Military Officer - October 2008 - (Page 54) Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Q. Current wartime requirements have placed tremendous stresses on active duty, Guard, and Reserve forces and families. Whether or not we reduce American forces in Iraq, do you believe we need a larger force to be better prepared for future contingencies? A. As president, I will increase the size of our undersized and overstretched Army and Marine Corps from the currently planned 750,000 troops to 900,000 troops. Enhancing recruitment will require more resources and time but must be done as soon as possible. I will create an Army Advisory Corps with 20,000 soldiers to partner with militaries abroad and increase Special Forces operations, civil affairs activities, military police, and military intelligence. We also need a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse. I will launch a crash program in civilian and military schools to prepare more experts in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, and Pashto; enlarge the military’s Foreign Area Officer program; and create a new specialty in strategic interrogation to produce more interrogators who can obtain critical knowledge from detainees without the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. I will set up a new agency patterned after the erstwhile Office of Strategic Services to draw together specialists in unconventional warfare, civil affairs, psychological warfare, and other relevant disciplines. It would fight terrorist subversion around the world and in cyberspace, deploying infiltrating agents in terrorist states and organizations, and assist in rebuilding failed states. Furthermore, we need to energize and expand our postconflict civilian reconstruction capabilities to complement any military campaign by a civilian “surge” to build political and economic foundations of peace. To better coordinate military and civilian operations, I will ask Congress for legislation to create a framework for civil servants and military forces to train and work together to facilitate cooperation in post-conflict reconstruction. Q. Today’s defense budget is about 4 percent of the GDP. In the past 50 years, in peacetime alone, it averaged 5.7 percent of the GDP. With larger forces planned and the need to replace and modernize hardware worn out by six years of war, won’t defense have to stay at least at 4 percent of the GDP to meet those needs? A. We can afford to spend more on national defense, which currently consumes less than four cents of every dollar that our economy generates — far less than what we spent during the Cold War. But setting an arbitrary proportion of GDP is the wrong way to measure whether we’re spending enough. We need to review the entirety of the defense program, assess threats and our means to manage them across both near and long term, and explore our options for protecting and advancing out interests. We can partially offset some of this additional investment by cutting wasteful spending. Q. Years of war have reminded Americans of the extraordinary sacrifices inherent in a 20- to 30-year military career. Multiple commissions have identified shortfalls in compensation and health care for wounded/disabled servicemembers, families, and survivors, but others have sought to shift more costs to re- [CONTINUES ON PAGE 78] PHOTO: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES 54 MILITARY OFFICER OCTOBER 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.