It happened after World War II and it happened after Vietnam. Now, after years of repeated deployments, the Army, as Robert H. Scales writes the U.S. Army is breaking down.
The Obama administration just announced a 40,000 reduction in the Army’s ranks. But the numbers don’t begin to tell the tale. Soldiers stay in the Army because they love to go into the field and train; Defense Secretary Ash Carter recently said that the Army will not have enough money for most soldiers to train above the squad level this year. Soldiers need to fight with new weapons; in the past four years, the Army has canceled 20 major programs, postponed 125 and restructured 124. The Army will not replace its Reagan-era tanks, infantry carriers, artillery and aircraft for at least a generation. Soldiers stay in the ranks because they serve in a unit ready for combat; fewer than a third of the Army’s combat brigades are combat-ready.
Scales knows of what he writes. He is a retired Major General and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College.
And he can still recall how, when he was a boy, his father – who was an army officer – told him of the U.S. Army paid a price, in Korea, for being unprepared:
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