Almost all politicians agree that our military's land forces are stretched too thin. In Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power (AEI Press, May 2008), Thomas Donnelly and Frederick W. Kagan examine what kind of forces we will need, and in what numbers, to meet the defense needs of the twenty-first century. After the Cold War, threats proliferated, and high levels of military readiness were hampered by divergent theories about responding to those threats. "The key point," Donnelly and Kagan write, "is that the U.S. military was redesigned in the 1990s to face numerous possible threats at a time when it was thought that we had no enemies."

The authors expect the United States to face a variety of threats in the future, so they recommend shaping ground forces to respond to "high-end conventional, mid-range counterinsurgency, and low-end counterterrorism threats simultaneously without placing intolerable stress on the military." As for the kinds of forces necessary, Donnelly and Kagan list six requirements: sustainability, robustness, lethality, leadership, partnership, and expansibility. The forces must be adequately equipped and funded (they estimate that a restructured Army would cost $240 billion by 2017, representing less than 1.2 percent of GDP), of sufficient size (a 1 million-strong active-duty land force with reserves of up to 900,000), capable of adapting to current and future challenges, and able to partner with allied forces.

Donnelly and Kagan acknowledge that expanding and restructuring U.S. ground forces will be expensive, but they write that "the cost of failing to do so is incalculably larger." Moreover, "the expansion of the ground forces proposed in this [book], then, is really a floor--that is, the minimum configuration of American land power necessary to mitigate the unacceptable strain and intolerable risk the current force accepts."

For more information about this book, visit www.aei.org/book934/.