The Pentagon announced yesterday that it would shrink the U.S. Army to pre-WWII levels. It’s about time.
They say that generals always fight the last war. The
Pentagon has rendered that an understatement. They’ve been refighting WWII for almost 70 years, accomplishing very little in the process. Of all its military adventures, the Korean War, which remains a stalemate after six decades, is the best it has to show for trillions in debt and tens of thousands of lives.
That the Korean War was a success is a matter of opinion. Rather than containing Pyongyang, there is a good argument to be made that the U.S. presence on North Korea’s border is what has kept that nation’s communist government in power. It would seem no coincidence that the only other truly communist regime is Cuba’s, against whom the U.S. has taken a similar stance.
Even giving the Pentagon Korea, it must be measured against the unmitigated disasters in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. A decade hence, the latter two will be viewed in much the way Vietnam was by the 1980’s.