Thanks for sharing, Dr. Metz. I liked the article a lot, and am inclined to agree the question isn't so much force size or new procurement as it is training, command structure, and mindset. When someone argues for "ten new combat brigades" as Giuliani did in his prospective foreign policy article in the last Foreign Affairs, I feel like they don't know what they're talking about. Or, perhaps more accurately, new brigades or Marine regiments would ease the strain of operational deployment tempo, but not address the underlying concerns of the mismatch, so to speak, between force capabilities and mission requirements.
Also, my personal belief is that for a myriad of reasons we won't be doing another nation-building-type intervention on the Iraq scale for some time, and the current mission there will be considerably scaled-down over the next year and a half. If that turned out to be the case, the new brigades would be a large and unneccessary expense.
I think the answer will come slowly and from the commitment of officers and men to institutionalize the lessons of our current and past conflicts and reorient themselves, their units, and even their equipment capabilities towards future missions. That doesn't require 95,000 new men or even the dismantlement of our conventional capabilities, particularly in naval and air forces.
Thanks again for a good article - you're a good read.
Matt
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