As part of the Obama administration’s plan to effect cuts in defence spending, the Pentagon is gearing up to propose the reduction of the US Army to its smallest size since before World War II and scrapping a class of Air Force attacks jets.
Citing unnamed Pentagon officials, The New York Times reports that Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel’s proposal would ensure a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations such as the ones that the US resorted to in Iraq and Afghanistan. “You have to always keep your institution prepared, but you can’t carry a large land-war Defense Department when there is no large land war,” the paper quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying.
With the US set to complete its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the year-end, the Obama administration is apparently keen to press ahead with its goal of bringing about military spending cuts in the face of a protracted fiscal challenge.
From a post-9/11 peak of 570,000 troops, the Army would drop to between 440,000 and 450,000 in the coming years, the Times report said, noting that this would represent the smallest number for the Army since 1940. That was just before the massive mobilisation for World War II that touched a peak of about six million troops by the time the war ended in 1945.
The cuts proposed by Hagel are said to fit the Bipartisan Budget Act reached by President Obama and Congress in December to impose a military spending cap of about $496 billion for fiscal year 2015.