In a piece at the Weekly Standard, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot argues that the 32% decline in troops in the 10 years following the end of the Cold War in 1991 weakened us for a proper military response to 9/11.
The stress on the troops over the last 10 years is apparent despite building the numbers back up (albeit not to Cold War levels). And because of that stress and our experience of unpreparedness at 9/11, Boot makes it clear that it is unconscionable that Gates would propose cutting troop numbers by 50,000.
Some hard questions:
We wish that President Obama, who forced these cuts on Gates and the Defense Department, would explain what in the international situation gives him confidence that we can meet all of our security commitments with so many fewer grunts. The president thinks that most of our troops will be gone from Afghanistan by 2015, but how certain is he that the drawdown will occur as envisioned? How certain is he that Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia won’t be the staging ground for another 9/11, thereby requiring another massive commitment of U.S. troops? How certain is he that we won’t face a war on the Korean Peninsula or in Iran or in some other land where we cannot currently envision sending American forces—any more than anyone could have envisioned on September 10, 2001, that America would eventually have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan?
UPDATE: The article is causing quite a bit of controversy. Matt Duss at the Center for American Progress offers a pretty strong reaction.
Comments