The battle over the Army's Ground Combat Vehicle isn't only about one war machine and what it may weigh (80-plus tons) or cost ($13 some million). It's just one front in a larger war over the Army's armored heart and its role in the nation's strategy.
As budgets tighten and the military reorients from Afghanistan to the Pacific, the nation can get by with "substantially smaller ground forces," said Andrew Krepinevich, the influential director of the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments. A former Army officer himself, Krepinevich has repeatedly called for cutting the Army in favor of air and naval forces. In particular, he told AOL Defense, out of all the Army's various branches, "armor/mechanized infantry is certainly a bill payer."
While some heavy forces are necessary insurance against the unlikely event of a major ground war, Krepinevich said, he estimated that the Army could safely cut its armored battalions by about 20 percent. Blitzkrieg-style ground campaigns are increasingly impractical in the face of modern smart weapons, he argued, so the Army need not invest heavily in forces to repell them.
"Where would we see a traditional invasion? Maybe in the Korean peninsula?" Krepinevich asked. But even there, "it's not like 1950 where there are hundreds of thousands of North Koreans coming across the border," he said, and the South is now wealthy enough to defend itself without US tank units on the ground. Instead, he argued, the Army should invest in missile defenses, cybersecurity, and other capabilities to support the Air Force and Navy in a long-range "AirSea Battle" against China or Iran.