How’s this for painful irony: Right as the Army leaves Iraq and begins to leave Afghanistan following a decade at war, it’s gearing up for intense bureaucratic misery. That’s because even the Army’s alumni argue that the looming cuts to the defense budget should slice the ground service particularly deeply. But on Monday, the Army leadership signaled it won’t give up its budget without a fight.
It’s not that Army Secretary John McHugh and new chief of staff Gen. Raymond Odierno don’t accept that the defense budget is on the block as part of an overall deficit reduction package. It’s that they don’t accept the idea that the Army should be chopped deeper than the Navy, Marines or Air Force.
“I’m operating [under the presumption] that it’s one-third, one-third, one-third,” McHugh told reporters at the Army’s annual D.C. gala, known as the Association of the United States Army convention. McHugh’s referring to something known in defense budget circles as the “Golden Triangle”: the idea that cuts to the defense budget ought to be split equally amongst the Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force. “If that changes,” McHugh added, “it won’t be because I suggested that.”
But even retired Army generals suggest that the “Golden Triangle” be broken. Last week, the Center for a New American Security released a budget blueprint specifically endorsing deeper cuts for the Armythan the other services. Its report, penned under the imprimatur of ret. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, justified those deeper cuts on an assessment that the threats of the future will primarily be dealt with through air and sea power, with some special operations forces sprinkled in the mix.
The Army’s riposte is as sharp as it comes in defense-speak: That’s pre-9/11 thinking.
“When I was a brigadier general in 2001 on the Army staff, I heard the same thing we’re hearing today: We’ll be technology-driven, we’ll be driven by air and sea forces and we don’t need a ground force and we need to reduce the size of our ground force,” Odierno told reporters. “We have to be ready for unknown contingencies.”
McHugh was even blunter. “We heard [these arguments] just prior to September 11,” he added. “We went into Iraq under the rubric of shock and awe. As I said this morning, after we shocked, after we awed, to secure victory, we had to march.”
Neither man spelled out a scenario for another potential land war after Iraq and Afghanistan. But they might not need to. On Capitol Hill and within the Pentagon, it might be enough to give legislators and budget strategists pause about the country’s poor track record of predicting the threats it finds itself facing.
Like its sister services, the Army doesn’t yet know how much the defense budget will be cut. Both Odierno and McHugh warned that cuts larger than $500 billion could be “catastrophic,” in McHugh’s term. They’re launching a wide-ranging review to determine what the Army of the future will look like: What the mix of light, heavy, medium and airborne forces ought to be; what capabilities should fall into the reserves; and how many brigade combat teams will remain after the Army’s total size shrinks. “Everything is on the table,” Odierno said.
But one thing isn’t negotiable if Odierno can help it. “No matter what happens, we’re not going to have a hollow force,” he said. That force might be smaller, and it might not be sized to do as much around the world, but it’ll be “high-quality,” the Army chief of staff vowed.
If Odierno’s caution about a third possible ground war this century proves prophetic — more, in other words, than a bureaucratic strategy to avoid deep budget cuts — it’ll have to be.
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