America's Big Military Mistake: Cutting Land Forces Too Quickly

America's Big Military Mistake: Cutting Land Forces Too Quickly

10/01/14

Michael O'Hanlon

Security, United States

Is ground warfare becoming obsolete? History and the present international environment tell us otherwise.

In recent years, ground warfare has again gotten a bad name in the United States.

This is understandable.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been very costly in lives, treasure, and enduring injury—physical and mental—to American troopers and their families.  The outcomes have been mediocre.  As a result, the White House’s 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, backed up by the Pentagon’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, argued that American ground forces would no longer be sized for the possibility of large-scale stabilization or counterinsurgency missions.

Meanwhile, new possibilities in the realm of drones, cyberwar, space technologies, precision strike, and commando operations have led to the contention that ground warfare is perhaps becoming obsolete.  A recent Chief of Naval Operations wrote a paper last year calling for an active-duty Army only half the size of its recent wartime peak.  Ongoing budget pressures, with the pending return of sequestration in 2016, have many defense planners wondering if the Army can in effect become the bill payer for the modernization needs of the other military services.

This debate is understandable at one level.  On another, it is potentially dangerous.  We have seen periods like it before.  In the 1920s, the advent of the airplane was going to make all forms of combat on land obsolete.  That turned out badly wrong.  In the 1950s, nuclear weapons were going to replace traditional ground forces for many missions.  That left the Army unprepared for Vietnam in the 1960s, and it resorted to a firepower-heavy form of warfare that was arguably its least impressive wartime performance in American military history.  In the 1980s and 1990s, fresh off Vietnam, the Army itself decided not to prepare for such counterinsurgency scenarios any longer.  That worked out fine for Operation Desert Storm in 1991 but much less well for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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