One hundred years ago this past August, it had become clear to even the most optimistic Europeans that the war begun with fond hopes in the summer of 1914 would not be over by Christmas. In 1861, Americans North and South had suffered a similar disappointment.
Wars have a nasty habit of refusing to end on schedule.The march to Baghdad in 2003went quickly, but the violence unleashed never really stopped. A short-term advisory mission in Vietnam led to regional wars that cost almost 60,000 American lives.Even our “splendid little war” with Spain in 1898 left us fighting Moro insurgents in the Philippines for years, and minor brawls with Native Americans led to almost three centuries of butchery.
Other countries down the centuries have been even more confounded, whether by the Seven Years’ War,the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War … or the myth-shrouded decade of combat Homer set on the windy plains of Troy.
But history doesn’t matter to Americans. We have a slogan that fits nearly all situations, from the stock market to warfare: “This time it’s different.” And so the cult of high-tech weaponry, fostered by defense contractors and their hirelings, has again infected us with the notion that the next “real” war will inevitably be short.
Despite massive defense budgets, we’re embracing unpreparedness yet again.
Distrustful of our military, a pacifist administration made a treacherous compact with an irresponsible Congress to cut veteran personnel to preserve funding for hyper-expensive weapons as fragile as they are irrelevant. The strength of the U.S. Army is projected to drop to 450,000, perhaps to 420,000. Given the tooth-to-tail ratio in a 21st century force, that leaves us with trigger-puller numbers closer to those of the Plains Indian Wars than to the oft-cited eve-of-WWII force. The Army we’re stripping to the bone will not be able to sustain one major war.
We’ve been here before. Atomic then nuclear weapons were supposed to negate the usefulness of ground troops. Then we faced Korea and Vietnam. Next, precision weaponry was supposed to eliminate the need for boots on the ground: In the wake of 9/11, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to cut two Army divisions to free up funds for well-connected contractors. Then we went to Afghanistan and Iraq. And what did we need? Boots on the ground.
Now we’re assured that we’ll never blunder into such conflicts again. Good luck with that.
Rare is the politician who genuinely cares for our troops. And the politician is even rarer who puts the needs of national defense ahead of financial advantages for his home district. The result? We’re gutting the best-seasoned force in American history in order to buy costly weapons that don’t even work.
Remember the F-22? That “multi-role” fighter was touted as a critical tool even for the War on Terror. In the inventory for over a decade, it has yet to fly a single combat mission. It’s too delicate and too expensive to risk.
Now we’re buying the problem-plagued F-35, a clumsy, short-range aircraft with a limited payload and outrageous maintenance needs. And that last point is the real Achilles Heel for both the F-22 and F-35. Our wartime fate will depend upon a relative handful of exorbitant aircraft, each requiring 60 hours or more of maintenance for each hour of mission time. Do the sortie math. Even if we surged for weeks, what then? And their one-of-a-kind maintenance equipment makes their forward bases primary targets. We’re splurging on defeat.
We need a larger, robust Air Force that can fight for years against a tough opponent. Instead, we’re investing in a new form of unilateral disarmament.
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man. “Valley of the Shadow,” the latest in his prize-winning series of Civil War novels, will be published in May 2015.
Originally published in the January 2015 issue of Armchair General.
