Sharp on defense budget: We’re taking risks with ground forces, so it would be prudent to plan for ways to rebuild them

Best Defense is in summer re-runs. This item originally ran on March 5, 2014.

One of the best people I know on analyzing the defense budget is Travis Sharp, and he delivers as usual in his new brief. He concludes that the United States is taking some risks by cutting its ground forces, and so should study different ways to regenerate ground forces quickly. Given this situation, Sharp, who lives up to his surname, writes:

DOD could add more substance to the debate by studying transformative models for generating ground forces, including a progressive- or tiered-readiness system. Tiered readiness has a bad reputation because it is often blamed for past U.S. military failures. However, critics often overlook the fact that these failures had many causes, including significant strategic errors by civilian political leaders.