Is 450k the bottom? Some more details about the next 40k cut to our Army.

COL Charles Williams I believe we are going to lose a lot of valuable combat experience and trained individuals that would have made a difference in the future (just my 2 cents). I believe that these numbers will have to be brought back up again the future (that is my gut feeling). I hope that I'm wrong, but gut tells me that this world will not sit back and become a peaceful place overnight. As we continue to move back into our shell, the terrorist will continue to gain background that we worked so hard to gain over the last 14 years. That is already evident. I'm not a warmonger, but I'm big fan of taking the "big hurt" to the enemy in their backyard and keeping our yard very safe. I see this a lot of these cuts as political moves to balance the budget and decrease government spending. In my opinion it has always been the easiest way for the government to get back down to reasonable levels of spending. I think the 2nd and 3rd order affects are increased unemployment for military service members with great skills, same for the civilian positions that go away and jobs, decreased revenue for cities that support the bases where the cuts are going to take place, lost revenue in defense contracting for those businesses that thrive off the increased war efforts (more lost jobs and communities affected), and the list goes on. Why don't we work on fixing government spending on entitlement programs like we cut the defense spending and other useless spending through supplements to legislation? Hope I didn’t rattle on too long!

Barring another war, I expect to see an active end strength of close to 300,000 within the next 10 years. Many will tell me that this is impossible, because those numbers are just too low. True, but irrelevant. Politicians legislate impossible things all the time. The mantra will be "technology makes ground forces obsolete." Again.

In the "best" case outcome, the active Army will be split between a highly deployable array of QRF-type organizations, with little forward basing but a lot of expeditionary-type deployments and an institutional training/cadre force with the goal of being able to quickly fill those needed billets when the SHTF. In this best of all possible bad worlds, there would be a very robust reserve force with multiple tiers of readiness, all the way from Reserve units that drill twice a month to guys who go to basic training, and then straight into the IRR with a monthly stipend.

For all those that say that the above cannot happen, probably not. But it would be better than what I think will happen....

No Sir, looks like we are headed for 420 or even 400. The only way that I don't see these numbers dropping this low is if we get engaged in another entirely different conflict or war.