“People sleep well at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” George Orwell, 1984

             It is often said, “those who do not learn the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.” Well, one would think that the United States would have learned something by now about drawing down its armed forces too fast. We did after WWI, WWII, Viet Nam, and the Cold War, and each time, we ended up needing to rebuild the military we just finished dismantling in time to deal with another crisis.

            In 1991, the United States had eighteen combat divisions ready to commit to global conflict. This was how we could amass more than 450,000 troops in the desert for Gulf War I in less than 180 days. Today, our military has almost exactly half the number of divisions it had in 1991 and is (according to the press) struggling to maintain a mere 135,000 combat troops in the field in Iraq.  Tales of third and fourth rotation deployments are common fare, as is the lament of reservists and the impact deployments have on their families.   All of this suggests a simple solution that no one wants to really talk about: maybe we need to increase the size of our military.

            The root cause of us wearing our military out, we are told, is that we are using our soldiers and sailors imprudently and too often. What amazes me is that many of the politicians making these charges are the same people who believed that they could systematically dismantle the U.S. military and suffer no ill effect.  Indeed, at the end of the Cold War we were often told of the “peace dividend.”  Ten years later, we’re learning that we let politicians take too much of our military’s strength in “dividend” and didn’t preserve enough of our “principal”---going from eighteen to ten divisions in less than a decade.  Simply put, we probably cut too many people too fast, just like we did at the end of WWI, WWII and Vietnam.

            If the critics are right, that we have over-extended our military and are asking too much of our reservists, then the next logical step would be to start rebuilding permanent standing divisions. Logic also dictates that if we are still interested in an all-volunteer military, we will actually need to start paying these people more.  Most of the folks don’t know that about 70% of the Pentagon’s budget goes to payroll. We’ve all heard of how many enlisted personnel qualify for Food Stamps because of their low pay, but look a little higher in the food chain and you find thousands of incredibly talented, highly specialized individuals working as NCOs and officers who are barely pulling down $30,000 a year AND risking their lives for their job.  

            The other solution is to reduce American commitments around the globe. For many, this solution could offer more of a “peace dividend,” money that could be spent elsewhere.  History shows that while approach works in the short term, the long-term costs of staying unprepared end up costing society more.   Throughout the 1920s, the United States disengaged from the “old man” of Europe, hoping that problems over there would not bother us on this side of the pond.   By 1940, it was painfully obvious that we too, were ill prepared for the kind of conflict Hitler and the Axis let loose on the world.   Luckily, we had almost another full year to prepare before the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor.

Total global losses for this lack of preparedness:110+ million.  Now more than 60 years in our past, World War II still holds many lessons for western civilization in the twenty-first century.  First and foremost is “be prepared.”  And that is why we, as a nation of freedom loving people, need rough men standing ready to do violence on our behalf.    

You can reach William P. McGowan at AngryEconomist@sbcglobal.net