The head of the US Army in Europe has made it clear that he does not want current US Troop levels on the continent to drop below what they already are, as the lack of more soldiers has made it difficult for exercises with European Allies. These exercises are crucial in building strong connectivity among the different armed forces allied against global terrorism, and it is the shared knowledge in combat, tactics, and intelligence that can give the US and its allies a leg up against groups like Al Qaeda.
The Army currently has 42,000 troops stationed in Europe, but that number could be reduced by another 10,000 by 2012 as part of a plan put in motion by former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. His ideas about making the military “leaner” have been shown as flawed with the current demand for even more troops in Afghanistan as stated by President Obama earlier this week.
This supposed “new” style thinking by Rumsfeld would have been fine if he had a) increased the budget put into USSOCCOM to help fight the new threats of terrorism, b) made proper assessments as to the amount of soldiers required to complete the jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan (something that is highly unpredictable and fluctuates rapidly). In retrospect, cutting troop levels during a time of war is a preposterous idea that would take years to come to fruition as a “leaner” model of the military. This could have been better done at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, when the US experienced nearly a decade of relative calm abroad. What is needed to meet the current situation is a retention of all troop levels, so that the year long deployments of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq does not have to be lengthened by months in order to cope with the apparent lack of fresh, readily trained replacements. Conventional troop levels are needed as a sort of peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and Iraq, where numbers are necessary to keep vast stretches of land (and the people who inhabit them) under control.
