Kansas City Star September 14, 2008
Experts fear terror war draining America's military might
By Scott Canon
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – When Russian tanks bullied their way into Georgia, debate broke out about what the United States should do.
But what could America do? Can the U.S. military, so consumed with small wars against terror and insurgencies abroad, wage a big war against a sizable adversary? Those questions are drawing keen attention seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, time that has seen America preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army and Marine Corps are retooling on the fly to fight a war on terror.
Those changes come, some worry, at the expense of the capability for full-blown, army-on-army war.
Meanwhile, oil wealth has given Russia the cash it needs to rebuild the military power of Soviet days, and China's booming economy makes it a daunting adversary of the near future.
Some analysts cite the Russian excursion into Georgia as symptomatic of fading U.S. military might. Half the Army's brigades are deployed. The other half are preparing to replace them. It would take almost a year and a half to make units ready for a high-intensity fight with the Chinese or Russian military.
The Pentagon is torn. Should it fashion itself to win the fights fully occupying its forces in Iraq and Afghanistan today? Or does it need to brace for yet-unseen, large-scale wars? Struggling to find enough troops for the battles at hand, can America muster the men and women needed to also fight Cold War II? It looks increasingly daunting.
"We're in two wars now," said Owen Cote, the associate director of security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If something else happened, we'd have to pull out all the stops."
Experts say that making the American military as ready for a major confrontation as it was during the Cold War while tending to its more immediate battles would require drastic increases in defense spending. Even then, an all-volunteer military might not provide enough troops.
For the moment, the Pentagon is transforming for the country's ongoing wars. Troop training has shifted dramatically toward better handling the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Next month, U.S. Army strategists at Fort Leavenworth will reveal a doctrine for "stability operations" and reinforce how today's military is increasingly more about holding things together than it is about breaking them into bits.
In the early 1990s, some intellectuals declared an "end to history" with the tumbling of the Berlin Wall. The West, capitalism, democracy and tolerance had triumphed. Cold War-like battles of ideas were the past.
Then seven years ago, as America enjoyed its so-called peace dividend – money saved from not girding against the Soviet menace – Muslim extremists flew into New York skyscrapers as if to prove that history was far from over.
The resulting war on terror seemed to make generals sound anachronistic when they spoke of conventional warfare – where countries would pit bombers against air defenses, submarines against battleships, tanks against tanks.
Several years into that fight, new concerns arose: Was the new counterinsurgency emphasis sucking away readiness for a big fight? Could the Pentagon find a working balance?
"Other than settling the two wars we're already in, this might be the most difficult defense question the new administration faces," said Hans Binnendijk, the director of the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University.
Finding military manpower is getting tougher all the time. Congress has authorized adding 92,000 ground troops to the Army and Marine Corps over the next five years. That will cost the Army alone about $70 billion. (That comes atop $13 billion a year to replace equipment that existing troops lose in combat.)
Many suggest simply preparing for big wars and adjusting to smaller jobs as they pop up. After the big battlefield conflict that sped U.S. troops to Baghdad in 2003, analysts note, the same military eventually modified itself for counterinsurgency.
"You need to have that intimidating force to dissuade the other guy from even getting in the fight," said John Pike, defense analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org. "Fighting terrorism and doing stability operations is just fine, but that's not what you hang your military on. You need to be ready for war."
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