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. 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. The Gates Plan does not appear to reflect a fully considered, more holistic approach to sizing U.S. land forces. 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. 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 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. 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. Even at a faster pace of expansion such growth could well require the better part of a decade.
The Costs
It would also cost a lot of money. 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. 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. 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. 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 Army's force management and comptroller staffs estimate that the Army has "skipped" about $100 billion in new gear over the past decade. The danger is, as Democratic senator Carl Levin has explained, that we will create "a larger version of a less-ready force." Any expansion needs to be balanced with equal equipment modernization.
Many of the current estimates of the cost of expansion exclude these equipment costs. 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. 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. 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. Again, the methodology is far from precise, but absent a better one, it serves as a benchmark. It's also a measure of the inadequacy of the current baseline budget: For 2007, before supplementals, the formal Army budget was $112 billion. 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.
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