Gutting The Army -The Obama Administration’s Warped Priorities

Arnold Ahlert / Canada Free Press

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recommended reducing size of the U.S. Army to its lowest level since before the nation’s entry into WWII.

“We must now adapt, innovate, and make difficult decisions to ensure that our military remains ready and capable—maintaining its technological edge over all potential adversaries,” Hagel said during a Pentagon news conference. Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, illuminated the administration’s dubious priorities. President Obama and Hagel are trying to “solve our financial problems on the backs of our military—and that can’t be done,” he explained.

The reductions are stark. The Army had already been tasked with reducing troop numbers from a wartime high of 570,000 to 490,000. Hagel proposes bringing that number down to the either 450,000 or 440,000. He defended those cuts, claiming they will allow more money to be spent on “technological superiority,” “cyber resources,” and Special Operations forces.

Retired Gen. Jack Keane contended the reductions would “cut into the bone and the capabilities of the Army,” even as he ridiculed the thinking behind them. “The assumption that’s being made in the Pentagon, and it’s almost laughable if it wasn’t so serious, is they don’t believe the United States will involve itself in a ground war of any consequence again,” he explained. “The fact of the matter is those assumptions have been made after World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War, and every single time they have been proven wrong. Here we are making that same assumption again. The Army is taking a much more severe cut, and the numbers of the Army are going down to pre-World War II numbers, which, on the surface of it, is irresponsible. Anybody looking at that knows it is far too much.”

Actually, they don’t. The Pentagon, which has long believed that America should be capable of fighting two ground wars simultaneously, as we did in Asia and Europe during WWII, and Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, has seemingly abandoned that idea. According to the New York Times, more recent budget and strategy documents reveal that the military must be prepared to win one conflict decisively, and fight a holding operation with a second adversary until a sufficient number of forces could be redeployed to win conflict number two. “Our analysis showed that this [reduced] force would be capable of decisively defeating aggression in one major combat theater…while also defending the homeland and supporting air and naval forces engaged in another theater against an adversary,” Hagel contended.

Given America’s recent track record, one might be forgiven for wondering what constitutes winning period, much less winning decisively. President Obama and his fellow Democrats have made it clear that troop withdrawal—on a timetable and virtually irrespective of conditions on the ground—was their top priority in Iraq, and will be their top priority in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the president’s indifference towards negotiating a status of forces agreement, and his determination to leave behind an insufficient number of troops to protect the gains we made in that nation, turned victory into defeat. It is a process being repeated in Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has rejected a security pact with America unless the Taliban are included in the process, and where Obama once again wants to leave behind a far smaller contingency of troops than his military advisors recommend to maintain our gains there.

Even if we had an administration committed to winning wars, it appears they are willing to sacrifice greater numbers of Americans to do so. Officials who saw an early draft of Hagel’s announcement admit that carrying out two large-scale military operations at the same time would make success more elusive, and engender higher numbers of casualties. Just as importantly, they conceded a smaller military might give rise to increased adventurism by our adversaries. Hagel seemingly concurred. “As a consequence of large budget cuts, our future force will assume additional risk in certain areas,” he said.

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