Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
Posted by major.rod



Well said and factually accurate. Bob's proposal dismisses the view of deterrence in my opinion, and while maintaining the force structure is expensive I suspect it is ultimately more cost effective than not deterring a conflict or launching into a conflict ill prepared which would not be acceptable to the American people. Bob still makes good points, but the reality concerning NG limited capabilities is ignored, and replaced with an illusionary history of Guard performance.
Well said, certainly, but only factually accurate if assessed on a very very short memory/timeline. I would encourage people to study the entire history of the US Army. To study the thinking that went into our Constitution and the debates that took place. Any arguments framed solely in the context of our Cold War and immediate post-Cold war context are incomplete and biased by that incompleteness.

Some like to make the "first battles" argument, which is equally flawed unless balanced with the far more important "last battles" context. Yes we missed 3 years of WWI and another 3 years of WWII. Yes we struggled in our initial engagements once we finally built an army around our few active and guard divisions and deployed them while a draftee Army was built. But we were the force of decision and ended both conflicts on our terms with untold numbers of lives saved. Why could we do this? We could do it because of our geostrategic strength. The same geo-strategy that validates why we need a strong navy with a very important expeditionary peacetime role for the USMC.

This does not mean NO peacetime regular army, but it does mean we can have a much smaller one than we do today. We have many tools of deterrence, and the best ones are not land forces. Did our large land army deter Saddam from taking Kuwait? No.

But our large land army has allowed a long line of presidents to commit the nation to war without the cooling off period that the national debate centered around Congress having to authorize and fund the raising of an army provides. That is what our founding fathers intended. Argue with them, not me. I agree with them and I have heard no arguments or seen any facts to suggest that things have changed today so as to render their positions moot. We fight wars more often for emotion than for interest (think how many battle Cries begin with "Remember (insert emotional defeat here)" rather than with a statement of some vital national interest. That is how Americans are hard wired. All the more reason for a cooling off period. Just like we don't let Americans buy a gun in the heat of the moment. Yet we let our presidents start wars in the heat of the moment.

Decisions made post Vietnam are interesting, but not decisive, and not even close to the real reasons why we fight our wars with citizen soldiers in America. The self-serving active army wanted to put all the logistics in the RC and keep the sexy gun-fighting commands in the regular force. It was only the massive political clout of the Guard that forced them to leave combat units in the Guard; and then the Army broke itself so that it couldn't go anywhere or do anything without having to mob the reserves. This abuses the reserves for non-warfighting missions. We need a BALANCED and properly sized regular force. Not sure if the current adversarial process we use will or can produce such an army. But step one is to get the facts and the history straight, and that means all the facts and all the history, not just the past 60-70 years.