U.S. willing to assume risks of reduced army
WASHINGTON — In shrinking the U.S. Army to its smallest size since 1940, Pentagon officials had said that they were willing to assume more risk the next time troops are called to war.
But assuming more risk, they acknowledged, meant that more of those troops would probably die.
“You have fewer troops, fewer ships, fewer planes,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said at a Pentagon news conference Monday as he formally unveiled the department’s $496 billion budget for fiscal 2015. “Readiness is not the same standard. Of course there’s going to be risk.”
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also warned of higher risks during a news conference Monday. He said that if additional cuts are imposed under the across-the-board mandatory reductions known as sequestration, “the risks grow, and the options we can provide the nation dra- matically shrink.” He said a smaller Army must serve not only the needs of the country but also provide battlefield support to other segments of the military. “At the end of the day, it’s our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen — America’s sons and daughters — who will face tomorrow’s challenges with the strategy, structure and resources that we develop today,” Dempsey said.
Under Hagel’s proposed budget, the Army would drop to 440,000 to 450,000 troops by 2019, down from a peak of 570,000 during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Army, which bore the brunt of the fighting and casualties in the wars, was already scheduled to drop to 490,000 troops.
The National Guard and reserves, which were costly to train for Iraq and Afghanistan to meet the standards of their full-time counterparts, would face smaller reductions, although the Guard’s arsenal would change to focus more on domestic disaster relief.
Military experts said a smaller Pentagon budget would mean cutting back on training and forgoing repairs for some equipment. If a crisis erupts, they said, the military could still mobilize troops, but they might not be as prepared, at least not initially. “The Army won’t say, ‘You haven’t given us any money to train these guys, we need six months to get there,’ ” if U.S. troops were suddenly called up, said Maren Leed, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’ll send them anyway, and then more of them are going to die. The military will always respond to the need.”