How to determine a national Priority?

You see Senator Lindsey Graham run around telling people to elect him President of the United States because he knows that the choice has come down to paying for butter or paying for a gun. He says that he alone has the bright idea of knowing why America must go for the gun, explaining that without it, an America that remains unprotected will not live long enough to consume the butter.

That is faulty logic, of course, because if you deprive yourself of having butter in the first place, what will you protect with a shiny gun in your hand and a hundred rounds of ammunition in your pocket? You may as well fire one into your head, thus be relieved of the misery that is sure to come when your empty stomach starts creating the sort of complications a weakened body cannot handle when deprived of the nourishment that only butter can provide.

Another fault characterizing the Lindsey Graham logic is the shallow simplicity with which he views all matters of state. This is why, when it comes to discussing these subjects, it is better to look at the work of individuals who display more depth, a sharper intellect and a higher aptitude to handling complex subjects. One of these is Michael O'Hanlon who wrote: “Obama's Military Policy: Down-Size While Threats Rise,” an article that also came under the subtitle: “A deliberate strategy shift to a smaller standing army risks leaving the U.S. unable to fight when necessary.” It was published on October 28, 2015 in the Wall Street Journal.

He goes on to explain what he means by “unable to fight when necessary.” To do this, he bases his argument on a decision that was reached by the Obama administration and confirmed by the Pentagon. It is that America will not, once again, buy what amounts to a rich insurance policy, and pay a prohibitive premium year after year. Such policy would amount to keeping a ground force sized to handle “large-scale prolonged stability operations.”

O'Hanlon tells what that is. He says there are two possible scenarios: (A) a situation that would be in the order of a Russian aggression against the Baltic States or a conflict between the Koreas. (B) a situation that would be in the order of a stabilization mission or one of relief or one of peace keeping ... following a regional war or an Ebola outbreak, for example.

The problem is that he does not explain (1) how relying on a large American ground force rather than a European standing army or the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) will deter the Russians from attacking a Baltic State. (2) Why the South Koreans with a population two and a half times the size of North Korea, and a GDP that is ten times larger … all protected by 30,000 American troops and America's nuclear umbrella cannot defend themselves without another American ground force that is sized to handle large-scale prolonged stability operations. (3) Why a large ground force that is armed to the teeth would be necessary to handle an outbreak of Ebola somewhere around the globe.

Without explaining any of that and despite the fact that he is aware of the argument advanced by the former Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead to the effect that America only needs an army of less than 300,000 soldiers, O'Hanlon calls on the next president of the United States to correct the current situation. To buttress his argument, he relies more on his emotion rather than his intellect – an approach that brings him close to that of the discredited Lindsey Graham.

For example, he says: “That would barely leave it (America) in the world's top 10. The U.S. army is already smaller than those of China, North Korea and India.” He goes on: “That would have been less than half Reagan-era levels and almost 200,000 fewer than in the W. Bush and early Obama years. Such a figure would also have been 100,000 fewer than in the Clinton years.”

What he does, in effect, is invoke the phony sort of pride that comes with saying: “we have a military that's bigger than the other guy's.” Well, this might have meant something in the old days, but not now. How did this sort of pride help the former Soviet Union with its war in Afghanistan? How did it help Israel with its multiple wars on Gaza and Lebanon? How did it help America with its wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq 2?

Undeterred, O'Hanlon goes on to say that the Pentagon is putting all its strategic eggs in the baskets of cyber operations, high-tech air and sea operations, robotics, space technologies and special forces, and then remarks that history suggests they will not be enough.

In fact, what history has repeatedly shown is that modern military operations that rely on large ground forces yield nothing that's worth having. What is curious is that by the time O'Hanlon had come to the end of his dissertation, he realized this much. Thus, he softened his stance before ending the article, saying this: “Each crisis … could require American forces as part of a multinational coalition. This suggests that the Army may not need to grow significantly.” Amen.