Chris Bray: Concerning the War Historian Who Knows Nothing About the Military

Chris Bray, at Histori-blogography (6-28-05):

In the National Review this week, Victor Davis Hanson dismisses claims that the U.S. Army is facing a critical personnel shortage."Our current debate," he writes,"is not properly a military one, since the American armed forces are performing exceptionally well in Iraq and probably have enough aggregate strength to re-deploy to meet foreseeable crises elsewhere. Given our size, material wealth, and underutilized resources, we could easily expand or contract our military as we see fit."

Note from the real world: At the age of 37, I am currently inprocessing as an infantry soldier called back from the Individual Ready Reserve, the first line of the military's inactive reserve force. Joining me here are a captain who has been out of the Army for nine years, a retired lieutenant colonel who looks to be in his late fifties, and a large group of enlisted soldiers who have been living as civilians for several years and are in many instances significantly overweight and out-of-shape. Most of the enlisted, and all of the officers, are in the combat arms. We are being housed alongside a set of barracks being used as a holding facility for soldiers injured in Iraq who are convalescing, limping around the day room and the dining hall with titanium rods where tibias and fibulas used to be.

Note, as you read Hanson's essay (and it's worth reading the whole elusive thing), that he never mentions how"we could easily expand or contract our military as we see fit." Note also that he seems not to have ever figured out that military expansion has a significant lead time due to training and infrastructure build-up.

So here we have a war hawk who insists that we can march on unproblematically, with plenty of bodies in uniform to do whatever job needs doing. But his diagnosis is obtuse, and his prescription somehow never makes it to the page. Shockingly, we yet again have an empty piece of chest-thumping vagueness from Victor Davis Hanson, who purports to be a historian of war but appears to know nothing at all about the military.