Today, something happened that hasn't happened in seven years. A country (Cuba) was officially removed from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Since we're at war with terrorism, this bears directly on how large the military should be. I have come up with a formula that I think should determine the size of the Army for as long as the Global War on Terror continues.
In an imperfect world like ours where there isn't a general agreement on conventional weapons, we may need the Navy and Air Force to remain at their present size (much larger than any of their plausible opponents) to deter other major powers. The Marine Corps insists on being smaller and more elite than the Army. Therefore, the chief area in which we have strategic and budgetary flexibility, as well as the service that does the lion's share of the actual fighting and dying when we invade a country, is the Army.
My formula is that the number of Brigade Combat Teams (each of which comprises three maneuver battalions and four support battalions, about 4,500 men) in the Regular Army (troops who are active duty for their whole enlistment) should equal the cube of the number of State Sponsors of Terrorism. The number in the National Guard should not vary. This means that when the War on Terror began, with 7 state sponsors of terrorism, we should have built up to 343 Brigade Combat Teams on active duty. The world is clearly much more peaceful today (in part because we didn't go out and fight everyone on the list, only the people we hated the most).
There are currently 32 Brigade Combat Teams in the Regular Army and 28 in the National Guard. While there were still four State Sponsors of Terrorism, I believed the Regular Army should expand to 64 BCTs, but now we are down to Syria, Sudan and Iran. The number of Regular Army BCTs should therefore be reduced to 27. I would recommend doing this by reducing the number of brigades in each armored and cavalry division to 2 and leaving the other divisions with 3 BCTs.
With a smaller hammer, fewer of the world's problems will look to us like nails. It is clear the Army under this schedule would not be big enough to occupy Iran, let alone Syria, Sudan and Iran -- which is part of the point. If we get a more general deal with Iran that allows the resumption of normal relations (unlikely under present conditions), we would be able to reduce the Regular Army to 8 BCTs.
Even if diplomacy led to a situation where we had 0 BCTs in the Regular Army, we would still have our nuclear deterrent, the conventional part of the Navy and Air Force, the National Guard, the Marines, and Joint Special Operations Command (whose Army troops are not organized as BCTs). We would in short still have the most expensive and impressive military in the world. But we would not have a military that any sensible person would argue was capable of occupying a mid-size country more or less by itself, which would also lead us to actually work with and listen to our allies if a situation arose in which we had to do that again.
My long-term goal, after India becomes the most populous country in the world in ten years, is to have a global treaty (the general agreement on conventional weapons referred to above) where each country is allowed to spend on its military based on its population. This would not be a rigid dollars-per-head structure. Rather, the Indians would keep spending $25 billion a year, the Chinese would spend $24.9 billion, we would spend $24.8 billion, and so forth. If the Chinese broke the treaty to spend $50 billion on their military, and the Indians responded by spending $40 billion, we, as the world's third most populous country, could build up to $39.9 billion. At that point the Navy, Air Force, National Guard, Marines and SOCOM would have to get a lot smaller and we would begin radical cuts to our nuclear weapons. The thing is, all those things are much less useful in today's world for getting your way, even on matters such as regime change, than global opinion, spy agencies, transnational structures and non-governmental agencies are. It takes soft power to change the minds of a people so they don't get a hard-on for killing your people. It worked with the Soviet Union and should be given a chance to work with all our other "enemies."