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December 21, 2004

Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying

One of the greatest movies of all time, for my money, is The Shawshank Redemption. Adapted from a Stephen King short story, the film follows a banker named Andy Dufresne (played by the incomparable Tim Robbins) who is sent to life in Shawshank Prison for murdering his wife and her lover. Inside, Andy is befriended by inmate 'Red' Redding (Morgan Freeman; need I say more?), the only guilty man in Shawshank Prison. The film spans the better part of two decades of Andy's life in Shawshank, as ugly as one might expect prison life to be (although probably still whitewashed). Near the end of the film, Andy tells Red that it's time to get busy living, or get busy dying. Red is concerned Andy means to kill himself, but they are not cellmates, so he spends a long night wondering if his friend will still be there in the morning. Sure enough, come morning Andy does not come out of his cell for the morning count. When guards enter his cell, however, they do not find a body: Andy is gone. He has escaped, to 'get busy living' in freedom. Andy was always living in the literal sense of the term. But life in prison is not truly living, and Andy has had to choose whether to risk his life in an escape attempt in exchange for a shot at real living, or accept his fate as a prisoner and get down to the business of dying in prison.

It takes time to build an Army. During World War II, it was nearly a year (November 8, 1942, Operation Torch) after Pearl Harbor before large numbers of new American troops saw battle. Even then, only a small number of American troops were involved in the fighting: ten divisions, out of the 90 divisions the U.S. Army would eventually field. And that small force was dealt a sharp rebuke in its first encounter with the Wehrmacht, as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel hammered the 1st Armored Division in the first real contact between U.S. and German forces. U.S. forces learned quickly, but not cheaply, as casualties ran high among U.S. units early in the campaign. The Italian Campaign would see the U.S. putting more divisions into the fight, but not until late 1943, and the full weight of the American Army was not engaged until June 6 1944, more than two and a half years after the war had begun. It had taken that long for even the industrial powerhouse that was 1940s America to assemble the men and materiel needed to take on Fortress Europe, even starting right after the war began. And even then, the Army was often referred to as the "90 division gamble" because General Marshall limited the Army to 90 divisions despite projections ranging as high as 350 divisions needed to win the war, and later decisions to build the Army to a strength of 100 divisions.

We are now little more than one-quarter of the way through the fourth year of the war. (Marking the start from 9/11, of course, since that's when we started fighting it.) In that time the Army has grown from an end strength of 482,400 to 495,374, thanks to stop-loss orders and Congressional approval to temporarily exceed statutory limits on end strength. Those additional soldiers have been used only to maintain units going to war at full strength, however; not a single new unit has been created since 9/11, although the introduction of Units of Action will change that soon. But that won't change end strength; the UAs will change the Army's structure, and may free up some additional soldiers for action, but the total force will be precisely the same. And doing the simple math that one soldier deployed actually requires three soldiers: one training to relieve him, one actually deployed, and one retraining and recovering after deployment, that means that maintaining 150,000 soldiers in Iraq actually chews up 450,000 troops. That leaves the cupboard pretty damn bare for other contingencies, even when a growing fraction of that 450,000 soldiers is coming from the reserve component. Add in the fact the reserve component may not be able to sustain the current tempo and the argument we don't need a larger Army doesn't seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.

The number one argument I hear against expanding the Army is that we don't know how long we will need them. That is certainly true. Iraq could stabilize before we could train the additional forces we need, in which case the Army would be larger than we require. That would cost money, particularly as we would have to raise base pay and benefits in order to attract enough volunteers to expand the Army by two divisions or more. Given our current budgetary woes, it's understandable why many people would be concerned about spending money on soldiers we might not need, although given Congress' willingness to spend our money on every other project under the sun, I'm not sure what's holding them back.

But here's a news flash: we'll never know if we'll still need the troops by the time they're ready. Had we started building new divisions immediately after 9/11, we'd already have them, and maybe our troops wouldn't be quite so overstressed. Two years from now, when we could have two new divisions on the field, who knows what the situation will be, or how badly we may be wishing we'd taken the time to build them when we could? Because of the long lag time involved in increasing the size of the Army, either we take a chance on not needing them, or we continue to grind down what we have and pray that the enemy will break before the Army does.

We are at war, whether we want to be or not. But we have decided to go to war without truly fighting a war, because our civilian leadership doesn't want to ask Americans to make the kind of sacrifices necessary to fight a war. So we're fighting on the cheap, forcing soldiers to return to Iraq 18 months after they left and causing possibly irreparable damage to our reserve components. It's time to make a choice: get busy fighting this war, or get busy losing it.