Immediately following President George W. Bush’s announcement that he would send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, newly appointed defense secretary Robert Gates called for an increase in the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. But while the world’s attention is focused on the additional troops, an underlying problem is festering.
In 2000, the Bush campaign promised that “help was on the way” after several years of lean defense budgets under the Bill Clinton administration. Despite a sizeable increase in defense spending to handle the War on Terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the core defense budget has increased little, raising questions about the military’s capacity to carry out its manifold responsibilities around the globe. Is the troop increase adequate for the wars the military is fighting and the global strategy it has adopted? Moreover, what are the resource problems facing the other services?
Join AEI scholars Gary J. Schmitt and Thomas Donnelly, editors of the newly published Of Men and Materiel: The Crisis in Military Resources (AEI Press, 2007), and the book’s four contributors as they discuss these and other questions.
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