Military Matters: A time to cut -- Part 2

WASHINGTON, May 13 (UPI) -- How can the United States seriously cut its military spending while retaining and improving its national security?

As the U.S. government cuts, it needs to preserve the military's combat units. That means, above all, the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps infantry battalions. Cut the vast superstructure above those battalions, but keep the battalions. Infantry battalions are what we need most for Fourth Generation wars, which we should do our utmost to avoid but which we sometimes will be drawn into, even with a defensive grand strategy.

In the U.S. Navy, keep the submarines. Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships, and geography dictates the United States must remain a maritime power.

Keep the big aircraft carriers, too, though there is little need to build more of them. Carriers are big, empty boxes that can carry many things besides aircraft. Mothball most of the cruisers and destroyers.

Build lots of small, cheap ships useful for controlling coastal and inland waters, and create strategically mobile and sustainable "packages" of such ships. Being able to control waters around and within stateless regions can be important in Fourth Generation war.

Fighter-bombers are largely useless in 4GW, where their main role is to create collateral damage that benefits our enemies. Keep the air transport squadrons and the A-10 Warthog close ground support aircraft, and move them all to the Air National Guard, which flies and maintains aircraft as well as or better than the regular U.S. Air Force at a fraction of the cost.

Reduce the regular U.S. Air Force to strategic nuclear forces and a training base.

In all the services, vastly reduce the baggage train: the higher headquarters, the development commands, the education bureaucracies and the armies of contractors. As Mark Twain said of the male teat, they are neither useful nor ornamental.

Finally, as the United States cuts, undertake reforms that cost little but will make the remaining U.S. forces more effective. Reform the personnel systems to create unit cohesion, eliminate the surplus of officers above the company grades and reduce careerism by ending up-or-out.

Reform tactics and doctrine by moving from the Second Generation of war to the Third, which is to say from French attrition warfare to German maneuver warfare. This requires a change in military culture, in education and in training. The adoption of Third Generation war tactics, doctrine and culture must be real, not just words on paper as it has been in the U.S. Marine Corps.

A program of military reform along these lines could give the United States more effective forces for Fourth Generation wars and such minor conventional wars as the nation might face within a defensive grand strategy than the forces it now possesses. It could do so for a defense budget half or less the size of the current budget.

To the reigning Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, that potential is a threat, not a promise. When the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex's money runs out, it will suddenly become a necessity.

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(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)