So Obama is whittling down our Army even more than it already is, cutting 40,000 soldiers over the next two years before he leaves office:
YAHOO NEWS – The US Army is to cut 40,000 soldiers from its ranks over the next two years at home and abroad, a defense official said, in a move that will raise doubts about its ability to fight wars.
Under the cost-cutting plan, the Army will be down to 450,000 soldiers at the end of the 2017 budget year, even though in 2013 it argued in budgetary documents that going below 450,000 troops might mean it could not win a war, USA Today said.
By comparison, the Army swelled to 570,000 men and women during the peak of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the newspaper said.
Some 17,000 civilians working for the Army will also be laid off, the official told AFP, confirming the USA Today report.
The paper quoted a document it had obtained and said the cuts are being made to save money.
It will affect virtually every Army post domestically and abroad, USA Today said
Lt. Col. Ralph Peters agrees with the 2013 assessement, saying this last year which couldn’t be more relevant right now:
I’m getting a little tired of hearing that inaccurate comment about going back to pre-WWII levels, 1940. It’s actually worse than that. Because if we go back to the 440k or 450k troops we had in 1940 – well in 1940, an infantry division, for instance, had a much smaller tail, far less overhead, fewer systems to be maintained, smaller staffs. That division put a lot of riflemen up front.
Today an division equivalent, the brigades, they’ve got this incredible and important tail – this logistical, medical, intelligence technical infrastructure and it puts a lot fewer riflemen up front. So if you go down to 440k -450k or lower, you’re going to have an Army that not only is unready and incapable of fighting any major wars, and may even strain to fight a mid-size war, it’s going to have less than a 100k actual shooters in that Army.
This morning Peters weighed in on these cuts, saying they are doing this to preserve the F-35 program, a program he says is only meant for major wars, not fighting ISIS. Also he says it’s too expensive and it doesn’t work anyway. He argues that troops fighting on the ground are worth a lot more than this program: