Even the Imperialists are upset with Imperialism on the cheap

In the WaPo LA Times today Ronald Brownstein tells us Even Bush's Most Loyal GOP Soldiers Alarmed by Strain on Troops.From the neocon think tanks to the halls of congress they are upset with what they see as Bush/Rumsfeld destroying the military.

Conservative defense analysts and GOP legislative leaders are raising alarms over the pressures that Iraq is imposing on the military, especially the part-time Army National Guard and Reserve. With growing urgency, these critics argue that the Pentagon is relying too heavily on the citizen-soldiers of the Guard and Reserve in Iraq because the administration has refused to enlarge the size of the full-time military enough to meet new demands.

"The problem for the United States is not imperial overstretch, it's trying to run the planet on the cheap," American Enterprise Institute fellow Tom Donnelly, a leading neoconservative defense commentator, wrote recently. Military historian Frederick W. Kagan delivered a similar indictment in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine.

Most strikingly, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) this month urged an increase in the active military and condemned lengthy deployments that he said were compelling Guard and Reserve volunteers to effectively "serve in the permanent forces."

These dissents signal an important shift in the political weather as Bush begins his second term. Until recently, complaints about the Pentagon's personnel strategy came from Democrats and a few maverick Republicans such as Sen. John McCain of Arizona. But it's a more ominous sign for the White House when a GOP leader such as Blunt, ordinarily a loyal soldier for Bush, breaks ranks.

The National Guard, so important when there are disasters here at home, is being decimated.

In Iraq, tens of thousands of Guard and Reserve members are serving much longer overseas missions than had been common for reservists. About one-third of active-duty Army troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have served a second tour of combat duty, a previously rare burden. Thousands have been presented with "stop-loss" orders that prevent them from leaving the military when their commitment is completed.

Yet the need in Iraq is so great that Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan, says the Pentagon may need to send some troops back for a third tour next year if the U.S. doesn't significantly reduce its presence by then. One senior military official recently disclosed that the Pentagon was already considering rewriting Guard and Reserve rules to allow longer tours of active duty than the current 24-month maximum. That trial balloon helped trigger Blunt's unusual public complaint.

"I'm absolutely confident it would contribute to further deterioration of the Guard and Reserve," he said.

Not surprisingly in this environment, the Army National Guard failed to meet its recruiting goals in 2004. And although the Army Reserve met its quota last year, it too has fallen short in recent months. Looking down the road, the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, recently concluded that the military was too small to meet the global commitments America was assuming.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

And it all boils down to the one thing that is really sacred to George W.Bush, Tax Cuts.

Now, critics ranging from Blunt to Korb to Donnelly say the Pentagon should enlarge the Army and increase the number of active-duty troops trained for nation-building activities. Blunt won't put a number yet on the increase he wants. Korb says 86,000, and Donnelly believes that even more are needed.

The problem is that every 10,000 active-duty soldiers cost the Pentagon about $1 billion a year. Blunt says Congress could fund a larger military by cutting other spending. But with Washington already confronting huge budget deficits, it's difficult to see how the U.S. could afford a much larger military without raising taxes, as it has done every other time the nation fought a major war.

Yet Bush is moving in the opposite direction with tax cuts that have reduced federal revenue in each of the last two years to less than 16.5% of gross domestic product. Taxes haven't been that low for two consecutive years in more than half a century.

Those numbers highlight the fundamental contradiction between Bush's expansive vision of America's mission to bring democracy to the Islamic world and his crimped approach to funding the government that must implement it. By failing to provide means to match his ends, Bush is violating the classic test of statecraft that columnist Walter Lippmann laid down in World War II: "bringing into balance the nation's commitments and the nation's power."

But there is little hope that things will improve any time soon.

One way to restore equilibrium would be to retrench the nation's commitments, starting with a withdrawal from Iraq. There's little chance Bush will take that route. But neither has he been willing to adequately fund his goals.

That imbalance is forcing the burdens of his foreign policy onto soldiers who are asked to do too much because there are too few of them to share the load. The reservists too long from home and the enlisted soldiers too long under fire measure the cost of a military too small for its missions and a tax cut too large for its time.