When the Truth Hurts. Is the US Not Up to the Job?

For some time, we have argued on these pages that the US military is too small. The money spent is for grandiose expensive systems, when we need troops, not billion dollar bombers. We start missions that domestic politics will not support. Every decision is made by looking at the political calendar. That is happening this morning.

Is the US too divided to be a steady force in the world? The only time that changes is when we are attacked and put on defense, and then it appears to last for fifteen minutes.

The US has not won a decisive HOT war since WWII. That my friends is sixty one years ago.

There is a very sobering blunt edititorial in this mornings Telegraph. I highlight the main points and pose a very serious question. Is Niall Ferguson right? If so what do we do about it? If not,tell us why. This should make you angry.


There are 300m Americans, but still not enough to rule the world

By Niall Ferguson Telegraph

• Before the First World War, the population of Britain was 46 million, barely 2.5 per cent of humanity. And yet the British were able to govern a vast empire that encompassed an additional 375 million people, more than a fifth of the world's population. Why can't 300 million Americans control fewer than 30 million Iraqis?

• Just why is the world's third-most populous country so short of boots on the ground? The obvious answer is that, considering the size of the US population and the Pentagon's vast budget, the American military is a remarkably small outfit. In 2004, the total number of Department of Defence personnel on active duty was 1,427,000, substantially fewer than the country's 2 million-strong prison population.

• The number of troops currently in Iraq is less than 140,000. That's roughly as many soldiers as Britain sent to the same country to defeat an insurgency in 1920 — at a time when the population of Iraq was a tenth of what it is today.

• Donald Rumsfeld, we now know, who repeatedly dismissed expert advice that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to ensure the stability of post-war Iraq. It was he who insisted on downsizing the military, at the very time when there would have been safety in numbers.

• American foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics, in the form of bureaucratic in-fighting and electoral manipulation, explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the outset, been so chronically undermanned.

• The United States was unlikely to be as successful or as enduring an imperial power as its British predecessor for three reasons: its financial deficit, its attention deficit and, perhaps most surprisingly, its manpower deficit. Rather cruelly, I compared the American empire to a "strategic couch-potato… consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line [and] inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings".

Ouch!