Quote Originally Posted by Stevely View Post
How did we ever come to this? I know there are plenty of explanations, but it's one of those things that despite all that, and despite that I understand at some level (at least I think I do) at least some of those explanations, I can't understand, down in my gut, how it is that we came to this sorry impasse.

We reduced the size of the Army to a ridiculously small number in vain hopes of a "peace dividend" in the 90s, smoked Rummy's dope and thought we could make up for numbers with gizmos, and then with nothing left but a rump Army to fight two major conflicts simultaneously, we frittered away (are frittering away) the Army's future, we're eating its seed corn. I get that.

What I don't get down in my gut is how can it be that it seems no longer possible to increase the size of the Army back to, say, what it was in the first Gulf War? The Army is half the size it was when I was on active duty, yet it seems to me, we're spending even more money than we did then, and merely to increase the force 60k or so seems an impossible task. Something just doesn't add up. We spend incredible sums, but our ROI in terms of real military power seems to get less with every passing year.

A cynic might say that we have indeed undergone Transformation, but we have transformed ourselves into a force increasingly incapable of sustained combat.
Well, I think it got to this firstly because the Army was pushed too far for too long, and now it's stuck facing long-term institutional damage that's too late in the day to fix, and of course in the short-term it, and for the same reason, it can't hold on to its own people anymore - they're burned out or their families are. And this same situation extends to the USMC, the British Army, the Royal Marines, and the Canadian Army. They've all been Red-lined for so long that the machine is now breaking down, for real.

The other problem is that, simply, those who wanted to join the military, already have done so, and the rest by and large aren't really interested; they're interested in themselves, not so much their country. So when the people that you can attract to the military are already leaving, there's not very many willing people to replace them, except for some people who don't think that they have anywhere else to go.

Things have gone back to the old days, where there is this strong tendency in English-speaking societies to look at the military and consider them as just a bunch of people who can't make it in civilian life. Having driven away so many of our own who were willing and able over the past several years, we're stuck with dropping standards to try to scrape up those who we ordinarily would not want and would not accept. And that just reinforces those old views of the military as a dumping-ground of society's ne'er-do-wells.

The final reason for all this goes back to that famous quote from that story about Vietnam, where the one returned soldier says to his buddy beside him "It's not touching anybody." Just because Iraq and Afghanistan are constantly in the news just obscures the fact that society at home doesn't feel a thing, doesn't have to do a thing, and doesn't have to be involved one way or the other. It's the Military's War, not Society's. Society has simply opted out of the War.