Marines out of Iraq?
The plan apparently calls for the Marines to take over the leading role in Afghanistan, where they are currently almost non-existant, and leave the ground operations in the Iraq War to the Army. On the face of it, it sounds like a simpler deployment schedule for both services, but what caught my attention in the report was this piece:
The Marine proposal could also face resistance from the Air Force, whose current role in providing combat aircraft for Afghanistan could be squeezed if the overall mission was handed to the Marines. Unlike the Army, the Marines would bring a significant force of combat aircraft to that conflict.
. . .
Military officials say the Marine proposal is also an early indication of jockeying among the four armed services for a place in combat missions in years to come. “At the end of the day, this could be decided by parochialism, and making sure each service does not lose equity, as much as on how best to manage the risk of force levels for Iraq and Afghanistan,” said one Pentagon planner.
Tensions over how to divide future budgets have begun to resurface across the military because of apprehension that Congressional support for large increases in defense spending seen since the Sept. 11 attacks will diminish, leaving the services to compete for money.
It is a measure of just how dysfunctional the US military is when the debate about how to deploy troops boils down to how certain services can continue to justify their budgets. The Navy and Air Force don't want the Army to get more money than them, even if their contribution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is, shall we say, considerably less. This is, I'm sure, why part of Operation Enduring Freedom, aka the Afghan campaign, includes a naval component to interdict the land-locked nation. A brilliant use of resources.
It comes in large part because the US, and its allies, are trying to fight these wars using their peace-time military forces. There was a time that fighting wars meant massively increasing the size of the military to deal with the threat and then draw back down when the fighting was over. Since the "War on Terror" is designed to be a perpetual war, it needs to be fought with a perpetual military force, which also means perpetual budget battles between services.
So if the Marines take over Afghanistan and the Army leaves, the Air Force is no longer required to be there in any major combat role either. Less combat roles might translate into less pork from Congress for shiny new toys. So the real battle won't be about whether this makes logistical sense, but whether each service still gets their allotment of defence contracts. It should be interesting to see how it plays out.
