Most of the military services are hoping to get smaller, as the Army, Navy and Air Force seek to slash thousands from their rolls.<\/p>\n
The Defense Department budget request unveiled April 4 asks for Congress to cut about 25,000 positions from the military services, which would bring authorized end strength much closer in line with current manning levels.<\/p>\n
The $813 billion budget request is the largest in history, up more than $17 billion from last year, but its goal \u201cis not about making the force bigger,\u201d comptroller Michael McCord told reporters April 4. \u201cThat is not what \u2026 our review concluded we needed to do. We\u2019re looking at making the force more capable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Army and Navy would shrink by more than 5,000 currently serving troops if the proposal is enacted as is, losing about 3,000 and 2,000 service members, respectively. The Air Force wants to drop around 5,700 active duty airmen by the start of fiscal 2023.<\/p>\n
Overall, the military could draw down by more than 10,000 troops, though the Marine Corps and Space Force would see a small bump. The new authorized end strength could come in at 2,122,900, down from 2,147,540 in 2022.<\/p>\n
The Army\u2019s request to drop its active duty end strength marks a new direction for the service. In 2017, after planning to draw down, the Congress authorized the service to grow, from 460,000 to 476,000, with an eye toward 500,000 active duty soldiers by 2022.<\/p>\n
But that goal proved difficult to reach, as recruiting pushes fell short of goals. The Army topped out at 486,490 in 2021, before falling to 476,000 currently.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the same size Army that we had on 9\/11, and when I take a look at what the requirements are, when I take a look at what historically we needed, and now that we\u2019re in a time of great power competition, I\u2019m very, very concerned about the size of the Army,\u201d Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said in April 2021.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Me too General. It’s not like there’s a land war on-going in Europe or China flexing their might in the Far East.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeff LPH3 sends in this Military Times piece on how the latest Biden Administration Pentagon budget … Biden continuing to shrink the military<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[518,237,236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biden","category-big-pentagon","category-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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