If your policy is to "lead from behind," i.e. "follow," I guess you don't need a robust, ready military:
Plans to cut 40,000 troops from the U.S. Army over the next two years will result in the lowest number of active soldiers since before America entered the Second World War.
Both domestic and foreign posts will be affected and the number of civilian employees could be reduced by 17,000.
The cuts would reduce the active-duty Army from its current size of about 490,000 soldiers to around 450,000 at the end of the 2017 budget year.
[. . .]
In 2013 it was argued in budgetary documents that going below 450,000 troops might mean it would not be able to win a war, USA Today has reported.
That "not be able to win a war" part is just a little troublesome, no? Certainly we were able to gear up pretty good and pretty quickly for World War II, but I doubt we could today, espeically without a draft, which Americans are in no mood to reinstate. Perhaps they would change their minds if we truly faced a major threat to national security, but I wonder. Past administrations, of both parties, have squandered their trust by involving us in all sorts of escapades that had nothing to do with our safety.
And I know there's nothing magic about 250,000 or any other arbitrary number, expecially considering how the nature of war is evolving. But somebody has to have done some work to match our resources with our responsibilities and intentions, so we don't have to do the equivalent of taking a knife to a gun fight, and who believes this administration has done that? They just want to downsize the military because they think America having too much power in the world is a bad thing.
