The Shrinking Army, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #355 | @MDWorld

January 20, 2014 Mike Gold 1 Comment

The latest round of budget cuts call for a 100,000-person reduction in troops by 2019. As expected, the Pentagon is whining that we won’t have enough ground fodder for enemy bullets in case we actually get involved in a major war that involves humans fighting one another on battlefields.

Our military culture understandably drips of history and tradition… but nostalgia is another matter. Nostalgia does not win wars. These days, the people who win wars are 17 year-olds in an underground bunker in Kansas holding game controllers that would be beneath Sony’s dignity. And those kids are being made obsolete by the even less-expensive squadron of 12 year-old MIT graduates who hack into other nations’ computers and wireless communications to fight the good fight with a more limited risk of American blood loss.

This is progress, and no, I’m not being cynical. If we’re going to put the next generation of voters in risk – and we always do – it’s better to do so behind a legion of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Michael Bay movies will become an important part of modern boot camp.

Still, the Pentagon bitches. That’s their job. The Pentagon has little to do with the military and a lot to do with politics… and even more to do with bureaucracy. We would be left with a mere 420,000 troops. We don’t yet know whom we’re likely to invade between now and then, but the past 20 years have indicated we won’t need as many Sgt. Rocks as we will need Col. Furys.

Those without the financial or political imperative don’t necessarily share the Pentagon’s opinion. For example, responding to the question “is 420,000 troops enough,” American University professor and former high-ranking government budget official Gordon Adams told USA Today “Who else that we are going to fight in a ground war has 420,000 soldiers. Silly, really. Of course we can.”

Perhaps the more important question is, who’s got the better computers and the better satellite systems and the better computer nerds? Somebody’s professional nerds are going to win the next war.

There’s another consideration of some importance. Let’s fool ourselves into believing the 100,000 person reduction in troops would come down evenly between 2015 and 2019 and, therefore, we’d add 20,000 to the unemployment roles each year. By way of comparison, the number of unemployed persons declined by 1.9 million (1.2 percentage points) during the past year – I’m not going to play the “how many were people who just gave up looking for work” game because that has been a consistent issue throughout our history. Subtract 20,000 from 1,900,000 and, rounding off, you’ve still got 1.9 million unemployed. This does not appear to be a significant problem.

Perhaps the best way to deal with the situation is to go ahead and reduce our armed forces by 100,000 – off the top. Get rid of those military politicians and bureaucrats, keep the men and women who truly know how to protect our nation in a 21st Century war, and look at how we’re likely to conduct ground wars after 2019 and make our adjustments accordingly.

That, too, is progress.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.