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Stardate
20030905.1335 (Captain's log): To further amplify a point made in the previous article: it's always necessary to rebuild the military after a major war.
There's always a substantial turnover of personnel at the end, for one thing. Historically that's often been because of draftees demobilizing, and because historically the military has grown during war and shrinks afterwards. But like any other "reduction in force", you don't always get to retain the people you wish you could.
Equipment gets used up. A lot of equipment gets used heavily and may not be worth trying to keep afterwards. Stockpiles of consumables are consumed, and may have to be replaced.
There's always analysis of the war afterwards, to learn what worked and what didn't, what went well and what failed and why, and what things turned out to be valuable and what turned out to be useless. As a result of that, new doctrine is developed, and the force structure will change as it is rebalanced. Sometimes the command structure changes, too.
The military we have today, especially today's Army, is largely the result of the rebuilding process which took place after the VietNam war and the failed Tehran rescue mission. In particular, analysis of that botched rescue raid showed deep problems in the topmost command structure. The mission had actually been planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the plan which resulted was more concerned with interservice political rivalry than it was with actually solving the military problem. Analysis showed that this was one of the primary reasons why the mission failed, and that led to passage of the Goldwater-Nichols act, which established the unified regional commands such as CENTCOM. That reorganization was spectacularly vindicated in 1991.
Even if we didn't over-use the Army in this war, we'd still have to rebuild the military once it was over, and indeed even as it proceeds. We're already learning lessons, and already beginning to apply them. The concern is whether there'd be enough damage to the Army in the short and medium term (about 5 years out) to negatively impact our ability to continue to prosecute this war, given that there's every reason to believe that it will last decades, just as the Cold War did. Will we reach the point where we need to perform some new military operation somewhere and not actually have the forces to do it? It's conceivable, but it doesn't seem as if we risk having the entire Army become useless in that period. I don't see it getting that bad.
It's not like the Army is going to cease to exist in five years, or have every one of its divisions downgraded and declared not combat ready. It's rather that it won't be as good as it is now, but will still be damned good. And we do have alternatives, especially if our leaders are willing to do things which are politically unpopular, such as to mobilize several Reserve and National Guard divisions.
We'd rather it didn't come to that, though. Irrespective of practical considerations, we'd really rather not abuse the Army, because those people deserve better.
We'd rather have help from other nations, if we can get it. But I don't think we're desperate, and I don't think we're willing to seriously compromise the long term strategy just to get that kind of help.
We always learn from previous operations. Sometimes the lessons are very straightforward. In the aftermath of the bombing campaign against Serbia which ultimately led to the end of years of civil war in dissolving Yugoslavia, we learned that letting umpteen nations all learn about and potentially veto every single mission is a horrible way to run a war. (Especially if one of those nations is France, whose people leaked a lot of the plans to the Serbs and whose government vetoed a lot of targets and later boasted about it to the Serbs.)
The experience in 1991 is usually summarized this way: we won the war but lost the peace. But it was more complicated than that.
For political reasons, it was felt that there needed to be a substantial Arab military contribution to the coalition force. One Arab nation had invaded and conquered another Arab nation, and for non-Arabs to kick Iraq back out of Kuwait was thought at the time to be politically problematic. So a large coalition force got created, which included substantial contributions from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt and lesser contributions from several other Arab nations. But their governments exacted a price for that cooperation: the war would free Kuwait, but it would not depose Saddam.
Many now think that was a major blunder. But President Bush's advisors also counseled leaving Saddam there, and indeed of letting several of the Republican Guard divisions depart intact with their equipment, so that Iraq could serve as a regional counterbalance to Iran. So just as our forces were poised to annihilate the entire Republican Guard, Bush called a halt to operations.
We learned from that experience, too, and one of the lessons was that sometimes the price which must be paid for cooperation from some nation(s) is too great. If getting a given nation on board means sacrificing victory in the war, it's a bad deal.
Certainly the current President Bush, son of the one who made those decisions, is cognizant of that lesson, and so far in the conduct of this war (which, to some extent, resulted from those earlier decisions) the administration has been
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