The strategic rationale for increasing military

Frank Hoffman, national security consultant, points out the strategic rationale for increasing our military.

Hoffman worries that these reasons for increasing a larger military force have not been adequately explained to either Congress or the American people, and that pressures for other domestic programs may squeeze out sustaining larger forces.

The rationale for increasing military forces goes beyond meeting immediate needs in Iraq, as the pipeline for presently planned increased forces will extend to 2012.

Indeed:

The war on terror is another potential rationale. Here again, however, exactly what kinds of capabilities are we adding to our protracted struggle against Islamic extremism? If we were adding 9,200 “foot soldiers” to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, it might help. If we were bulking up our badly implemented strategic communications and public diplomacy programs with a new U.S. Information Agency, it might help. If we were using the military manpower to establish standing interagency task forces, an Army Training and Advisory Brigade, or new legions of active duty civil affairs and psychological operations professionals and intelligence specialists it might help.

But, one strategic rationale is that the civilian agencies exhibit no enthusiasm for fulfilling their role. So, one strategic reason for increasing military forces is these missions:

If the U.S. State Department and other agencies have no stomach for “armed civil affairs” or what might be called “contested state building” then the land forces need to have the resources to fulfill these new governance, advisory and training tasks.

Hoffman adds these reasons for increasing military forces:

* Reverse the Slow Manpower Erosion. Offset a decade of incremental reductions caused by rising personnel costs. The Services have been under significant pressure over the last few years to reduce manpower levels to pay for sharply higher recruiting, retention, and health care costs.

* Bury Our Technological Hubris. Offset a decade of illusions about future warfare. Over the past decade a number of speculative concepts about the changing nature of warfare have worked against maintaining a sufficient ground force. These include Defense planning guidance predicated upon very short wars, a prejudice for technology over “boots on the ground” and an irrational exuberance about the productivity enhancements posed by the supposed wonders of information technology.

* Prepare for the 21st Century, to better posture the Pentagon for the changing character of anticipated wars and contingencies, including the prospects of what the CIA calls the coming “Perfect Storm” of ethnic and religiously motivated conflicts. The historical patterns of such conflicts suggest that these will be protracted and manpower intensive, as we’ve seen in the last few years.

* Take Pressure off National Guard. We must reduce the need to tap into the National Guard so heavily. The National Guard has been incredibly responsive to a range of contingencies since 9/11, including support to that domestic crisis, Katrina, enhanced border security tasks, supporting operations in Afghanistan, and major deployments to Iraq. This is a well we have tapped into far too often, as a buffer against bad strategic decisions in Washington. The families of our Guard and Reserve component have been asked to pay too high a bill. Likewise, state governors have been left short of units and assets to meet their emergency and homeland security needs.

Under present circumstances and force levels, Korea and Iran believe the U.S. neither has the capacity nor the stomach for armed intervention. Our threats ring fairly hollow to their ears, and to other despots or terrorists, which increases the chances of either their calculation or miscalculation drawing the U.S. into otherwise avoidable armed conflict or defeats by default.

If Congress were serious about avoiding another Iraq, it wouldn’t be sending signals of weakness and withdrawal but, instead, getting to serious work examining the needs for a larger military, even larger than currently proposed, and providing the needed support and after-action capacity to the civilian agencies.