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.
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
Am glad that I don’t have any stock and bonds in the arms industry.
Those RIF/ERB/QMP boards are gonna be extra frisky. The mid career guys are thinking ‘aw fuck’.
BOHICA!
I spent 22 months in AFG as a DOD civilian between 2011 and 2018…
Never noticed a change to the Afghani lifestyle during each of my 4 deployments…
I only did one year there and left convinced that most of the people there cannot be made civilized.
^Word^ API. You can’t civilize people who don’t want to be civilized. History is replete with examples. We wasted way yonder too much American Blood and Treasure there. GTFO!
This is starting to resemble another fine period in the Army when another dim bulb dem was in the white house. I’m talking about the peanut years. Cutting every fucking thing for just the sake of saying they are making cuts. At the same time bloating the hell out of the deficit with so called covid relief spend spend spend bills.
Old Tanker
We need ZOMBIE REAGAN for 2024!!!!
Or Trump & DeSantis