Future Size Of US Military Forces

For John, BLUF:  Hard decisions need to be taken by Congress regarding the Federal Budget, including the Defense Budget.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

At the web site Breaking Defense we have Mr Colin Clark writing "Fear, Changing Threats Drive SCMR, OpPlans Rewrite; Cut Readiness Dough, Analysts Say".  SCMR, you ask?  Yes, it is pronounced as "scammer", but it stands for Strategic Choices and Management Review, and is an internal Department of Defense Exercise.

An interesting part of the article is this chart, laying out the differences between the inputs of several "Think Tanks" and the current SCMR visions.

Missing from the chart are the current numbers, but it appears real estate was limited.

As for the difference between capacity and capability, we have Secretary of Defense Hagel's words"

between “capacity—measured in the number of Army brigades, Navy ships, Air Force squadrons and Marine battalions—and capability—our ability to modernize weapons systems to maintain our military’s technological edge”

It is the old quality vs quantity argument, with folks often trotting out the quote "Quantity has a quality all of its own", which is attributed to the late Vladimir Lenin.  The flip side of that is Israel against the world, where quality has a quantity all of its own.

If you read the article originally linked to you would not there is the suggestion that when cutting the Department of Defense consideration might be given to cutting back civilian employees of DoD.  There are about 800,000 DoD Civilians and in addition about 775,000 contract workers providing direct services for DoD (as opposed to contractors working in the civilian world on contracts for delivery of products).  These are approximations.  Hard numbers on overall civilian personnel are not that easy to winkle out of DoD using one's web crawler.

We are facing some hard choices in the months ahead.  The US Congress is going to have to make some hard decisions on the Federal Budget and on how we preserve our national defense capabilities.  The Congress is divided on this and so are the civilian pundits.  If you read someone like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman you might conclude that increasing the Defense Budget and buy more stuff would be the way out of our creeping recession.  On the other hand, others fell we need to get our National Debt under control in order to break back into prosperity.  I don't really see much of a compromise solution that will break the impasse and lead us into the promised land, flowing with milk and honey.

Regards  —  Cliff