Don’t Cut The Army In 2021
The post-COVID budget crunch – and the need to grow seapower and airpower for a Pacific contest with China – make it all too tempting to cut the Army. But that would be a grave mistake, warns retired three-star general Tom Spoehr.
By Thomas Spoehr on January 04, 2021 at 8:00 AM
Every December, we ask our favorite experts and insiders to help us forecast the year ahead for the Defense Department. This year, the Heritage Foundation’s Thomas Spoehr – a contributor to our pages and a retired Army lieutenant general himself – offered such a passionate defense of the Army’s embattled modernization program that we decided, with his permission, to run every word:
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Thomas Spoehr
2021 is shaping up to be challenging for the Army. Recent years have been hard enough. The Army’s budget has been flat since fiscal 2018, which means that, in real terms, it has suffered a decline of over $13 billion in buying power when considering inflation. These pressures have already forced the Army to make tough choices, including constraining end strength growth, chopping procurement quantities, and paring non-essential programs. In essence, the Army has already been in a budget-cutting mode for the last three years.
https://breakingdefense.com/2021/01/dont-cut-the-army-in-2021/
