Bush to increase size of Army and Marine Corps, now let's all wave goodbye to the RMA

With the news that President Bush wants to increase the size of the military, this leads to some interesting questions.

First of all this would seem to suggest that the Rumsfeld/Revolution in Military Affairs doctrine is dead at least for the moment. At least until the knee-jerk "we need to get back to real fighting" argument takes place internally after Iraq and possibly Afghanistan failles.

It will be very difficult to do any sort of meaningful expansion while engaged in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Canadian Forces are considering how to do an expansion and apparently has been very blunt when discussing it with the Prime Ministers Office that this will be impossible in the short-term [one to three years] without first stopping the Afghan assignment.

Now I'm sure someone out there is going to mention the American buildup after Pearl Harbor however this was done without any real reference to a budget or civilian economy. Basically if they wanted something odds are they received it. Considering the American political climate at the moment it is unlikely that the same sort of leeway would be given for a crash program. This is probably another example of what could have been done after September 11 by the Bush administration but wasn't. Many commentators have pointed out that if the administration wanted they could have asked the impossible mainly increased taxes.

It will be very interesting.

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