There "not being enough volunteers" is a pretty good metric that the President is misreading the situation.

The Congress not agreeing to raise an Army and resource the same to wage such a war is another great metric for the President.

Having a warfighting army on the books ready to fight takes those metrics out of play. This is what President's Madison and Jefferson both wrote numerous cautions about.

We need to stop seeing the post-WWII era as the norm that we measure everything else against in terms of our national security. It was a fluke and anomaly in many ways, and the containment strategy was a choice - not the only option for dealing with security challenges in that era.

Today many pundits (Form the SECDEF to Think tanks to Services to GCCs to random people with access to some media) proclaim powerful and existential threats to America. But these are either grossly exaggerated (China currently, AQ-X ever, Iran ever), or are not military missions at all (cyber attacks on US infrastructure). Similarly we propose solutions that don't work to problems that don't exist (Massive conventional Army SFA conducted by rotating BCTS that have been trained first by SF and have a HTT attached to them; or A2AD to counter China's ability to project their defensive systems a few hundred miles from their coastline).

When does this stop? When does common sense once again prevail? It is time to have a new national dialog on our true national security concerns. Someone needs to put the services back into their respective lanes. Someone needs to take this dangerous toy away from the President. Someone needs to infuse a greater sense of responsibility and backbone into the Congress. That somebody is the American people.

Equally problematic are the social programs; our approach to education; our approach to immigration and integration of new citizens; and our puritanical approach to vice-related crimes that feeds such massive illicit economies and fills countless prisons with our young men. (but this site is about the military, small wars, etc, so we'll leave others to chew on these).

When was the last MANDATORY "small war" for the US? What if we had limited Afghanistan to a punitive raid and avoided Iraq altogether? Would we be less safe than we are today?? We are drawn along by an inertia of thought and action that we seem unable (or unwilling) to break free of.