The review sets forth potentially big changes in U.S. strategy, including, the official said, removing up to 4,000 troops from Europe and downsizing the overall ground forces even further. The 2012 budget request already called for cuts of 27,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines in the next four years, and those numbers could increase.
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Currently, the Pentagon is committed to nearly half a trillion dollars in cuts over the next decade and could be on the hook for another half trillion dollars if Congress does not find a way around automatic cuts that enacted after the failure to reach an agreement on the federal budget.
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The ability to wage and win two MRCs – major regional contingencies, in Pentagon-speak — at the same time has long been a fiction that has been in the interest of the Pentagon and its contractors to maintain. It acts as a floor on just how much of a military we need to buy; if we need X to wage and win one war, it sounds logical that we need double that – 2X – to prevail in two places.
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Former defense secretary and CIA chief James Schlesinger – who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations – declared the two-MRC capability a fable a decade ago, before 10 years of war ground down the U.S. military. “We don’t have the capability of two MRCs today,” he said in January 2001. “We are short in intelligence. We are short in communications…We really don’t have the capability for two MRCs.”

How about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? These don’t really count, Mr. Harrison says. That’s because the Pentagon never actually had to fight them in earnest at the same time. The surge in Iraq peaked in 2008 then started declining. In Afghanistan, US troop levels reached their maximum in 2011