The Army's Next Big Fight?

I don’t know if anybody who’s still in the Army ever reads this blog, but if you do, I’d be curious to get your thoughts on an article from Slate, The Army's Next Big Fight: Protecting its Own Budget from Panetta and the Pols. 

Personally, I find myself more than a little split on the issue.  On the one hand, the Army has been ridiculously over-extended these past ten years or more, and that needs to stop.  I have little doubt that some serious rest, reorganization, and planning for the future are in order if our Army is to survive and succeed in the foreseeable future.  But then again, the country is broke.  I mean, really broke.  So broke that a few more years like this will see in a potential Greek-style debt crisis, and I don’t think anybody wants that.  We’re already laying off teachers and cops left and right, and that’s bad enough, but trust me, it can still get a lot worse.

What’s difficult, I think, is that there’s no clear focus for the Army going forward.  Fighting terrorism?  I mean, as a New Yorker I’m all for it, but doing it with tanks doesn’t look like it works very well.  Frankly, fighting terrorism seems like a mission you give to the CIA and then let them task the Army for help on a case-by-case basis.  And what’s more, we might get in some place with the Army and stabilize the situation, but what we’re not doing well is then setting the conditions for success and/or withdrawal.  From the outside, the Army looks like a medical first responder.  Yeah, we can get in there and stop the bleeding and get the patient stabilized initially, but that’s only a temporary fix.  We still need to get the surgeon to come in and make permanent repairs before closing up the wound with sutures so that the patient can actually heal.  Right now, it looks like the best we’ve done is to stick on band-aids and then train replacement paramedics in how to hold them in place without actually addressing the causes of the bleeding.

I don’t say that this is the Army’s fault, but as a national security apparatus, the track record just isn’t there.  Korea?  Yeah, there’s still a Korea.  But then, we still have troops there, too.  Vietnam?  We won every battle, but the country fell anyway because the government was corrupt.  Nobody wants to die for a corrupt government.  Iraq?  Yeah, the situation has improved, but I don’t think you can make the case that it’s actually better than it would have been had we merely continued the 90’s policy of Containment.  And in any event, the Arab Spring might make the point moot.  Afghanistan?  Well, the good news is that we got the bad guy.  The bad news is that I’m not sure how much that has to do with the effort to stabilize the Karzai government, which at this point looks a lot like the old government of South Vietnam, at least in terms of efficacy and corruption.  Hell, you’ve even got Pakistan there as a modern day Laos, giving shelter to the enemy as he invades on mountainous goat trails.  If there’s any good news, it’s that we’ve at least now got a leader with the balls to bomb across the border, even if it risks the feelings of our so-called allies.

None of which answers the question of what the Army’s role is going to be after the wars end.  It seems clear that the country is headed for more engagement, but with that said, I cannot fathom that the electorate would vote for another war unless something really unexpected happens.  And maybe that’s what the Army’s role is—to be prepared for the unexpected.  But what does that look like?  And what can we afford for it to look like?

I guess my real question is this: is there an understanding in the Army that the current way of things is unsustainable, or are we committed to going the distance regardless of the country’s current realities, no matter what?