Fitting the Military to Reality

By Rajan Menon, Rajan Menon, a New America Foundation fellow, is a professor of international relations at Lehigh University.

At a congressional hearing July 7, the Army’s new vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard A. Cody, answered the rhetorical question of whether U.S. military forces were stretched too thin with a resounding “absolutely.”

It doesn’t take the genius of Clausewitz to figure out what’s obvious: With 135,000 troops assigned to the war in Iraq, 17,000 in Afghanistan, 37,500 in South Korea, 47,000 in Japan and 100,000 in Europe, saying that we are overstretched is putting it mildly. In all, there are 368,900 U.S. troops in 120 countries.

Some drastic steps have been taken or……more