A Bigger Army

The President says he wants to increase the end-strength size of the Army. What to think? One point to note is that this is a longstanding Democratic Party idea, something backed by John Kerry. Is it actually a good idea? The answer is that it depends.

In a world without tradeoffs, a larger Army would certainly be useful. Life, however, is all about tradeoffs. A bigger Army is a more expensive one: "Army officials have estimated that for each addition of 10,000 soldiers to the force, it would cost about $1.2 billion." One can easily imagine worse things to spend $5 billion on than adding 40,000 troops to the Army, but one can also imagine better things. The Kerry campaign's proposal was to pay for the troop increase by scaling back spending on national missile defense. That would be a good idea. Similarly, any additions in troops that can from scaling back or canceling weapons systems like the V-22 Osprey, the Virginia Class Submarine, the DD(X) Destroyer, the F-22 Raptor, or the size of the American nuclear arsenal would be a good idea. Reasonably independently of specific ideas about foreign policy it makes sense to shift military spending away from hardware and toward quantity and quality of personnel. Likewise along these lines, if we end our deployment in Iraq in 2007 rather than in 2009 or 2012 we'll save hundreds of billions of dollars that would be better spent on enhancing the Army's manpower.

Conversely, simply borrowing additional money to further increase the Defense Department budget or reducing the budgets of other agencies to increase the Defense Department budget is not an appealing option. We should be changing America's security-spending priorities to better-suited the contemporary world, not increasing the overall scale of our spending at a time when America's objective security from foreign threats has rarely been higher.

Comments

All these thoughts are spot-on. But one concern that should be faced squarely is the one summed up in the saying that when you have a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. If we weren't bogged down in the epochal, catastrophic strategic blunder-of-choice called Iraq, would America's military look so inadequate in size? We already spend magnitudes more money on defense (and/or offense) than any other nation (or menu of nations) in the world. Do we really want to encourage our worst Kaganesque patriotic-gore instincts by buying ourselves a yet bigger hammer? I think not. It's our ambitions and delusions that need to be real-sized, not the size of our military. We may need to expand our manpower for a couple of years if we decide to stay in Iraq, but that should not necessarily be thought of as a great wonderful thing that should perforce be made permanent.

Posted by elle loco | December 20, 2006 9:47 AM

One can easily imagine worse things to spend $5 billion on than adding 40,000 troops to the Army, but one can also imagine worse things.

Wha?

Posted by right | December 20, 2006 9:55 AM

The second "worse" should read "better".

Posted by Vance Maverick | December 20, 2006 9:56 AM

"Army officials have estimated that for each addition of 10,000 soldiers to the force, it would cost about $1.2 billion."

I'd like that number fact-checked. Sounds waaay to small to me. That only works out to $120k per soldier. I've read training alone costs far more than that.

Posted by Jasper | December 20, 2006 9:58 AM

the size of the American nuclear arsenal

Does decommissioning nukes cost money or save it?

Posted by Consumatopia | December 20, 2006 10:00 AM

Does decommissioning nukes cost money or save it?

It costs money to do, but those are one-time expenditures and it reduces operating costs etc. over the long run. Exactly how much money we spend on this or that in FY2007 isn't really the issue, the question is the steady-state level of defense spending and what we get for that. Shifting resources away from strategic nuclear weapons and toward soldiers makes sense even if we need to spend some extra cash up front.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | December 20, 2006 10:15 AM

News accounts differ on the recruiting situation in the military. We hear they're hitting goals but also hear tales of markedly lowered standards and fudged numbers. Will they have to sweeten the offer to get additional troops to sign up? I'd imagine recruits are like oil, each additional unit exponentially more expensive to procure. Might that 1.2 Billion$ per 10,000 troops added be a lowball or wildly unrealistic number? You're going to have to have military recruiters permanently ensconced in every high school in America, giving them their own office next to the principal to hit these new numbers. So, the military is going to have ever lower admittance standards, spend rapidly increasing sums of money, intrude deeper and deeper into our schools and homes and struggle mightily to add to standing forces. All this while ill advised wars chew through thousands of current soldiers and hundreds of billions worth of equipment, arms and ammunition. The skin is a little thin on this balloon in my estimation.

Posted by steve duncan | December 20, 2006 10:22 AM

$120k per soldier per year is about right, all in - salary, pension costs, medical, food, accommodation, equipment, etc. It sounds a little low - in the UK it's about £100k per man, or close to $200k - but that may be a result of economies of scale working for the (much larger) US army. Certainly it's roughly correct.

If you're thinking "but I've heard that a trained infantryman represents an investment of $600k or something" - that's potentially also correct, if you reckon that it takes more than a year to train him, and you're also paying for his two fellow recruits who wash out during training.

Posted by ajay | December 20, 2006 10:23 AM

Increasing the size of the army is a terrible idea and I hope the Democrats resist it. The only rationale you can make in favor of it is that, if you have a really idiotic strategy, and we do, then you need a larger army to sustain that idiotic strategy.

What we need to do is adopt a smart strategy which will actually allow us to decrease the size of our army as well as our overall military expenditures.

Posted by Jim W | December 20, 2006 10:27 AM

Sadly, the "bigger army" theme seems to be right on the brink of becoming official Beltway theology, with next to no serious discussion of what, exactly, the bigger badder army is supposed to do. Fix Iraq somehow, I guess -- though of course nobody has a convincing argument for how that's going to work.

I'd rather see our "leaders" discussing whether an independent Air Force is still a useful organization. Fun cost/benefit trivia: The U.S. Air Force consumes half of all the fuel used by the federal government. All by itself.

Posted by sglover | December 20, 2006 10:28 AM

What we need to do is adopt a smart strategy which will actually allow us to decrease the size of our army as well as our overall military expenditures.

I think this is seriously mistaken. You could (and should) expand the end-strength of the army in the context of a shrinking defense budget. The Pentagon's budget should be cut because much of it is not very useful. A relatively large Army is useful and isn't responsible for the bulk of defense spending.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | December 20, 2006 10:32 AM

Elle Loco and Jim W have it right. ALthough you may need to have 40,000 extra soldiers to make a Bushite foreign fractionally less painful for Americans (worse for everyone else), there are problems. An economist might point out some of these by rephrasing the question (Jim Henley-style) to 'Is it worthwhile to take 40,000 young men and women out of economically productive pusuits and spend a great deal of money to train them to kill foreign people efficiently and blow things up'?. Answer: doubtful.
And as elle says, having thousands more people available whose sole function is killing other people to achieve foreign policy goals may bend foreign policy to the killing-people side of things, which is already too popular.

Posted by JohnTh | December 20, 2006 10:51 AM

"In a world without tradeoffs, a larger Army would certainly be useful."

Really? Maybe the beast that should be starved is our military forces. When neo-cons have a large Army, then they can't resist the temptation to use it somewhere, just for the heck of it.

Posted by dogfacegeorge | December 20, 2006 11:07 AM

"A relatively large Army is useful.." - M.Y.

Useful to who? And when? The only useful thing an even larger army could do (and right now it is already VERY large) is more successfully occupy countries, though it will be of little use to Iraqis by the time we are able to train and field it years down the line. And where exactly are these new soldiers going to come from when the Army has had such a brutal time keeping numbers just steady? Prisons?

The other question is, why would you want a larger military? Do you plan on more large-scale occupations in the immediate future? Our current military is far beyond adequate for defending our nation, our allies, and 'force projection'.

We do not need more troops and we do not need more spending on the military. Neither will even act as a band-aid for our real problems: that we need responsible people making foreign policy decisions, and an informed citizen body that can act if they don't.

Posted by Matthew C | December 20, 2006 11:08 AM

I can't help but feel like the Democrats mostly agitate for a larger military so they don't look "soft on defense." Nobody wants to be the target of another Zell Miller keynote address.

Posted by Steve | December 20, 2006 11:11 AM

What about humanitarian intervention? We would need a larger army to be able to do any of that anytime soon. We can't expect India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to carry the bulk of the burden forever.

Posted by Reality Man | December 20, 2006 11:15 AM

There's also the matter that $5B dropped into State's budget would probably do a heck of a lot more for our standing (and thus security) in the world than 40,000 more people in the Army. And of course $5B into the FBI would presumably give them more than the six expert speakers of Arabic they presently have, with the concomitant security benefits. More of what isn't working now is not a good prescription for success.

Posted by Doug | December 20, 2006 11:52 AM

Reality Man, there is no way the US would initiate a 'humanitarian intervention' that required more soldiers than we already have. That would imply a huge amount of violence that no President would put the Army in the middle of. Kosovo, for example, was a *relatively* small conflict. Yet Clinton was totally unwilling to send ground forces for fear of US soldiers getting killed. It was never seriously on the table. There is no way a President would inject the US into a crisis bloody enough to require hundreds of thousands of troops purely on hummanitarian grounds. Not Clinton, not Bush, not Carter, no one.

Posted by Matthew C | December 20, 2006 11:53 AM

If you're thinking "but I've heard that a trained infantryman represents an investment of $600k or something" - that's potentially also correct, if you reckon that it takes more than a year to train him...

That's precisely what I was thinking -- hence my suspicion that the quoted price tag is misleading.

Posted by Jasper | December 20, 2006 12:03 PM

The figure is 1.2 billion a year as quoted by the Washington Post this morning.

Posted by Cal Ulmann | December 20, 2006 4:09 PM

My understanding is that increasing the size of the Army (or the armed forces overall) will require Congressional action and a Presidential signoff. While everyone in Congress wants to be seen as tough on terror, increasing the size of the Army may be too much for them. And President Bush would likely see his approving on an enlarged Army as an admission of failure. We have seen how he takes to that sort of thing.

In Iraq, we are seeing just how little use our technological edge provides in counter-insurgency. Attack helicopters aren't much help in the streets of Bagdhad. Neither are M-1 tanks. Both provide very attractive targets for rpg squads. Ask the Israeli's about how Hezbollah fighters swarmed Israeli tanks.

Programs like the new sub and new jet fighters add nothing to our ability to fight the kinds of wars we seem to be headed for in the future. And, our current hardware seems more than adequate to face down any other nation on earth for the forseeable future.

Put the money into an approach that won't require such a long tooth-to-tail ratio.

Posted by zak822 | December 20, 2006 5:29 PM

I stand corrected! I see on Josh Marshall's blog that President Bush has embraced the Democratic notion of enlarging the Army.

Let's see if anyone can actually follow through on it!

Posted by zak822 | December 20, 2006 5:36 PM

Before getting into dollar for dollar comparisons, get into the messy details. There are deep and very important issues ignored here, mostly and understandably, to a degree, out of convienence.

To start, there is the bit Matt Y leaves out when citing the cost of +10,000 Army: the 2006 cost is a $500m increase over the $700m 2001 cost. By any measure that's significant. A large part of this increase, although not the entire increase, is due to increased recruiting costs, which a recent CBO report go into some depth on. Ever consider why it costs more to recruit? Hold on to that thought for a moment.

Second is the cost of the “surge” force of contractors, providing manpower when the military comes up short. These are, however, ad hoc resources that do not fit into any sort of planning or sizing metric as a GAO report released this week details. This potentially 100,000 shooters in Iraq -- only a small percentage of which are now US or UK by the way when they used to make up a hefty percentage when the number was closer to 20,000 -- are not included in any planning, COIN or otherwise, and most notably in the recent discussions on upsize the Iraq force. Further, these "temps" cost more per man through multiple layers of contracts, loss of institutional memory, and increased per diem charges. Use of these contractors insert distance from command and control for any strategy that might exist, among many other reasons.

Getting into FCS-type expenditures (which the Army is already slashing now that the Witch is dead) would help but Matt Y doesn’t go there. Instead he’s looking at weapons systems that may or may not provide to be of replacement value to our forces that are wearing out equipment... a careful analysis is necessary and modular systems, like the DD(x), are finding new uses. However, low hanging fruit that are more easily picked are out there that really add to the real bottom line, which is more about quality than dollars that's missing in this discussion.

After all, the 10,000 troops that cost an addition $500m today are, on average, of lower quality than in 2001 by the standards of the military’s own recruiting command.

It isn’t just about numbers, which a trade-off framed as you do, implies. There is a trade-off, but it is messier and perhaps murkier because it is about fuzzy ideas of quality and not just quantity.

Posted by MountainRunner | December 20, 2006 6:40 PM

Let's be realistic. Table 1 from the World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (http://www.state.gov/t/vci/rls/rpt/wmeat/1999_2000/) indicates that in 1999, in a non-war situation, and 7 years ago, the cost per serviceman was $189,000 per year. Sure, at some point the incremental cost is low, but at the 40,000 level?

Also, the cost of deploying and supplying those 40,000 soldiers in Iraq has to be above the average cost.

Posted by Chicagoan | December 21, 2006 2:30 PM