Good But Not Enough: Gates Increases The Army's Size Max By 65,000

http://www.spacewar.com/ reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates rose the maximum troop level ceiling for the Army in 2010 by 65,000.

Considering the U.S. Army has a Teeth to Tail ratio of about 12:1, that equates to about 1 combat regiment, or about a third of a division. A good start, but far from sufficient. The initial Quadrennial Defense Review under Bush senior suggested that we have a standing Army of about 12 divisions. For political reasons Clinton brought that down to below 10, with many of those divisions failing to meet the Army's top rating for readiness. So, if that QDR was really non partisan, we are still about 2 1/2 divisions short of where we need to be to even think about occupying a country right.

I fear we will pummel Iran, and they will hit back, and then we will not have enough troops to really deal with a big war, and the edges of American Global Security arrangements will start fraying giving rise to all sorts of problems (North Korea making moves, Russia becoming more aggressive, loss of value in the U.S. dollar, just to name a few bad things we face). Stuff that we are seeing now, just on a bigger and more dangerous scale.

Read more about Gates's plan [HERE].