Pentagon’s budget, as advertised, touts a new strategic vision -- and a major reorientation of U.S. military forces. It anticipates a reduction in ground forces, a withdrawal of heavy Army units from Europe, and a shift in the military’s focus toward Asia. Above all, it favors agile (and, therefore, more easily deployable) special operations forces and the advanced air-and-space power that makes them so lethal/.../
Perhaps most important, by planning to cut 100,000 ground forces as it increases the size of (and reliance on) special operations forces, the Pentagon sends an unmistakable signal about the wars it thinks it will fight in the future. It obviously does not foresee long, manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns. “Much of [the Rumsfeld plan] is strategically sound, just as it was before the Iraq war put those initiatives on the back burner,” says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “But you run the same danger of designing a force for the kind of war you want to fight. As Secretary Rumsfeld discovered, the enemy gets a vote in that.”