Sir,
Sorry that I don't have a bunch of time to devote to a lengthy response, so I'll just present two sides of the coin. The first side is what are the requirements. Here's a thread which I know that which you've seen but may not have had the time to read what these experts had to say (the testimony addresses the size of the ground forces).
http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/uni...th-levels.html
The other side of the coin is what can we afford. Here's a article that addresses this,
Foreign Affairs - The Underfunded Pentagon - Martin Feldstein. I've attached a .pdf copy of the article.
Quote:
Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. military capabilities were suffcient to protect the United States and its allies. For many decades, the United States has been the global leader in military spending, and it continues to be so today. In the current fiscal year, U.S. defense outlays will total roughly $550 billion, reportedly more than the defense expenditures of the next 40 nations combined. Yet this spending is probably not enough to ensure the security of the United States—and for something as critical as national security, even “probably enough” is inadequate. Handling the new threats facing the United States will require a significant rise in defense spending; the real questions are how much more is needed, what the new funds should be spent on, and how the money can be raised.
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Despite these needs, U.S. national security expenditures today remain low relative to national income (the best measure of a nation’s capacity to spend). Defense spending is now 4 percent of gdp, including the funds for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.Without those operations, defense outlays would now be about 3 percent of total economic output, whereas in 1962, before the Vietnam War, defense spending was 9.3 percent of gdp. By 1979, that percentage had been cut nearly in half, to 4.7 percent, in order to
make room for the growth of domestic social programs. Defense spending rose rapidly during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, rising to 6 percent of gdp by 1986—a trend that helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War led to the so-called peace dividend in the 1990s, and by 2000, defense spending had fallen to just 3 percent of gdp.
Foreign assistance programs, meanwhile, only amount to 0.3 percent of gdp, essentially where they have been for most of the past 40 years.
Although the new threats confronting the United States imply that more funding for national security is in order, there is no way to say precisely what percentage of gdp should be devoted to it. The appropriate level of outlays can be determined only through a detailed budget process that examines each potential use of funds and arrives at an aggregate figure. But to frame the discussion about how an increase could be financed, it is useful to consider the 6 percent figure achieved during the Reagan years as a specific target.
Returning to that point would require devoting an additional 2 percent of gdp to defense. The United States clearly could afford to do so if it wanted to. Since real gdp can be expected to grow by about 15 percent over the next five years, a 2 percent rise in the share of output devoted to defense would account for only about one-sixth of this additional national income. The decision to increase national security spending is therefore a question of politics and budgets rather than available resources.
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The bottomline is that we can afford more defense spending and a size increase, so politics is the limiting factor.
As far as Talent's denial of the need for more concentration on counterinsurgency, I think that he's wrong. His oped didn't really address this, other than to say that he's against it, so I can't comment point by point against his views. However, there are many who state that the GWOT is really a war against a global insurgency being waged by the pan-Islamists. Thus, we need to build the intellectual (mostly cultural) capacity to wage that war. It's not a matter of smarter tanks or helicopters in this war, but simply, people skills based on a knowledge of how to exploit those people skills. Look at failed states, which are the incubators for terrorist sanctuaries, and that's where we'll need to operate. A glaring oversight IMO by Talent.