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September 09, 2003

Eating our Seed Corn

I have noted before that the Army is stretched far too thin for all of its current missions. Now it looks like they're looking to solve the short-term problem while disregarding the big picture by extending reserve tours to a full year, meaning thousands of soldiers have now had four to six months tacked onto their time in Iraq and Kuwait.

Is this the job they signed up for? Yes and no. Yes, anyone who signs up for the Guard or Reserve should be smart enough to understand that it may mean they will end up being mobilized to go to war. Further, while I have some sympathy for the soldiers whose tours have been extended, Army life can be pretty tough and you know what you're getting into when you don the green suit. So I believe it would be wrong for any of those soldiers to complain outside of their units regarding their situation.

On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't blame any of them for deciding to get out when their mobilization is over. Most people don't enjoy going to war, and a significant fraction of the reserves join up for the additional paycheck with little thought of the risks they're volunteering for. Now that those risks have been made quite clear, many of those soldiers will decide that they don't really want to take them any longer, and so they will leave.

At the same time, many civilians are noticing what's happening to the reserves as well. You can't really sell people on 'one weekend a month' when almost one-quarter of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve is currently mobilized. A fair number of people who might have otherwise joined the reserves will decide that they'd rather not spend a year in Iraq or Afghanistan. This has a significant upside; the soldiers that remain will be very familiar with the risks of being in the reserve. Therefore, the remaining soldiers will be those the Army can count on to accomplish their missions and go where they're needed, because they truly want to be there.

But as Lenin once observed, quantity has a quality all its own. The Army may do its work better if the people remaining are all the highly-motivated ones, but it won't be physically possible for it to do as much. Many Army missions require numbers more than quality. To accomplish those missions, we're going to need an Army at least as large as we have now, if not larger. Yet decisions like this are almost guaranteeing that the Army will start to shrink over the coming years.

This leaves us with several alternatives. We can move to a draft; we can expand the active force; we can do nothing and hope for the best. Only one of these alternatives seems feasible.

A draft may resolve the issue by simply changing the political calculus of the war. Under the threat of a draft, it's likely support for any use of troops would drop dramatically. Arthur Silber has discussed the problems with a draft here and here, and the bottom line is simple: if we do not have the right to our own lives, we have no rights at all, and the draft surely takes away a person's right to their own life. I cannot accept a draft as an acceptable solution. Nor should anyone who believes that that rights are, in fact, inalienable rather than simply grants from government.

Doing nothing is often the best solution to a problem, but I don't see that to be the case in this instance. This decision to extend reservists demonstrates our (perceived) need for more troops in Iraq. If we simply continue to work with what we have, we will eventually grind the Army away. There will still be a solid core, but as I noted above, it will not be sufficient to accomplish all of our missions. Doing nothing may keep us afloat in the short term, but it will simply delay the day of reckoning.

So that leaves us with expanding the Army. Based on our current requirements, and making the perhaps poor assumption we won't be adding any new requirements, we need a bare minimum of two more divisions or division-equivalents. This would give us 38 brigades, which is twice the number we currently have deployed. Therefore, we're still going to be pretty short, but filling two more divisions alone will be difficult work.

Indeed, given the constraints of our volunteer Army, it may be impossible, but there are some things that can be done to make it possible. The President could stop asking Americans to go shopping and start asking them to serve their country. Congress could raise the military pay rates, particularly those for junior enlisted soldiers, to make a military career a more enticing career choice. The Army could issue a call to active duty to the reserves, allowing soldiers who want to go onto active duty to do so without having to call up vast numbers of reservists who would prefer to remain part-time troops. It would probably take all of these measures, and perhaps more, to fill the divisions. It would be worth it, however, because it would take a great deal of pressure off of the current active component and the reserve component. Just as important, it would help ensure that we still have a robust reserve force for the future.