Expanding the Military
Strategy Page discusses increasing the size of the army. (via Instapundit)
Now that U.S. Army brass have come out in favor of increasing the size of the force, there is all sorts of chatter about where the recruits are going to come from. Well, they’re coming from the same place they’ve always come from. Today, the military has 2.2 million active duty and reserve troops, out of a population of 300 million. That means, out of every million Americans, 7,334 of them are military. But at the end of the Cold War, fifteen years ago, the military had 3.7 million troops, out of a population of 250 million. That was 14,800 military personnel for every million Americans.
They point out that the lower number of soldiers has resulted in higher standards, and that this is not something that we should give up but say that we could fill in the gaps by recruiting qualified foreigners. I am not necessarily oppossed to this per se, but certainly I think that their is a danger in having too much of our armed forces being foreign, rather than native. More particularly though, I am not sure that I agree with the need for more soldiers.
I have been advocating for a while the creation of a new military branch devoted to nation building rather than winning wars. I think that the need for winning wars will continue, and we don’t want to dilute the focus of the existing military branches, and at the same time the need for the study and execution of how to form a liberal democracy with the same level of obsessiveness, detail and scope that our military has brought to the study and execution of winning wars.
At the same time, these additional troops would call for skill sets and personality types that might not find traditional military service terribly attractive, opening up an additional pool from which to draw recruits. Obviously in a nation building scenario the ability to defend oneself and supply force protection would still be required, this aspect of the new service would not be dissimilar to techniques the existing military branches use, and I would imagine that for a major deployment, such as Iraq, the nation building force would be leavened by the other branches to help with this task. However, the focus and scope of the nation building force would go well beyond what we expect our traditional military to accomplish.
It would have expertise in everything from creating a national constitution to cutting corruption in government beaucracy. It would be able to assist in setting up a court system, training lawyers and judges and local police departments. It would be able to set up business regulations and advise on tax codes and focus on creating everything from munipical governments to national ones.
Certainly our military and other government bodies are involved in all those things in Iraq right now. My impression is though that a whole lot of this nation building is uncoordinated and often as much a matter of luck as of planning. If we happen to have the right officer in the right place, great things happen and success is created, but when we don’t, nothing much gets done properly. Given that ‘the right officer’ may be skill sets and attitudes that are unrelated to the traditional job of ‘kill people and break things’ it is understandable that this is just a crap shoot, indeed that we have success stories at all is a testament to how exceptionally skilled our military is, and how well rounded and educated many of our soldiers are.
The overall focus though is lacking, and any system to ensure that the right people are in the right places is also lacking. It seems to me unlikely that our existing services can transform to embrace this new mission while at the same time maintaining expertise at the old one, since both missions appear to me to be vital for a peaceful world, it is time to create a new institution for a new job.
