How big the cuts?
MAX BOOT, who seems never to have met a use of American military force he didn't like, is worried about Barack Obama's vague new military strategy. America's forces are to be lighter, as one war (Iraq) has ended and another (Afghanistan) is to be wound down. Most people would think such reductions, in both dollar and head-count terms, make sense.
Not to Mr Boot, who takes a look at historical reductions in forces in his article "Overspending the Peace Dividend". Each cutback, he argues, has left America unprepared for future conflicts. Here are the numbers he cites, in terms of percentage reductions after a major conflict:
Revolutionary war: 71%
Civil war: 95%
First world war: 91%
Second world war: 88%
Korean war: 31%
Vietnam war: 43%
Cold war: 38%
Those are indeed some striking numbers. Could Barack Obama be thinking of reducing the forces by 95%? Or even 43%? 31%? There are no hard numbers from the Pentagon yet, so Mr Boot trails his own: he has heard that the army (not the rest of the forces) will be cut from 569,000 to 490,000, or by 14%. Somehow, especially in light of this, I don't think the new Obama strategy runs the risk of a foreign army putting Washington to the torch.
