Re: US Withdrawal From Afghanistan.

Per this article, the US force presence in Afghanistan is too small to make much of a difference at all, and withdrawal won’t have much impact on what happens there. Budget cuts are at work here, the size of the Army is retreating rather than growing, and funds that might have gone to support a stronger and well-trained force are under the budget knife.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/27/the-force-is-still-too-small-army-chief-says-and-afghanistan-withdrawal-wont-really-help/

From the article:  Ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan won’t be of much use to Army planners sweating the size of the force, as fiscal constraints loom large over the service in the coming years.

The Army’s end-strength growth, once expected to top 500,000 active-duty soldiers, has slowed to a crawl in recent years and currently sits at roughly 485,000 troops.

“This is the same size Army that we had on 9/11, and when I take a look at what the requirements are, when I take a look at what historically we needed, and now that we’re in a time of great power competition, I’m very, very concerned about the size of the Army,” Chief of Staff Gen. James C. McConville said during a Tuesday discussion at the Center for a New American Security.

Much of the strain on the Army’s size comes from the combatant commands, where soldiers make up the bulk of military personnel deployed across the world. But the impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility, won’t make much of a difference.

“The number of troops in Afghanistan is really not a significant amount,” McConville said when asked how the withdrawal would factor into end-strength woes.

Growing the Army also doesn’t appear to be happening in the current fiscal environment, unless the service cuts into readiness and modernization funding. – article

This does logically beg the question re: why we were there in the first place, but we’ve been there for such a long time, I don’t think it matters much any more.

Category: 2020 Election, Afghanistan