Jets or GIs? How Best to Address the Military's Manpower Shortage

The Army You Have

In December 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a soldier why U.S. troops in Iraq were not properly equipped for their mission. Rumsfeld responded that "you have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." Rather than resolve anything, however, the secretary's explanation only begged two further and fundamental questions about the U.S. armed forces: What kind of military does the country really want? And if it does not have it, how can it get it?

In "The U.S. Military's Manpower Crisis" (July/August 2006), Frederick Kagan provides a persuasive answer to the first question but not to the second. He advocates that the U.S. military change its priorities, elevating the importance of manpower -- but he does not push for any corresponding reprioritization of the budget.

The strategic shift that Kagan advocates -- from more technology to more troops -- is too important to be left on the drawing board. Turning strategy into reality requires making tough decisions about what the military most needs and what it can do without. The Bush administration has made such a decision: faced with a choice between adding additional troops and buying the new F-22 Raptor fighter plane, it has consistently selected the F-22.

Kagan, in contrast, does not set priorities. Although he insists that "the soldiers are a better investment" than the fighter, in the end he chooses both. Given today's budgetary constraints, however, this refusal to prioritize is a recipe for making a bad status quo even worse. By choosing both, Kagan, in fact, chooses the plane.

UNMANNED

The U.S. military suffers from a glaring manpower deficiency. The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that in operations such as counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, stabilization, and peacekeeping, even the United States' impressive technology cannot substitute for soldiers. As Kagan observes, only soldiers possess the requisite combination of brainpower and weaponry to "mix with an enemy's population, identify the combatants intermingled with that population, and accomplish the critical tasks of governance and reorganization that are so essential in persuading an enemy government to surrender."

The Bush administration, however, does not share this assessment, as evidenced by its handling of the invasion of Iraq. Before the war, Rumsfeld was dismissive, even contemptuous, of warnings from senior U.S. military officials, such as former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, that securing Iraq would require a vast number of boots on the ground. The secretary and his allies contended that the war and the occupation could be managed with a relatively light and short troop deployment. This belief reflected the strategic theory underpinning Rumsfeld's military-transformation agenda, which prioritizes long-range airpower and the development of ever more technologically sophisticated equipment and weaponry over expanded ground forces.

Of course, events have not been cooperative, and the administration has been compelled to keep more than 130,000 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq for three years while refusing to offer any timetable for their redeployment. This massive troop commitment has put a serious and unsustainable strain on the U.S. military. Every available combat brigade in the active-duty army has already served in Iraq or Afghanistan at least once, and many are now in their second and third tours. The Pentagon continues to struggle to provide these troops with the weapons and equipment they require. Meanwhile, the costs of their recruitment and retention have skyrocketed. The army spent almost $500 million on selective reenlistment bonuses for active-duty service members last year, which is more than twice what it spent in 2004 and more than four times what it spent in 2003.

The overstretched state of the U.S. military is creating broader strategic problems. For the first time since Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird orchestrated the transformation of the U.S. military into an all-volunteer force under President Richard Nixon, the army's ability to credibly threaten to send large numbers of troops to fight the nation's enemies is diminishing. The United States could probably not embark on another major troop deployment today without reinstating the draft. Even sending the number of troops needed to stabilize Afghanistan would be extremely taxing and would threaten to break the all-volunteer force.

Despite this obvious manpower shortage, the Bush administration remains committed to Rumsfeld's military-transformation agenda. Neither the president's budget for 2007 nor the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review calls for expanding the number of U.S. troops. Instead, the Bush administration continues to emphasize the development and acquisition of new weapons, some of which were initially conceived of in the context of the Cold War.

ANTE UP

Kagan is well aware of these problems. But he is unwilling to make the expansion of manpower a budgetary priority. Instead, he concludes that the United States should simply add hundreds of billions of dollars -- the equivalent of one or two percent of the country's GDP -- to the defense budget in order to pay for troop increases without adjusting, streamlining, or trimming a single existing program.