Defense

The U.S. Army is at the brink. Will budget cuts deplete its forces? Or could it wind up keeping thousands of soldiers? The answer is anyone’s guess. But it’s certainly a challenge for Army leaders, especially when the next big inflection point is out of their hands.

If President Barack Obama is reelected, it probably means the Army will keep up the drawdown already under way from its wartime peak of about 570,000 troops to an end strength in 2017 of about 490,000 — slightly larger than it was in September 2001. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, has said the force must not wind up smaller than that, acknowledging that it’s “on a razor’s edge.” He is keen, however, on keeping a smaller force a high-quality force. “The thing we have going for us is that I believe the Army is in a position of strength,” Odierno told reporters Monday. It’s drawing down with the best-quality, most seasoned force it’s ever had, he said, and it’s doing so with a goal in mind. “The Army, in the end, will be optimized for a broader range of missions in support of the joint force,” he said. It’ll be a force “that can deploy at several speeds, at several sizes and respond to several different contingencies” — capabilities it didn’t have before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Nonetheless, Army leaders have talked about the need to take “an appetite suppressant” and push back plans to buy new helicopters, as well as taking care to fence off the areas they’d try to protect in a worst-case budget scenario: special operations, intelligence and reconnaissance, and space and cyberspace. But the campaign of Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, has made big promises to support the Defense Department if he’s elected. He has said he’d devote at least 4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product to the Pentagon, an increase of billions — or even trillions — of dollars. Perhaps none of the Pentagon’s four services would stand to benefit more than the Army.

Romney campaign officials have said he would stop — or even reverse — the drawdown, with the goal of keeping the Army at around its Iraq-era “surge” peak of about 570,000 troops. The goal, they said, is to avoid what they see as mistakes the U.S. has made as it has demobilized after previous wars, shrinking the Army only to have to grow it again when the next conflict came along. Retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who’s backing Romney, said there was no way to know where the Army would end up but that Romney’s goal was for it to stay flat or grow. “You have seen reductions and planned reductions in end strength. … The number that people frequently toss around is 100,000 [troops],” Franks said. “I don’t know what in the final analysis [the Romney] number would end up to be, but the first thing you do is stop the bleeding and say, ‘In a time of war, what we will not do is have end strength reductions.’