The larger point here is that constraints in general should be seen as opportunities for innovation. Budgetary matters aside, think of the Boland Amendment in the 1980s, which restricted the American presence in El Salvador to 55 military advisors. In the midst of a bitter civil war being waged in our continent's most densely populated country, these advisors hugely improved the quality (and behavior) of the Salvadoran military, and came up with a counterinsurgency strategy that turned the tide of battle and helped lead to a durable peace and the establishment of a vibrant democracy. More recently, similar political and other constraints have limited the American military to sending only small detachments of special operations forces to the Philippines and Colombia -- yet they have done profound good in both places with their highly innovative ideas.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America, the need to respond swiftly in far-off Afghanistan led to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld championing another bold approach: setting loose just 11 Special Forces A-teams -- about 200 sets of boots on the ground -- in the company of indigenous Afghan fighters of quite mixed quality. The result was an amazing victory, the toppling of the Taliban in a few short weeks once the Green Berets were deployed in battle. That the occupation of Afghanistan went awry later on, and that large surges of troops did little to end the war, should be seen simply as testament to the fact that too many resources may impede the kind of creativity called for in such settings. We were at our best, our most inventive, when our forces were the insurgents, operating on a shoestring.
So embrace the call for defense budget cuts in the same amount as called for by sequestration, but reject the meat-ax notion of applying reductions equally, across the board. There are more skillful ways ahead that will emerge in the wake of reduced resources -- perhaps a whole new way of war to be revealed. For the Byzantines, such creativity took the form of creating a 6th century version of the modern armored division. For the Reichswehr, it took the form of deep thinking about the implications of technological change and the need for rapid "expandability" of the force. For the U.S. military, the lessons of recent experience suggest an ever greater awareness of the need to move from forces made of a few large and expensive things to a force comprised of many small, nimble, networked parts.
The answers will reveal themselves. All they wait on is the "call for the question" to be stimulated by the requirement for additional defense budget cuts.
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