His opinion:
If we’re planning to cut-and-run from Iraq and hunker down, then we don’t need a bigger Army. (The problem isn’t holding onto the troops we’ve got — As Army Secretary Francis Harvey said when we interviewed him, recruitment and retention are going well. That’s a separate question from the one of how big an Army we need, but I’m afraid that if we stress the troops we’ve got too much, retention will slide, something we discuss in that interview; Harvey was sanguine, me not quite so much.) My own preference would be for a bigger Army than we’ve got, so that the stress on the troops will be lower, and we’ll have more capacity in case we need it in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Administration hasn’t seemed to feel that way. I’m a lot less of an expert than the people running the Pentagon (I hope!) but it seems to me that returning the Army to its pre-Clinton Administration size isn’t such a bad idea.
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