Fewer Missions, Not More Troops

Under pressure from army generals and Democratic senators like Carl Levin and Jack Reed, President Bush last January proposed adding 27,000 marines and 65,000 soldiers to our military personnel over five years. The proposal would boost the army from 482,400 to 547,000 and create six new brigade combat teams, for a total of 48. The Marine Corps will expand from 175,000 to 202,000 and add several battalions to existing regiments. An additional 9,200 troops will be added to the 555,000 troops in Army Reserve and National Guard.

The editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post back the plan. So do John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson. Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani support an even larger expansion. The draft defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2008 contains initial funding for the plan. Given bipartisan support, these funds will likely be part of the bill that the president signs into law later this year.

There are several problems with expanding the ground forces. First, it will impose enormous cost on taxpayers. Second, by the time the new troops are ready to deploy, the military should be relieved of its primary burden -- Iraq. Once that happens, the United States will have enough ground forces to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, if it continues, while defending its allies in the Middle East and Asia. All we would lack is enough troops to occupy a large country that would prefer otherwise.

The justification for the new troops must then be to fight more wars of occupation. That is the principal problem with the plan. Its advocates ignore the lesson of Iraq, one U.S. leaders long understood but recently forgot: running other countries uninvited is a job the U.S. should avoid. Counter-terrorism does not require counter-insurgency and state-building. These missions are prone to failure, expensive, and a source of anti-American sentiment.

New Troops: Expensive and Irrelevant to Iraq

The troops will be expensive: from 2007-2013, they will cost $108 billion more than what would otherwise be spent. They will cost roughly $15 billion annually thereafter. The initial costs buy new infrastructure, sign-up bonuses and training. The recurring costs are salary, benefits and the operations and maintenance of the new units.

That is not all. As long as the army continues to experience recruiting difficulties, expansion requires lowering induction standards. Quantity degrades quality. And because the four services' shares of the defense budget have been nearly fixed relative to each other since the Kennedy administration, it may prove politically difficult to expand the army without increasing the defense budget for the other services.

The new troops will not help Iraq. The time needed to train and recruit the new personnel means that the effort will not be complete until 2012 and none of the troops will be available before 2009.

If not Iraq, what are the new troops for? The army, including its Reserve and National Guard, and Marine Corps include about 1.2 million troops. About 500,000 are combat troops. Even if the United States still has 25,000 troops in Afghanistan in five years, and a similar amount preparing to rotate there, plus 75,000 troops stationed in Europe and Asia, we would have ample forces to defend against the unlikely prospect of Iranian or North Korean aggression. Those states' militaries together cost less than $7 billion annually. Aggression by either would provoke local rivals of equal or greater strength. Russia is troubling, but the days of worrying that it would overrun Europe are gone. The European Union, with a GDP larger than America's, can defend itself in any case. Whatever one fears about China and Taiwan, there is nowhere for an army to fight over the Taiwan straits.