What Happened To The Military?

What in earth are we doing bogged down in another land war in Asia? Didn’t we learn anything from Vietnam?

After Vietnam everyone said that the United States would never be stupid enough to get involved in another mess like that ever again. So all of the carefully compiled reports and information, all of the scholarly research on what went wrong, all of the reasoned tactics for avoiding the mistakes that were made, all of the intelligence gathered from a decade long disaster was bound and filed in the belief that this kind of conflict would never happen again so let’s look at other scenarios.

All of the talk about having an exit strategy before you commit the military, is a reaction to Vietnam. Among the many things that changed after 09/11/2001 was the memory of how we got into that mess that was Vietnam.

Setting aside all of that, let’s look at the “Army we had.”

At the end of the Cold War, George H.W. Bush was President, and Richard Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. Immediately following the conclusion of the Gulf War, they began cutting back on the military in a major way. Moth-balling equipment, carrying out a “reduction in force” of military personal.

The 2.1 million of the military force that Reagan left was reduced to 1.4 million at the end of the century¹. Much of this reduction took place while the Republicans controlled Congress during a Democratic Presidency or Democrats controlled Congress under a Republican Presidency, so it was a bi-partisan effort launched during Bush I.

The Air Force and Navy simplified their operations and reduced their equipment inventories to deal with the new realities.

The Marines merely reduced the number of people, because there has never been any major alteration in their role in the military.

It was the Army that saw some of the most significant changes, changes that would come back to haunt it. The Army essentially moved much of what constituted support functions to Reserve and National Guard units. The assumption was the Army would be acting as assault troops in a multinational force and, after winning the war, they would be replaced by peacekeeping troops.

And so, the all-volunteer military said good-bye to the 20^th century.

Next we’ll look at the madness of Prince Donald.

1. CRS Report RL31349