The Gates Plan is more generous to the Marines: an increase to 202,000...
...And, as the "surges" in Iraq and Afghanistan make clear, there has been a long-neglected need for larger deployments...
...ground forces: We should expect that our enemies and potential adversaries will try to mimic or adapt Hezbollah's successes...
...To operate successfully on inherently opaque battlefields, field units must be robust...
...I am not aware of a similar "doctrinal" cost estimate for the Marines, but it's a reasonable assumption that the gap between ends and means is similar...
...Even if other agencies of the U.S...
...Most notoriously, the Army has been slow to replace the Humvee—the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle—never meant to function as a combat vehicle and vulnerable to insurgent attacks and "improvised explosive devices...
...It cannot be won from a distance...
...But it soon became clear that, while sound in theory, the idea was unworkable in practice...
...It is not only a wiser way to prosecute the long-duration missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it would release a larger portion of the Marine Corps to do those missions for which it is uniquely suited...
...In particular, the outsourcing of ground force fire support to aircraft is a "transformational" decision that should perhaps be reevaluated...
...The days when the United States could stand safely "over the horizon," empowering the local regimes in a quest for "stability," supplying naval and airpower as needed, have passed...
...Islamist revolutionaries—initially Persian Shi-ites but now, and far more dangerously, radical Sunnis like Osama bin Laden—have laid claim to these weak and derelict states in the name of Allah...
...Useful or "actionable" intelligence is fleeting, more often the product of the persistent presence of soldiers and Marines in neighborhoods than of satellite sensors...
...Rudy Giuliani wants to enlarge the Army by about 70,000 from its current strength of 510,000 active-duty soldiers...
...The first mission is the defense of the American homeland...
...Announcing the Iraq "surge," the president allowed as how he was "inclined to believe that we need to increase the permanent size of both the United States Army and United States Marines...
...And this was actually quite true: We should recall how surprisingly successful the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were...
...The Rumsfeld "transformation" project, premised on the assumption that victory would be secured by the precise application of firepower, has collapsed...
...Moreover, we can see multiple missions for land forces, each crucial to the success of American strategy...
...The Pentagon, to its credit, highlighted this issue in the 2006 defense review, but only hinted at the immensity of the tactical, operational, and strategic challenges...
...And finally, the land forces need to be genuinely expansible...
...The strategic stakes are immense: The Long War is the central conflict of the 21st century...
...Moreover, many of these countries are important U.S...
...Many of these internal tasks are best done by the Army National Guard...
...While the many commitments of The Long War will be the main preoccupation of the active-duty U.S...
...forces are present, and bad things happen most often when they are not...
...That's a precious asset, but not a basis for force planning...
...increased investments would be squandered absent accelerated equipment modernization...
...as we go forward in The Long War, the ratio is one in four...
...And so our forces must be better educated as well as trained...
...John McCain is working with his advisers to formulate his answer, but he might well trump his rivals...
...George Casey revealed that he, too, wanted a faster timetable, directing his staff to "tell me what it would take to get it done faster...
...It's also a measure of the inadequacy of the current baseline budget: For 2007, before supplementals, the formal Army budget was $112 billion...
...And in late April new Army chief Gen...
...what is the mission...
...The conflicts we face are more like the frontier fighting of the 19th century—in the American West but also in the far-flung outposts of the British Empire—than the epic clashes of European armies in the 20th century...
...help...
...But the experiences of the Bush years ought to have driven these fantasies from our minds...
...Former Army chief of staff Gen...
...During the Cold War, the classic question for defense planners was, How much is enough...
...Yet even more profoundly, we must rebuild the institutional base of the services...
...As a result, ground force modernization has lagged far behind, while the increased pace of operations and unexpected combat losses have depleted the fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and gear of all sorts...
...Now the service has confessed it needs about $20 billion worth of so-called Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and an angry and confused House of Representatives has whacked $860 million out of the 2008 request for the Future Combat System project to help pay for them...
...forces in Afghanistan is likewise an expression of American strategic priorities...
...To paraphrase Rumsfeld, we are still at war with the land forces we began with, while the demands of the mission—the multiple missions—have risen sharply...
...Despite these widely varied assignments and the potential for catastrophe, the defense of the American homeland is a relative bargain...
...Some of this makes sense: The need for small-unit air defenses, for example, is not what it was when we confronted the Soviet hordes...
...the best that can be said is that it might lighten the burden on the reserves, but the ability to sustain a surge level of effort would be very much in doubt...
...Hillary Clinton may be trying to make her fellow Democrats forget her vote to go to war in Iraq, but she insists that "it is past time to increase the end-strength of the Army and Marines...
...This is an undeniable lesson of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...And with Donald Rumsfeld at last departed from the Pentagon, even President Bush has opened his mind...
...Again, airpower and strike warfare did not deliver the promised results...
...Improved training and real education mean time, people, and money...
...The sizable supplemental appropriations of the past two years are helping to reset the ground forces, but not nearly enough to restore the necessary technological edge...
...The Gates Plan does not appear to reflect a fully considered, more holistic approach to sizing U.S...
...On the other hand, the need for intelligence capacity and military policemen has grown rapidly...
...The effort to build more lasting partnerships or alliances with frontline states and their militaries as part of a Long War strategy asks more of the U.S...
...And it's a job that will fall mostly to our next president...
...The Army We Need We can't fight The Long War with the forces we have By Tom Donnelly In wartime Washington there is but one point of bipartisan agreement: The land forces of the United States are too small...
...ability and willingness to project power abroad is filtered through a new, post-9/11 prism...
...If there is a single "metric" of progress in those irregular wars, it is this: Good things happen most often when U.S...
...There is more: American strategists have for centuries understood the Caribbean Basin to be an integral part of our "homeland...
...ground forces...
...Either one could potentially call for an even larger and more extended American presence on the ground...
...Hugo Chavez seems mostly a buffoon, but Venezuela supplies about one-sixth of our oil imports...
...Pundits barely had a chance to explain that Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires before the Taliban and al Qaeda forces were decimated by the creative use of intelligence operatives, special operations forces, and airpower...
...And yet $200 billion is little more than one percent of America's annual gross domestic product...
...Here's a useful point of reference: At the end of the Cold War, one in five American ground forces was a Marine...
...So if the cost of sustaining a force with an active component of 510,000 is, as estimated by the Army, $138 billion per year in 2008 dollars, then an Army half again as large is likely to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 billion per year...
...Also, the pace of the Gates Plan is slow: The expansion timetable stretches to 2012...
...Nor can there be a neat U.S...
...Eric Shinseki responded by proposing the Future Combat System project, an innovative attempt to synchronize all Army modernization over a period of decades while introducing information technologies to "network" the force...
...military, but also in planning operations abroad...
...This is a question we have been reluctant to face...
...Irregular war in general and our Long War in particular go far toward eradicating the distinction between front line and home front, between the tactical and the political, for both our enemies and ourselves...
...What's more, Hezbollah had newly effective weaponry and an unprecedented level of tactical sophistication in addition to surprising cohesion...
...land forces need not only to be more numerous but also to reflect capabilities beyond simply the timely and devastating delivery of firepower...
...However, it continues and even exacerbates an imbalance in overall land forces structure in a way that makes sustained operations—those required by The Long War—more stressful...
...And these combat support specialists increasingly need to be tied closely and habitually to the maneuver units they serve...
...the costs It would also cost a lot of money...
...Central Command, our presence in the region has shifted from mostly maritime and transitory to an extended engagement on land...
...The geographic centrality of Afghanistan—it borders on Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and even briefly China—makes it strategically essential...
...oil imports, or the Philippines, until recently the host of major U.S...
...The experience of the past five years has at least taught us how much is not enough...
...And supposedly "transnational" phenomena—population flows and the international narcotics trade—keep significant U.S...
...But these are not the budgetary follies of the late Cold War years...
...Modern technologies might overcome a number of problems, but many of the difficulties of maneuvering and, particularly, massing forces would remain...
...Now, the costs are more immediate, paid not in dollars but in the currency of lives and the danger of defeat...
...military than conventional theater security cooperation plans, which are often centered on episodic exercises rather than the day in, day out building of local capacity and institutions...
...This quality has been almost lost by the decision-by-default to fight The Long War with too small a force...
...On the Republican side, the leading candidates are straining to one-up each other on the issue...
...land forces in a timely fashion after the 9/11 attacks has left the Army and Marine Corps dangerously brittle...
...The Israeli experience in Lebanon in 2006 serves as a wake-up call...
...Nor can we confidently retreat to an "offshore" balancing of local potentates...
...they are no longer a strategic reserve, a hedge against unforeseen contingencies, but an operational reserve, as consumed in their own fashion by the rotational demands of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Long War efforts as the regular force is...
...Even though the Kosovo air campaign by itself did not stop the Serbs' ethnic cleansing—it took British prime minister Tony Blair's threat to deploy ground forces, along with pressure from the Russians, to induce Slobodan Milosevic's change of heart—the "no-contact war" in Kosovo perversely bolstered the position of airpower enthusiasts in the Pentagon...
...the Sunni sheikhs in Anbar province and now a collection of "nationalist" insurgent groups want to separate themselves from al Qaeda in Iraq...
...The attitude of the Clinton administration during the Balkan conflicts was, essentially, We don't do land wars...
...land, air, and naval forces...
...The unfortunate fact is that much of the military transformation of the past decade has gone to purchase equipment of doubtful utility in The Long War...
...Chastised for clinging to Cold War heavy-weapons programs and resisting the program of transformation, the service suffered the two largest program cuts of the Rumsfeld years with the termination of the Crusader howitzer and Comanche helicopter...
...A further indication of the Pentagon's rising interest in the Islamic rim countries is the carving of the new U.S...
...Perhaps the best example is "Joint Task Force— Horn of Africa," established in Djibouti in 2002, with an average strength of 1,500 land troops and a naval force about one-third that size...
...Not the least of these is Iran, on the road to becoming a nuclear power...
...Marine Corps is built first and foremost around the concept of six-month rotations in amphibious units capable of independent operations for about 30 days...
...And the key to sustainability is the quality of the people in the force: Now, more than ever, there is a need for an Army and Marine Corps built around a substantial core of long-service professionals...
...often, holding fire is the right, but agonizingly difficult, choice...
...And so the strategic prospects for employing conventional forces of all kinds, including even the most elite and capable land forces, in a nuclear environment would present a U.S...
...In the three decades since the creation of U.S...
...government begin to assume some of these burdens, many will continue to devolve to men and women in uniform...
...Technology can boost the effectiveness of the individual soldier and Marine, even in counterinsurgency operations, but these remain manpower-intensive missions...
...ground forces, Pentagon planners won't know how much is enough or even what kind of forces are needed...
...size and shape American land forces—so that the Marine Corps and the Army complement each other—we must answer five questions...
...The basic concept was to disperse U.S...
...The performance of the U.S...
...In a number of critical missions, the value of sea-based land forces is undeniable and arguably even greater than it has been for some time—in Southeast Asia and West Africa, for example...
...Though it hasn't received the press attention of the Iraq surge, the current surge of U.S...
...To again draw a contrast with the Pentagon's past "transformational" ideal of deploy-fight-recover, where U.S...
...In sum, the Bush administration's failure to expand, refit, and restructure U.S...
...Thus the most important step in fixing what's wrong with our land forces is to build a regular Army capable of conducting The Long War at a reasonable pace of deployments, without so completely engaging its own reserve components or the Marine Corps...
...Yet an altogether more challenging battlefield environment will exist wherever operations are conducted under a nuclear shadow...
...Again, the Army's dilemma is the most apparent...
...Likewise, in contingency operations, the flexibility and combined-arms punch of Marine expeditionary units cannot be matched by special operations forces or Army airborne units...
...Out of this conflict will come a new political order, but that can't happen until the fighting is over...
...Further, even the ability to dominate more conventional battlefields should not be taken for granted...
...we have fought our wars on the cheap...
...president with less-than-appetizing options...
...It is mostly the conduct of "The Long War"—a more useful and accurate term than "Global War on Terror"— that will determine the size and shape of U.S...
...The real value the Marines have added in both cases is not their sea basing but their mental flexibility...
...We cannot be indifferent to the outcome of this struggle...
...It may be that, with effort and investment, new options can be created, but they must be regarded as a future goal rather than a present reality...
...The sporadic nature of the fighting demands that captains, lieutenants, and NCOs make correct judgments and maintain control of their units in chaotic circumstances...
...This was supposedly the preferred U.S...
...forces should be engaged in this fashion, denying sanctuary to terrorists and helping to buttress the legitimacy of governments, especially in struggling democracies...
...The decisive battles are proving to be highly irregular, and the crucial battlefields—the minds as well as the cities, villages, and wastes of Iraq and Afghanistan—to be highly opaque...
...Obviously, they must learn new languages and understand diverse cultures, but they must also acquire a more sophisticated strategic and political understanding: The acts and decisions of junior officers and noncommissioned officers can quite easily have strategic consequences, especially when magnified by the world media...
...Strategically, al Qaeda in Iraq now matters more than al Qaeda in Waziristan...
...European Command...
...the world's industrial economies depend upon the region's energy resources, and the region's political troubles embroil the world's great powers, including the rising People's Republic of China...
...Paradoxically, this diminishes the value of unique formations like the Marines or Army airborne or air mobile units by treating them simply as more cogs in the force-generation machine...
...Africa Command—a full-blown, four-star theater command— out of U.S...
...strategic interests quite on their own—Nigeria, for instance, now the source of roughly 11 percent of U.S...
...posture—now an Excalibur-like ideal for those unhappy with the war in Iraq—but it has been overtaken by events...
...They have provided critical command and control capabilities and manpower during floods, forest fires, and storms...
...Land force structures, in particular, have been relentlessly trimmed over the last decade...
...The Arabian heartland—the region centered on Mecca and Medina but including Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq, which al Qaeda theorist Ayman al Zawa-hiri famously described in his directive to the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi as essential to the jihadists' project—is unquestionably the central front of The Long War...
...The attacks of 9/11 created a new reality: The American homeland is directly at risk...
...Insurgents do not seek direct confrontations with U.S...
...Since the death of our superpower doppelganger, the question for the Pentagon has been, What do you want us to do...
...But in fact there has long been a large role for U.S...
...Many of the current estimates of the cost of expansion exclude these equipment costs...
...A rough estimate would mean an active force of approximately 750,000 soldiers, still a smaller Army than at the end of the Cold War but an expansion roughly five times that envisioned by the Bush administration...
...These include a wide range of exercises, show-the-flag missions, and so on...
...land forces is neither deployability, nor mobility, nor lethality, but sustain-ability...
...Even more uncertain would be a postwar or even post-reunification scenario, whether the result of an unanticipated and peaceful development or a catastrophe...
...In the near term, given the stresses of dual surges in Iraq and Afghanistan and the deleterious effects of more than a decade of neglect, almost any plan to expand U.S...
...And so the most valuable contribution of U.S...
...The 1989 invasion of Panama was nothing if not a reaffirmation of the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, and there is no reason to believe that our security concerns in our own region will diminish...
...The spirit of soldiers and Marines is undiminished, and their performance in battle has been superb...
...To help the Nigerians or the Indonesians become a full-fledged partner in rolling back the influence of Islamic revolutionaries demands not simply tactical competence or interoperability, but the reorientation of their armies away from their internal missions, which often are one of the few tangible expressions of national sovereignty...
...Beyond Korea, the prospects for unforeseen contingencies are undiminished...
...In a war we are struggling to understand, war colleges are not overhead expenses...
...Army strength...
...The war in Afghanistan is a contest over a key "middle ground," where our goal is not simply to continue to suppress the Taliban and al Qaeda cells, but to stabilize and welcome a second ally—an ally eager to establish a long-term strategic partnership with the United States and the West...
...Fully 40 percent of this force is deployed abroad...
...The attacks of 9/11 confused the picture: There may be a bipartisan consensus on the need to expand U.S...
...And their equipment stocks have been looted in even greater measure...
...A robust force can be a more flexible force, but what transforms numbers into results is the quality of leadership...
...the Bush administration can only begin the process...
...The faith of Muhammad was spread by trade as well as conquest, and from West Africa to Southeast Asia it has produced local manifestations that reflect indigenous society as well as the teachings of the Koran...
...The defense transformation movement was premised on the idea that battlefields would be transparent, and that when enemy forces massed—or even were detected in small formations or in headquarters—they could be struck swiftly, devastatingly, and from half a world away...
...And, Castro and Chavez notwithstanding, the Americas remain generally peaceful and fairly well governed...
...At the same time, these small units must maintain the capability to respond, and respond rapidly, with devastating firepower...
...Through the post-9/11 years, the number of soldiers in the active-duty Army—regulars plus activated reservists—has hovered between 600,000 and 625,000...
...forces or where initial strikes have been successful, the tyrannies of time and distance present enormous hurdles...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 36
