Finding the hidden strategy in yet another non-strategic "strategy"

The Defense Department today issued an eight-page document (pdf) called "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense." If you haven't read it yet, you're not missing much. I'm just going to very briefly run down a couple of things that jumped out at me; to analyze it in any greater depth is a waste of time, as the document is basically a restatement of things we've seen before in the NSS, NMS, and QDR.

[DISCLAIMER: This is long. I thought it was going to be short, but it's long. Don't say I didn't warn you.]

Here's the bottom line up front, as people like to say in the Building: the ground forces are shrinking, and the Department has determined that rapid reconstitution of massed land forces if and when necessary is the spot where we're willing to accept the most risk. This is a perfectly reasonable decision—as Ex pointed out earlier, it's easier to reconstitute trained and ready land forces than it is to produce high-tech weapon systems (like submarines and fighter aircraft) out of thin air. He didn't mention this, but it's also true that the U.S. – a geographically isolated great power under little to no threat of invasion – will also have more lead time than it might otherwise when preparing for the sort of extended and manpower-intensive operations that require significant numbers of ground combat arms formations. All of which is to say: if we're going to fight a long war, we can accept the risk of taking a few months or even years to ramp up to the required personnel numbers.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that it's easy, quick, or inexpensive to produce exceptionally-trained land forces of the sort we've deployed abroad over the last decade. What I'm saying is that it can be done when necessary, and that it's more difficult, more expensive, and in fact often more wasteful to keep more than 800,000 active component land forces humming with readiness and competency 24/7, 365 in a strategic environment where the requirement to deploy even a quarter of that number with minimal warning time in defense of a truly vital national interest is almost inconceivable. (The defense of Korea is a troubling exception.)

Yes, the credibility of U.S. deterrence could diminish if the rapidly-deployable force is downsized, and that has the potential to be destabilizing. But how rapidly can the U.S. military deploy huge numbers of ground forces to a contested theater in case of emergency even with current troop levels? And how many aggressive regimes out there are primarily deterred by the threat of an American invasion force rather than by the overwhelming destructive power of U.S. strike assets? The real deterrent power of U.S. joint forces comes from the absolute guarantee that American air and naval forces will wreak intolerable destruction on enemy maneuver elements as they operate in the field (supplemented by the quick arrival of U.S. rapid reaction forces and forward-deployed Marines), with later-arriving heavy U.S. land forces prepared to retake the intiative, finish the enemy, and hold ground. It may be stating the obvious, but this operational concept is far more threatened by constrained access than by insufficient Army force structure.

One particular line from the document is getting a lot of attention: U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations. COIN is dead, or something like that. (Spencer writes "kiss big counterinsurgencies goodbye.") Bollocks.

Read the sentence again: U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations. Now add ...in the steady-state/under normal circumstances. Because that's what we're talking about here: force structure in the steady-state. If and when the U.S. gets involved in a major, protracted conflict – of whatever type – you can throw all the sizing constructs and operational concepts you see here out the window. If, God forbid, American troops should be sent to "liberate" Iran and American policymakers determine that extended post-invasion stability operations are necessary, then we'll see stop-loss and deployment extensions and temporary end-strength increases and all the other contortions you've seen in Iraq (and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan). What this document is saying is not that such operations will no longer be considered, but rather that the steady-state, "peacetime" U.S. military will not be manned as if we expect to engage in them next month. Manned. Sized. Structured. You know, like the U.S. military in 1938 wasn't sized to simultaneously conduct major combat operations against the world's two most capable military powers in geographically distant theaters. That doesn't mean we couldn't do it; it just means we weren't allocating our national resources as if that was a preferred or expected course of action in the near term.

It's important, too, to make note of the other half of this: the elements of COIN/stability ops capability that aren't easily and rapidly reconstituted – specialized doctrine, equipment, concepts, and so on – are not being abandoned. Stability operations will still be a part of what U.S. forces train on, part of the "range of military operations" or the "full spectrum" or whichever fashionable phrase you want to use. The lessons of recent combat will still be institutionalized in doctrine and TTPs, not to mention in the thinking of those personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and the policymakers who prepared them and sent them there. The U.S. military isn't throwing out COIN—it's just normalizing capabilities and operational concepts associated with COIN as just several of the many things the force may be called upon to do.

Force structure is just force structure. Political leaders decide when, why, and how to employ military power—the Department and/or the services can discard unfashionable operational concepts if they so choose, and they can even constrain the president's near-term options by training and organizing in a particular fashion (especially with the aid of Congress, which makes the resourcing decisions), but the military doesn't get to foreclose certain policy choices. Nor does the president foreclose those options when he gives strategic guidance that impacts force structure decisions; he merely accepts risk, makes tradeoffs, and prioritizes based on expectations and preferences.

For me, the most important and informative statement in the document isn't under the COIN/stability operations heading, but rather in the elaboration of the deter and defeat aggression mission. Many readers will have noticed the obvious allusion to the allegedly discarded two-war planning construct, but there's a lot more to this. (The italics are in the original; I have added emphasis by underlining.)

As a nation with important interests in multiple regions, our forces must be capable of deterring and defeating aggression by an opportunistic adversary in one region even when our forces are committed to a large-scale operation elsewhere. Our planning envisages forces that are able to fully deny a capable state's aggressive objectives in one region by conducting a combined arms campaign across all domains – land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace. This includes being able to secure territory and populations and facilitate a transition to stable government on a small scale for a limited period using standing forces and, if necessary, for an extended period with mobilized forces. Even when U.S. forces are committed to a large-scale operation in one region, they will be capable of denying the objectives of – or of imposing unacceptable costs on – an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.

(Just as a quick aside from your frustrated and fusty Clausewitzian correspondent: isn't the imposition of unacceptable costs just another way of denying the enemy his overall objectives? Isn't that the very point of imposing unacceptable costs?)

Viewed alongside the pronouncement about stability operations and force sizing, this passage tells the reader a great deal about where the Department is headed. There's a later paragraph that hints at the same theme, identifying the need to examine the appropriate balance between active and reserve components in the development of future forces and programs. But the bit I've excerpted above really does tell us something new, something that's been hinted at but that we didn't already know: the administration has determined that active component forces should be structured and maintained to serve peacetime engagement, assistance, and deterrence functions and to conduct decisive, high-intensity, short-duration combat operations. Force structure necessary to conduct protracted operations of nearly any type – offensive, defensive, or stability operations – will not be immediately available—it will need to be mobilized from the reserve component or created wholesale through temporary end-strength increases. That's what the underlined bits are telling us, what with the slightly obfuscatory and non-standard "standing forces" and "mobilized forces" terminology: we can still do this extended, large-scale stabilization stuff if we need to, we just have to dip into the reserves.

And if we're honest with ourselves, we've been doing this for the last eight to ten years anyway! The difference is that the 2003 military (or the 2007 military, or the 2009 military, or the 2011 military) told the country yep, we've got this. The DoD Instruction (pdf) for stability operations (and before that, the Joint Operating Concept for Military Support to Stabilization, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations) announced to the world that the joint force understood what was required of it and could do the job. Those documents didn't say they'd need an end-strength increase or three, stop-loss, longer deployments, compression of the standard rotational cycle, and ready access to an operational reserve to pull the whole thing off, but that's just picking nits, I suppose. What this 2012 guidance does is finally admit that the country does not – cannot – maintain sufficient wartime force structure indefinitely—that a peacetime military and a wartime military are not and cannot be the same size! We've lied to ourselves about that in the spirit of the endless, un-scoped Global War on Terror or Long War or Protracted Conflict, but we're finally coming to terms with that objective fact—one that the defense industry, the congressional armed services committees, and the recently cash-swollen Pentagon haven't wanted to concede.

And so we've come full-circle back to what I was talking about above: this isn't a renunciation of manpower-intensive types of missions, but merely a recognition of the fact that we don't need all that manpower on hair-trigger in the steady-state. Which is to say that if we decide we're going to occupy a country and install military governance, or that we're going to pacify a population in support of a partner government, or that we're going to pour a lot of resources into a post-conflict stabilization mission... we're going to have a little time to work up to it.

*****

One final addendum to a post that has (perhaps unsurprisingly) ended up 500% longer than I intended: why are people saying that this document sets priorities? Spencer writes that counterinsurgency is "ninth on a list of defense priorities," while Nora Bensahel says in a CNAS press release that the strategy review "prioritizes among the missions that U.S. forces will be expected to conduct." I don't see this. What I do see is a listing of the ten "primary missions of the U.S. armed forces," pretty much stripped straight out of last year's National Military Strategy. (Counter terrorism and irregular warfare; deter and defeat aggression; project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges; counter WMD; operate effectively in cyberspace and space; maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent; defend the homeland and provide support to civil authorities; provide a stabilizing presence; conduct stability and counterinsurgency operations; and conduct humanitarian, disaster relief, and other operations.) It's true that COIN is listed ninth, but I can't find any indication that they're in priority order. And then there's this mystifying caveat tacked on to the end of the list:

The aforementioned missions will largely determine the shape of the future Joint Force. The overall capacity of U.S. forces, however, will be based on the requirements that the following subset of missions demand: [CT/IW; deter and defeat; nuclear deterrence; homeland defense].

Uh, what? The shape of the force is going to be tailored to the whole mission set, but the "overall capacity of U.S. forces" is going to be based on these four missions (presumably the most vital)? Don't they have this exactly backwards? It would make sense to me to say that the overall capacity of the U.S. military must be sufficient to conduct activities across the entire range of missions, but that the force would be tailored (in "shape," by which I mean prioritization of various capabilities, types of forces, and so on) primarily to conduct the specified subset of that range.

In any event, I don't see any prioritization here. I see "this is the stuff we should expect to be able to do all the time, including in peacetime, and here's the stuff that we're going to want to do at other times, and that we may need to surge or grow or 'reverse' or modify or whatever to be able to accomplish if things don't go as we expect." And I suppose that's a sort of prioritization, but only so much as we can say that "win the wars we're in and try to avoid other wars" is a priority over "do things that are painful but sometimes necessary in contingencies."

[insert pithy, non-profane post title here]

I don't like to scream profanity into cyberspace via post titles, which are embedded in the URL, so I'm just going to bump it down into the body text.

Max Boot: Are you fucking kidding me?

To head off the dangers that may come with “catastrophic success,” it is important for the coalition to plan now for stabilizing a post-Qaddafi Libya. If policymakers haven’t already done so, they ought to consult The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building put out by Jim Dobbins, Seth Jones, and their colleagues at RAND. In particular look at page 39, which lists “peak military levels for peace enforcement” in a variety of conflicts from 1945 Germany to 2003 Iraq. Iraq was on the low end of force levels—only 7 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany was on the high end—101 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. This helps to explain why post-war Germany was so much more peaceful. Bosnia and Kosovo, also relatively successful exercises in nation-building, were in between—with 19 and 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively.

What does that mean for Libya—a country that, according to the CIA Factbook, has a population of 6.6 million? If the aim is to replicate the Bosnia/Kosovo experience then 330,000 peacekeepers would be called for. If Iraq is the model, 94,000 peacekeepers would be needed.

Of course, as with all such metrics, these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances. In Libya there are a number of factors that suggest lesser levels of risk, including the fact that the eastern portion of the country around Benghazi has been relatively peaceful and stable under rebel control. So perhaps even 94,000 peacekeepers won’t be needed. But it is likely that a need substantial if smaller force will still be required, and it is imperative for NATO policymakers to begin planning for such a deployment. As part of that planning process, they need to shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent. Otherwise they risk shock and opposition among publics that have not been prepared for yet another deployment.

For ten minutes after I read this post, I could do nothing but stare blankly at the screen.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The political and public will to secure, stabilize, state-build, or otherwise involve U.S. forces and resources in a post-conflict scenario in Libya simply does not exist. A significant majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement even at current levels: when asked last week "do you think the U.S. is doing the right thing by using military force in Libya now, or should the U.S. not be involved in Libya now?", only 33% of those polled approved of the enterprise. (See question 31.) There's no small irony in Boot's exhortation to policymakers to "shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent," considering the way Boot himself is manifestly incapable of offering a persuasive rationale to his own audience.

Beyond that, Boot's analysis of force requirements is so stupid it practically drools. One can only assume that the RAND state-building study is cited and linked as a sort of bluff; surely Boot knows that his foolishness will be revealed if the reader takes time to examine it even cursorily. "In particular look at page 39," we're told, where a chart compares the peak troops-to-inhabitants ratio for Germany and Japan in 1945 with six peace enforcement missions from the post-Cold War period. Here's Max:

Iraq was on the low end of force levels—only 7 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany was on the high end—101 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. This helps to explain why post-war Germany was so much more peaceful. Bosnia and Kosovo, also relatively successful exercises in nation-building, were in between—with 19 and 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively.

Yes, force levels do help to explain the success of peace enforcement and stability operations. Dobbins et al. agree: "High levels of forces have generally tended to correlate with high levels of security and order and low levels of casualties." But they don't completely explain outcomes: just look at Japan, where post-conflict violence was nonexistent with a ratio of only five occupying troops to every 1,000 people -- the same as violent Somalia in 1992.

It is, of course, intuitive to assume that high force levels are conducive to low violence. But the sample size of the RAND study is troubling, as is the lack of consideration given to a number of other qualitative differences between the various campaigns. The wars against Germany and Japan, for example, ended with the surrender of each country's high military command, to the evident relief of populations that had been battered by years of total war. The Bosnian war had a similarly settled conclusion, with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (acting by proxy for Bosnian Serbs) agreeing to the Dayton Accords alongside the Bosnian and Croatian national leaderships. The Kosovo conflict, on the other hand, ended with the withdrawal of Serbian forces from the province and the entry of KFOR peacekeepers, who were joyously received by Kosovar Albanians. (In this sense, it can hardly be classed as "peace enforcement.") And the Iraq war, of course, merely shifted from conventional to irregular war in 2003, the year the data was reported; the government in Baghdad had collapsed, the armed forces scattered, and the anti-coalition resistance taken up by sectarian militias and loyalist irregulars.

What this brief exploration should show is that a great many variables related to conflict termination can impact the level of violence in the peace enforcement or stability operations phase, and troop levels are not uniquely determinative. Boot seems to acknowledge this when he writes that "these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances." But he goes on to conclude that the risk of post-Qaddafi violence in Libya is likely even lower than in any of the scenarios mooted above, and that a stabilizing occupation could perhaps be effected with an even lower force ratio than Iraq in 2003 (which, contrary to Boot's assertion, is not "on the low end of force levels," but rather just above the median in a set of eight cases). Of course, there's a serious problem with this line of reasoning: if the post-war situation in Iraq were reproduced in Libya this year, that would be a totally unacceptable result for the United States and the international community! The force levels in 2003 Iraq didn't come close to assuring stability!

There are a good many reasons to believe the precise opposite of what Boot asserts -- to believe that the risk of violence in Libya is much, much higher than in Japan or Somalia or Kosovo. Many Libyans have already insisted that a Western troop presence in the country would be unacceptable to them, even during a phase of the conflict when the outcome is still uncertain. If Libyans are unwelcoming of American combat power that could aid in Qaddafi's demise, how much more likely are they to resist a foreign presence once the dictator is gone? As Boot has clearly noticed -- he reminds us early in the piece that "Libya has been a major recruiting center for Al Qaeda" -- Arab North Africans in authoritarian countries are solidly within the target demographic of America's most committed foe; should we expect that AQAM will be unable to rouse resistance fighters to the anti-crusader cause in an Arab country with weak borders, surrounded by other Arab countries with weak borders and populations presumably susceptible to the bin-Ladenist pitch? We should instead pretend that post-conflict conditions in Libya will be less like the disaster of post-Saddam Iraq and more like Kosovo, where occupying forces had come to the aid of a weaker ethno-religious faction after the expulsion of an aggressive, invading army?

In the end, we can't know whether Libya would violently oppose a Western occupation (even one that Boot would surely proclaim as salutary to the cause of Arab freedom). Steven Goode, summarizing the findings of a study on force levels by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, adverted to just this point.

Another caveat of the work is that the analysis cannot predict the violence level before a conflict starts. Many insurgencies simmer at a low level for years before becoming serious enough to provoke a significant reaction from the government. In contrast, the Soviet Union faced intense resistance immediately upon invading Afghanistan, with more than 4,000 Soviet and Afghan soldiers killed every year of the conflict (or more than 250 fatalities per million Afghan residents). Policy-makers contemplating intervening in other nations should remember that not only can invasions lead to insurgencies; they can also lead almost immediately to levels of violence more than three times that currently [in the winter of 2009-10] seen in Afghanistan after eight years of war.

All of which by way of saying what almost everyone except for Max Boot seems to have learned by now: this kind of thing isn't as simple as you think it is. (Or more succinctly: STFU.)

The Russian army sucks. But should we care?

Last week the Center of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, an establishment-connected Moscow think tank, published a series of reports on the state of Russian defense reform in a book called The New Russian Army (pdf). It's available online, but my Russian was crap even when I was studying it, so I'll just trust Pavel Felgenhauer's analysis.

The book lists a number of technical, strategic and personnel problems that bedevil the present Russian armed forces: including a lack of modern weapons, vague military doctrine that does not distinguish precisely what threats Russia faces and the military means that must be developed to counter them. Russia is an isolated power with no significant allies, while the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), comprising Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, depends on Russia’s limited defense resources. According to CAST experts, CSTO allies are weak and disloyal and unprepared or able to support Russia politically or militarily, while these countries require constant commitment and investment. Additionally, an acute manning crisis has diminished the combat readiness of the so called “permanent readiness brigades.”

Felgenhauer's summary focuses on the personnel aspects of the book, recognizing that Russia's other strategic challenges are of secondary importance when viewed in light of an army that can neither deploy nor fight effectively.

According to “The New Russian Army” authors, the main strategic mistake was the transition to one year conscript service in 2008 from the previous two year term. The idea of the reform was to man combat units mostly with contract soldiers or kontraktniki, while conscripts form a trained mobilization reserve are also used as a pool for recruiting additional kontraktniki.  From 2005 to 2007 more than 50 percent of the defense budged was reportedly spent on the federal program to form a contract armed force, which was later declared to be a failure: the number of recruited kontraktniki was inadequate and their quality – dubious. In 2009 and 2010 contract units were replaced by a predominantly conscript force – mostly to save money.

Today, officially the Russian armed forces have 85 brigades, but according to the “New Russian Army” authors their combat readiness is dismal. Sergeants and specialists are 3-months trained conscripts. Unit combat readiness fluctuates twice a year as during the spring and fall drafts trained soldiers are discharged after one year service and units are left with six-month serving badly-trained conscripts and fresh recruits with no training. These brigades are officially fully combat ready, but in reality they may send into combat one or two battalion tactical groups of six-month-trained conscripts.

The crux of all this: the Russian army has perhaps five battalions that can fight worth a damn. What's it to us?, you might be wondering. Well, fair question. NATO's force-sizing construct was based for nearly half a century on the eastern threat, and some folks would still base U.S. military force structure and concepts on a country they view -- along with China -- as a military (if not economic) peer competitor. And for the purposes of our new-ish NATO allies, this may be a noteworthy revelation: Poland and Estonia, for example, will welcome Russia's struggles to field capable expeditionary landpower, and a better understanding of a potential adversary's capabilities can help them to tailor their own forces within a broader NATO defensive framework. But what about for the U.S.: should signs of Russian military weakness meaningfully inform our strategic approach vis-a-vis Russia? As far as I'm concerned: not a bit.

First of all, the way the U.S. understands and behaves toward Russia as an international actor has never been about landpower capabilities -- at least not since the demise of the Soviet Union. Force projection and deterrence are a job for the navy, the air force, and the strategic missile fleets, not conscript infantry battalions. NATO's responsibility for territorial defense still holds, and those nervous smaller states only recently emancipated from Warsaw Pact serfdom are of course interested in Moscow's ability to send an armored column over the western frontier. As a matter of force planning for the Big One in Europe, latent capability is perhaps just as important as who's currently in uniform and manning the guns, and Poland will never be sanguine about Russia -- underpaid, underfed, over-officered conscript force or not. And these revelations aren't exactly earth-shattering or surprising, either: the poor performance of Russian troops in Chechnya and, more recently, Georgia justifiably posed questions about whether the bear had lost his fangs.

So: if the Russian army's weak, it's time to press for advantage, yeah? Time to add more members to NATO, push 'em around on the Caucasus and central Asia, bully them in the near abroad and disregard their red lines, right? Not exactly. Moscow still bears influence far out of balance with its expeditionary landpower capabilities by dint of nuclear weapons, a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, and Russia's status as a willing partner and supplier of armaments to a great many states in both the developed and developing worlds. Medvedev, Putin, and their successors can still exert a great deal of pressure on U.S. interests both in Eurasia and elsewhere, as Russia's shifting relationship with Iran has clearly demonstrated. NATO still depends on Russia and her one-time vassals for logistics cooperation in OEF, not to mention the affinity our little counterterrorist and counterinsurgent buddies have for Russian helicopters.

What does all this mean to us, then? Not very much. Russia still swings a big stick, and it doesn't mean much that in an imaginary battle for Antarctica, we could put roughly nine times as many well-trained, well-equipped ground forces in place. Russian weakness will perhaps pose a greater problem to western interests than strength would: instability in the north Caucasus or elsewhere on the southern periphery is probably our biggest security worry with regard to Russia, and a state that's not capable of conclusively settling its own border troubles and insurgencies is more likely to take unsettling and destabilizing actions than one that's geographically and demographically secure. Beware of those who celebrate this trend: over the long term, a worried, impotent Russia makes for a worrying, unstable Eurasia.

Army suicide stats and possible implications for future force structure* (UPDATED)

Vice Chief of Staff of the Army GEN Peter Chiarelli briefed the press this morning on last year's Army suicide statistics. The transcript isn't up yet, but according to media reports, he was expected to reveal a decrease in the total number of suicides across the force in the Active Component [ed--updated] from 2009 to 2010. Unfortunately these statistics were also expected to show a dramatic spike in the number of Guardsmen and Reservists taking their own lives.

UPDATE: The transcript of GEN Chiarelli's remarks, which include more precise statistics, is now online. The total number of suicides across all components of the Army was up around 25% from calendar year 2009. On the active/reserve issue, the Vice observed that "the reality is, we are able to more effectively influence those soldiers serving on active duty and help mitigate the stressors affecting them."

This isn't an entirely novel trend, and I've seen a number of plausible explanations for why it might be so: distance from military mental health facilities, dislocation from the support structure developed in one's (civilian) personal life, financial pressure, and so on. One of the interesting things about the way the Army reports these statistics is that members of the Guard and Reserve who commit suicide while mobilized for active duty -- that is, those who are activated for combat service or combat support -- are counted among the active duty numbers. So what these figures indicate is that there's been an uptick in the number of part-time soldiers to kill themselves essentially while living as civilians. These are people who are largely inaccessible to the government's mental health network, and whose emotional health may be impacted by the pressures of daily life outside of uniform in ways that are difficult to distinguish from the negative effects of military service. This is a troubling reality for the Army, the DoD, and the VA, because it complicates efforts to develop effective policy solutions to help these individuals.

Mental health issues are and ought to be extremely important of their own right, but I think this development can help to inform some conclusions about future force structure. The way we organize the military is, pretty evidently, a budget question as much as an operational one. In this time of budgetary austerity, a number of people who oppose cuts to the defense topline have argued both to preserve expensive weapon systems and to maintain the presently inflated personnel end-strength of U.S. ground forces. Even more craven are those who insinuate that inflated military personnel costs -- pay, benefits, health care, and the like; what they refer to disparagingly as "defense entitlements" -- have damagingly starved modernization accounts of the cash needed to effectively defend the nation. And the worst of these argue that program cuts will cost lives, while altogether ignoring the reality that underfunded personnel accounts can do the same: that's when services are denied the resources they use to provide mental-health care, among other "entitlements," to their people.

This is an oversimplification, but we can boil defense spending down to a pretty simple equation. Let's have E represent end-strength; that is, the total number of people in the military. Let P be per-capita personnel costs -- an abstracted figure that represents how much is spent per servicemember on pay, benefits, and the like. O is for operations and maintenance, or the cost of doing business in combat zones and training areas. And then M is for modernization: cash spent on new weapon systems. We'll use D to signify the defense topline -- the overall budget.

D = M + O + (E x P)

For those of you who failed algebra, I'll restate that in narrative form: defense spending equals the sum of modernization plus operations added to end-strength times personnel costs. Again, this is a simplification, and each of these variables abstracts a number of other spending decisions that are nested within it: we could make the P smaller by cutting pay and benefits, or make the O smaller by having less wars. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the O is stable thanks to ongoing conflicts that will be resourced at a certain level free of influence from other spending concerns. Now we have this:

D = M + (E x P)

If D is to remain stable -- i.e., we can't add anything to the topline -- there are certain concrete, unavoidable consequences to playing with one of these variables. If you want to spend more money on F-22s, for example (increase M), then the other half of the equation has to go down. And for that to happen, you have to either make E smaller -- cut personnel numbers -- or make P smaller by cutting benefits and pay. If you want to have a huge land army (increase E), then you have to either dramatically slash the amount you spend on weapon systems procurement or make more moderate cuts to modernization AND some reduction in benefits and pay.

By now you're wondering what this has got to do with suicide data, I'm sure. We're getting there, but let me first get to the "future force structure" part. As may seem obvious to you, if you have two armies of exactly the same size and Army A's end-strength is composed of 80% active-duty personnel and 20% guard and reserve personnel, while Army B has the exactly reversed composition, Army B will be cheaper. Reservists and Guardsmen receive fewer benefits, are paid for much less of the year, and don't spend nearly as much time as the Active Component undergoing expensive training rotations. Recognizing this fact, some commentators have concluded that the best force structure for America in a resource-constrained environment would be one that had a small, expensive core of professional soldiers with a much larger strategic reserve of cheaper citizen-soldiers, available for activation in times of national crisis. This surely sounds sensible on the surface, as it would allow for savings across the board. Even if one rejects this dramatic rethinking of the composition of our forces, there are other, less ambitious affordability plans that encourage “greater Reserve and Guard integration” – that is, building more essential capability into the organizations and personnel that cost less to maintain.

But the suicide data released today should remind us of the negative consequences of this approach. Reservists are not so easily managed by the government as soldiers on active duty, for the simple and obvious reason that military leadership does not have 24/7 access to reserve and guard personnel. This means not only that officers and NCOs aren't around to make sure Specialist Jones stays physically fit or keeps his hair short, but that they can't monitor his emotional health. In the case of demobilization after active service in combat zones, reservist vets will often be far from mental health counselors and other mechanisms for the services to monitor social re-integration and the impact of postwar stress. Add to that the fact that reservists now face the many challenges of "regular life" in the civilian world, piled atop the trauma and stress experienced in uniform, and it's perhaps unsurprising that part-time troops are more troubled. To take a purely practical view of this, that means the Guard and Reserves will often have a lower rate of what the Army calls Comprehensive Soldier Fitness... and by extension, combat readiness.

This has been a circuitous way of saying that while a reserves-centric force would be much, much cheaper, it comes with its own problems. (This is particularly true if you plan to continue mobilizing those Guard and Reserve units at an extremely high rate, as has been done over the last eight to ten years.) Among the most significant of these is this near-epidemic of mental health issues, which pose a threat not just to combat readiness and operational effectiveness, but to the government's very moral authority – born of the pledge to care for those who serve. Ask the families of private security contractors killed and wounded in support of U.S. combat missions about the pernicious effects of a drive to reduce personnel “overhead” by outsourcing security functions; reservists represent similar “overhead” savings, but is it a good idea to consider a similar “outsourcing” of the bulk of military operations to reservists and Guardsmen?

Of course, there are other solutions. You can shrink overall end-strength without shifting more responsibility to the reserves, but that means a re-imagining of the roles and missions of the military. I suppose you could keep sending 100K+ troops to foreign lands for one-year tours, maintaining that presence for years on end, even with a smaller force… but you’d better have some damned good incentive structure to keep people from jumping out when their enlistment is up. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that’s possible when you feel compelled to choose a few dozen more air-superiority fighters over a better enlisted compensation package, for example. Recruiting and retention may not be much trouble with ~9% unemployment, but you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) bank on that one indefinitely, either.

Military personnel costs are the third rail of defense budgeting. If you don’t have the gall and the balls to argue that soldiers and Marines are gonna die without the EFV/FCS/F-22, or if you’re unwilling to accept a choice between systems’ survivability and troops’ quality of life, then you have to figure out a way to operate with a smaller force. Focusing on the reserves might not be the right answer.

*DISCLAIMER: I meant for this post to be just a couple of sentences about the lessons we should be learning about future force structure from the Army’s suicide data. There wasn’t a whole lot of planning or thought behind it, and it’s not built on a complex understanding either of personnel issues writ large or the way the Guard and Reserves organize, train, recruit, retain, or compensate their force. I am not an expert on either of these subjects; in fact, I probably don’t know much more about them than the average guy reading the newspaper. But this exercise took me off in an unexpected direction, and rather than edit down to something tight and persuasive, I thought I’d just leave this virtual stream-of-consciousness essay up as a discussion-starter. If you know more about this than me, tell me. If you think I’m an idiot, tell me. If you think my conclusions are ludicrous, and that suicide data should be considered for the troubling message it conveys about the psychological and emotional health of our force, and not for budget implications, then I’ll mostly agree with you but quietly hope that you understand the purpose of what I’m trying to do here.

Is it time to reconsider the Taiwan delusion?

Courtney at GSGF links approvingly (it seems...?) to Tom Donnelly, Mackenzie Eaglen, and Jamie Fly's newest piece in The National Review, in which the authors unsurprisingly deride Secretary Gates' recent announcement of program cuts and future end-strength reductions. It's just like another spin of the ol' Best of Max Boot record: we don't have enough troops and weapons for everything, which is just the same as not having enough for anything! Jason's already gotten into the fundamental stupidity of this approach, but Courtney avoids Boot's worst pitfalls by positing a specific threat for which we ought to be prepared: aggressive Chinese revisionism vis-a-vis Taiwan. If you dare...

China's hot desire for a tiny tiny fun, free choice little sister democrazy (that hasn't ever bothered anyone) speaks volumes about the idea of messing with defense budgets.

Presumably the argument here is that an American military with 47,000 fewer ground troops (and no EFVs or SLAMRAAMs) would be unable to defend Taiwan against Chinese invasion.

Well, I'm not quite sure how to tell you this, Courtney, but... If the Chinese want Taiwan back, they're going to take it. And there's really not a whole lot of anything we can or should do about this reality, whether the defense budget is $553 billion or $553 SQUILLION.

Here's a little taste of what a war with China would be like, courtesy of the research geeks at Popular Mechanics. (Focus particularly on the first 700 words.) It ain't pretty, and (contra Bill Gertz) that's not because we've got bad intel on China or because we aren't spending our money right. No, it's really a matter of geography: just the same as we wouldn't expect China to be able to stop an American invasion of Cuba, when we think about the whole thing as a practical matter, it's patently absurd to imagine that we could defend the island from the revanchist whim of its powerful neighbor. What's the capability gap that prevents us from mounting an effective defense? I'd start with an inability to instantly teleport air and missile defenses across thousands of miles of ocean and lack of forward-deployed coastal artillery that's roughly as capable as the laser cannons defending Hoth at the start of The Empire Strikes Back. Anybody know the life-cycle costs on that stuff?

Seriously though: we're not going to explicitly renounce our commitment to defending Taiwan, but it seems certain we'll never be able to execute anything but a minor delaying action against Chinese landing forces. And I know Courtney's answer will be different to my own on this question, but: why should we? Is it worth the death of perhaps tens of thousands of American sailors and airmen to make a hopeless if symbolic defense of one small bastion of democracy just a brief sail from the Chinese mainland? Wouldn't we all be better off doing exactly what we're doing, which is sustaining the One China policy, engaging with Beijing in ways that are meant to mitigate the rising power's more aggressive tendencies while supplying Taiwan with defensive weapon systems and insisting they take no overtly destabilizing actions (like declaring independence)? And if not, why not?

Of course we're not interested in inviting an invasion, and the limited support that we currently provide to Taipei ought to demonstrate our seriousness on that front. But as a force planning construct, it seems absolutely insane to countenance the loss of a carrier strike group or two to defend a geostrategically meaningless hunk of rock from the unwanted affections of our biggest creditor. There may be good reasons to go to war with China one day, but that day ain't now, and Taiwan ain't the good reason. If and when war does come, it seems unlikely to be contested by infantry BCTs and Marine Expeditionary Brigades -- rather it's far more likely to be a stand-off scuffle between F-22s and the much-talked-about new J-20, or some kind of as-yet-inconceivable showdown between swarming UAV fleets. So let's leave aside any nonsense about "China's hot desire for a tiny tiny fun, free-choice little sister democracy" mitigating in favor of larger, more expensive U.S. land forces. It's not serious.

Donnelly, Eaglen, and Fly conclude their National Review piece with what I imagine they intended as a punch-you-in-the-face moment of ground-truth profundity: "Cutting land forces now can only make the 'Long War' longer." No, I'll tell you what will "make the 'Long War' longer": getting into a whole bunch more manpower-intensive, strategically dubious wars of choice. And war with China over Taiwan satisfies at least one half of that equation.

Max Boot is still not making the argument for a larger land force

Forget grand strategy and all that. There are a couple of significant problems with this newest Max Boot column where he responds to critics of his Weekly Standard article that I commented on the other day.

Let's start near the top. "Regarding the first point: critics say that Bush and his civilian and military officials decided to send a small force to Afghanistan and then Iraq not because of force constraints but because the were wedded to the ideology of the "small footprint." There is a great deal of merit in this assertion." Great deal of merit?? I've yet to see a single piece of evidence to suggest anything but that being the case. I ask Mr. Boot to provide any, because I've never seen it. Every book, article, or primary source I've seen on the subject stated explicitly that a small footprint was decided on as a matter of principle and had nothing to do with troops available. I'll agree that force sizing was part of the calculus later in the Iraq conflict, after the insurgency grew, but for a couple years, I'd still argue it was barely a "major" part of the calculus. No one was interested in an escalation for political reasons (remember that whole "we're not in the middle of an insurgency" business?) - as well as principles. At the time, Afghanistan was going swimmingly with practically no footprint. No one was terribly sure what was going wrong in Iraq that it couldn't follow that model.

The second major problem I have with his post is in the last paragraph. "Indeed, even as we were winning in Iraq, we were losing in Afghanistan, because we didn't have enough troops to adequately garrison both countries." He goes on to state that Bush and Clinton force planners that we'd have such large commitments. Let's get past the heavily weighted term "garrison" and move on to what this logic does mean for force planners. How big of a country should the United States be prepared to "garrison"? For what purposes? We had 500K active duty troops available (not including the USMC) for Iraq and Afghanistan to "garrison" two fairly large countries with populations totaling just over 50 million people. Mr. Boot specifically listed Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan as countries the President should assure us that we won't have to commit troops to. Populations? 26 million, 10 million, and 180 million people respectively. If Mr. Boot feels we should have maintained a force size of 700K to "garrison" 50 million people and that the U.S. should maintain whatever capability necessary to do the same to other problem nations, then by that logic we'll need an army of roughly 3 million active duty soldiers. Yeah, that won't adversely effect our economy.

This last bit was a bit tongue in cheek. I'd like to think that Mr. Boot wouldn't think an army of that magnitude would be reasonable (I could be wrong though). But this "who knows what we'll have to occupy" is terrible reasoning, especially as there is no real political, strategic, or operation reasoning that would dictate the necessity to "garrison" these and other places. To say nothing of the Albright logic (we have a huge military so let's do something with it) that could put the U.S. in strategically ill-advised positions again. And finally, as I mentioned the other day, neither of these articles mentions the size and role of the National Guard or Reserves in case of national emergencies. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good rule of thumb: if you don't think your operation is so vital to the nation that you don't think the the Guard or Reserve should be deployed for it, then you shouldn't be there at all.

Anyway, there are probably good reasons for maintaining a large land force. Max Boot is not making any of them.