Dr. Eowyn:
Here’s the answer to Trail Dust’s post of Feb. 25: “Try to find anything on military cutbacks.”
~Eowyn
Originally posted on Consortium of Defense Analysts:
In a speech outlining the administration’s proposed defense budget, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that after more than a decade of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military leaders no longer plan to “conduct long and large stability operations.” It is time to “reset” for a new era (whatever that means), and so the Pentagon plans to scale back the US Army by more than an eighth to its lowest level since before World War II.
What the scaling back will mean:
- In numbers, that means shrinking American forces by 13%, from 520,000 active duty troops to between 440,000 and 450,000, the lowest manning levels since 1940, before the American military dramatically expanded after entering World War II. The Pentagon had previously planned to downsize the ground force to about 490,000. But Hagel warned that to adapt to future threats “the army must accelerate the pace and increase the scale of its post-war drawdown.”
