Over the past decade, after Afghanistan and Iraq went from overwhelming victories to exhausting occupations, a narrative emerged in Time magazine, on CNN, and in other journals. It asked why we needed 150-million-dollar air superiority fighters when our enemies were insurgents who were lucky if they had a pickup truck, and bemoaned that in a world of subterfuge, drone strikes, and special forces teams attacking terrorists from helicopters, the United States military was still built around defending Western Europe from the Warsaw Pact. War was changing, the narrative went, and the military was too conservative and obstinate to adapt to the times.
With the current Crimean crisis, such sentiments are looking premature.
Now there's a new narrative, in which our idealistic president's foreign policy strategy and a reduced military budget have left our military ill-prepared for this sort of crisis. Even if we don't end up actually fighting Putin, the critics say, a strong, capable military would give us a bigger bargaining chip as we try to resolve the situation, or may even have been enough to avoid it entirely.
Of course, this narrative could change again in an instant, if for instance Afghanistan or Iraq implodes and we get dragged in to run a counter-insurgency all over again. But it does present a dilemma: what is our military for? What foe should it be designed to battle?
A vast juggernaut of a military isn't all that useful when fighting terrorists or insurgents, since they're hard to deter, aren't interested in a fair fight, and typically so ill-equipped that sending tanks against them is cost-inefficient overkill. If we want to continue the "War on Terror," or foresee a need to clear out the next Taliban from somewhere (or the previous Taliban from Afghanistan, again), then we'd be better served by a mobile military supported by good on-the-ground intelligence. More drones, less F-22s. More elites, less National Guard guarding other nations.
On the other hand, if we plan on lining up on the other side of a border from someone like Russia or China, we're going to want as many men, with as many big guns, as possible. In this case the military's nostalgia becomes far-sighted, as we maintain a military capable of fighting another great power, an army more interested in defeating the enemy and driving them from a territory than in occupying and policing that territory, or scouring a region for insurgents.
But which scenario is more important? Which is more likely?
There will always be terrorists somewhere, and often in places that threaten our (more odious) allies, so there would always be something for an anti-terror Army to do. And anti-terror campaigns are easy to get into since they're not "real" wars, can happen with or without the cooperation of the host government, and in some cases can go on without officially happening. On the other hand, terrorists are small fry who can cause death and destruction, but not nearly on the scale of a proper military, or even certain acts of nature.
Conventional, great power wars are as old as nations, and can cause mayhem several orders of magnitude above the likes of Al Qaeda. As a consequence, considerable effort is made to prevent them from happening, leading to the irony of a state possessing a large, expensive military that it hopes to never use. On the upside, the threat of force can often be just as useful as the use of force, so that even an "unused" army can prove a wise investment. And of course if you have a nearby neighbor with a big conventional army, you'll probably want one of your own just in case, even if you'd rather be chasing terrorists somewhere.
The third option would be to combine the two, muster a big army to find in the field, and also support elites to run counter-terror operations. But that may not be practical when Congress can barely pass a budget, much less a balanced budget.
In a way, the Crimean Crisis is refreshing. It's making us question how we've been using our army, and really our foreign policy focus ever since 2001. Maybe now we'll be less concerned with what a terrorist with a car bomb can do, and more with what a tyrant with a state can do. Maybe instead of trying to ensure that no one, anywhere, can ever attack a US citizen or ally with explosive undergarments, we could try to create a world where a country can't occupy and annex territory. We thought we'd done the latter some time ago, but evidently we were distracted by the exploding underpants.
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