Carl,

Actually we took very few losses in the initial months, or even the initial years, of both those conflicts. You have bought into the great "we need an army" lie. The reality is that because we had an appropriately sized army neither President Wilson or Roosevelt could have committed the US on a Presidential whim no matter how much they may have wanted to. Both instead had to turn to other forms of diplomacy and engagement to shape those conflicts from afar, and then, years later once the primary combatants had blunted themselves against each other, we were able to enter on our own terms and bring those conflicts to closures that advanced American influence, but at a savings of potentially millions of American lives.

Sure, early units fared poorly as they went up against experienced units. That is to be expected. We say "train as you fight" but the reality is that you will "fight as you trained, until the enemy trains you to fight otherwise." What you identify is our failure to train properly in peace, not our failure to maintain a standing army in peace.

In 1940 or 41 General Marshall declared that 5 German Divisions landing in the US could go all the way to the Rocky Mountains unchecked. True, and completely immaterial. At that time Germany couldn't even put 5 Divisions across the English Channel, let alone across the Atlantic Ocean.

We own the global key terrain. Everyone else may want it, but they simply can't get here. At least not any faster than we could identify the threat and mobilize the militia and begin building an Army for the pending threat. This is our birthright and we squander it when we build too large of a military and sustain it in peace. We not only overburden the American taxpayers, but we relieve our allies of their own duties to properly prepare to secure themselves based upon their own geostrategic reality. Germany and France should both have much larger armies than the US. But they don't because we have enabled them to pour that money into their civilian economies instead. Same is true in the Pacific. We are being played for fools by our friends and foes alike in this regard. China does not need a large navy now any more than we did in the last 80 years of the 1800s. Our commercial fleet sailed under British protection then, and Chinese merchants sail under US protection today. Don't expect a thank you note any time soon from any of these cats, and don't expect them to return the favor when we need the help some day either.

We wage wars of choice. We do this much more because we can than because we have to. That is a fact. Sequestration is a term used to scare Americans to keep funding this machine, but in fact it might be just what we need to make America much safer than we currently do with all this military capacity to send about on these little adventures.