Lt. Col. Ralph Peters said on Hannity last night that these proposed cuts the Army would be worse than pre-WWII levels and that they would make the Army incapable of fighting a major war:
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 logisitical, 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.