There is undoubtedly waste in U.S. defense budgets, just as there is waste throughout the federal budget. So no apology need be offered for careful efforts to trim fat from the Pentagon or any area of government.
But the scope of cuts to the military which are planned by President Barack Obama are alarming and dangerous.
The active-duty U.S. Army would drop from its 2010 number of 570,000 soldiers to 490,000 by 2017. And the number of Marines would fall by 20,000 -- from 202,000 down to 182,000.
While administration officials are downplaying the impact of those cuts on our armed forces' ability to defend America, Gen. Raymond Odierno, chief of staff of the Army, is much less optimistic.
The Army would shrink from 45 combat brigades to only 32, though each remaining brigade would grow slightly by the addition of an extra battalion -- the size of which is generally 600 to 800 soldiers. Odierno warned that the Army will lose its capacity to fight two wars simultaneously with the cuts that are planned.
Moreover, while pay has been rising fast for many civilian federal government positions, new pay-raise limits would be imposed on the military starting in 2015. (Our troops are scarcely getting rich as it is.)
The Obama administration says the cuts will make the military leaner and "smarter." But sheer numbers count for a lot, and foes may not "cooperate" with the fact that we can fight only one war at a time.
"America's enemies rarely come on one at a time," historian Arthur Herman noted at National Review Online. "They usually come in twos as in World War Two or even (as when North Korea threatened to heat up in 2003 when our troops were tied down in both Iraq and Afghanistan) in threes. How will a future president decide which conflict deserves the full commitment of American military resources, if he has only one roll of the dice ...?"
Good question.