As the military strategist Andrew Exum recently wrote, "No one can clearly spell out what the U.S. Army is meant to do in the current threat environment and why its current share of defense budget makes sense." Exum notes that the two big growth areas for the Army are training foreign militaries and special operations, especially in counterterror settings. But counterterror efforts will be largely carried out by Special Forces -- whose numbers remain steady in the current budget -- while training is a much more modest and less glamorous role than war-fighting, and one that the Army does not particularly enjoy.

 The Army, which devotes immense resources to thinking about and imparting matters of doctrine, is trying to find its way in this new environment. The service's big thinkers are engaged in an exercise called "United Quest 2012," which is designed to figure out a way forward and, not incidentally, offer strategic grounding for the Army in what are bound to be increasingly fierce inter-service budgetary battles. According to reports from recent United Quest seminars, officials are "peeved" to have been excluded from AirSea Battle, but also "looking for something like that." I spoke to Ricky Smith, a senior civilian official with the Army's Capabilities Integration Center -- a big-think site at Fort Eustis in Virginia -- who said, rather hopefully, that AirSea Battle is still only a "concept," and may never make it to the status of "doctrine." In fact, the centrality of the Navy and Air Force to preserving security in Asia and the Persian Gulf is firmly established.

In any case, as Smith noted, "wars pick you" and not the other way around. You don't, that is, usually fight the wars you expect, much less intend. And that's the real reason why a (mostly) defensive power with global obligations needs a large standing army. The Army is a hedge against uncertainty, against what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to call the "known unknowns." What if a war breaks out over access to oil in West Africa, or natural gas in Central Asia? Sounds unlikely? So did a war in Afghanistan until it wasn't. You need insurance. But how much do you need? This is a matter not only of cost but of plausibility: While it is very easy to imagine small-scale conflicts in these or other settings, a war involving 100,000 soldiers, like Iraq or Afghanistan, is highly unlikely.  The Strategic Guidance stipulates that America's armed forces must be able to win a war in one region while blocking an "opportunistic aggressor" in another. This still seems like a lot of insurance. And it's instructive that while the Army will be pared back to pre-9/11 levels, the Army Reserve and National Guard are being preserved from cuts. They constitute, in effect, a hedge against the hedge.

For all the caterwauling we're bound to hear about the current round of cuts, which amount to $485 billion over the next decade, there are probably more to come. The failure of last year's bipartisan deficit-reduction panel triggered automatic cuts of which about half, or $500 billion, will be apportioned to the Pentagon. It's unlikely that all of that can be avoided. In that case, President Obama may find himself asking the same questions about the Army that so many military experts have. Andrew Krepinevich, no dove, suggests that the Army may settle at 450,000 troops. That sounds like plenty. The Army had better come up with some good answers.

PREVIOUS 12