Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to Pre-World War II Level

[melm00se]

21. While I am not a big fan of an over the top level of military spending

The USA has made the mistake of over shrinking the military in the past.

Prior to both World Wars, the US military ended up far behind the curve, militarily. when the need to employ the military, it took a couple of years to bring htem back up to speed.

During WWI, the US military did not have a single modern military aircraft and had to borrow/buy modern aircraft from their allies. Additionally, the US Army entered WWI without fully functioning modern automatic weapons and their training was well behind the norms required for combat.

During the interwar years, the US military's only truly modern warships were the USS Saratoga and Lexington (both built during the early 1920's). In both cases, their aircraft were (at the beginning) modern but soon fell behind the quality of aircraft being produced by the looming Japanese threat.

With the advent of the Great Depression, the quality and training gap increased and that gap was acutely felt in the early days of WWII. The US Navy was outclassed by the IJN and the army was outclassed by the Wehrmacht in Northern Africa.

It can be argued that the lack of equipment and training cost American lives unnecessarily in 1942 and 1943.