Last week, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth announced a plan to cut 5% of the U.S. Army’s total strength, or roughly 24,000 soldiers. This is a remarkably large reduction given the state of global affairs, which includes increasing aggression from all of America’s adversaries and two full-scale wars involving allies.
This number, when accounting for the addition of 7,500 cybersecurity and air defense billets, corresponds to the Army’s recruitment shortfall — roughly 15,000 soldiers a year for the past three years. Perhaps Wormuth, the Army’s top political leader, is responding to politics and is purposefully lowering the bar in hopes of finally reaching a recruiting goal during President Joe Biden’s administration.
The cut itself is not the most alarming aspect, as there are certainly rational arguments to be made about the overall size and efficiency of the force. But the details of the cut defy logic and prudence. Wormuth and her team of advisers have elected to cut Special Operations Forces, armor, and engineers, which are some of the most in-demand warfighting capabilities in Israel and Ukraine. Viewed through the lens of contemporary conflicts, the 5% cut is detached from current battlefield realities and represents wishful thinking about how wars might be fought in the future.
Wormuth’s plan will see U.S. Army Special Operations Command lose 3,000 soldiers under the justification that she is positioning the Army for full-scale conflict and “away from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.” This statement, likely a deflection, shows a complete misunderstanding of the role of irregular warfare in great power competition. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are, in fact, two components of irregular warfare, and there is no way to cut units that specialize in counterinsurgency or counterterrorism without cutting from America’s ability to conduct irregular warfare, an area in which the U.S. has lagged behind our adversaries. The CCP’s maritime militia in the South China Sea, the Wagner Group’s operations in Africa, and Iran’s use of proxies to attack U.S. forces with near impunity, are all forms of irregular warfare. A sound strategy for great power conflict would recognize that many of our actions will take place under the irregular warfare umbrella, and the Defense Department should invest heavily in units with these missions.
Army engineers will face some of the deepest cuts in Wormuth’s plan, a strange and dangerous move since NATO is advocating a renewed focus on trench warfare training. The battlefield in Ukraine is lined with trenches, minefields, and even rows of dragon’s teeth. These are all obstacles built by engineers. The units responsible for breaching them are, as expected, also made up of engineers.
Simultaneously, in southern Israel, Israel Defense Forces engineers have now cleared, collapsed, or flooded several hundred miles of tunnels. These tunnels were built by terrorists and are a reminder that counterterrorism is far from over. IDF engineers are breeching blast doors, sealing tunnel entrances, and reducing ordinance caches daily. All of this suggests that the role of engineers in modern warfare has not diminished but rather is becoming more complex than ever before.
Additional cuts are also set for armor units, mostly in Cavalry and Stryker brigades. This contrasts drastically with the Biden administration’s own talking points on Ukraine aid and Ukrainian pleas for armored assets. Armor was one of the top problems in the lead-up to Ukraine’s 2023 summer offensive, and now, many experts have cited the low numbers and late arrivals of U.S. Abrams and German Leopard tanks as reasons for Ukrainian underperformance. And in Gaza, Israel has shown the world the value of armor in urban operations, leveraging the mobile strongpoint a tank offers in complex environments to clear dense cities systematically.
The planned cuts do not make sense. The only logical argument relates to recruitment shortfalls and the difficulty the Biden administration has in inspiring men and women to serve. In fact, recruitment shortfalls are concentrated in combat arms units, so much so that the Biden team may be suggesting cuts to combat capabilities rather than solving problems it has created.
There is plenty of fat to cut in the Army, literally and figuratively. Yet none of Wormuth’s planned cuts touch overstaffed areas such as human resource technicians, career counselors, equity directors, or even the thousands of civilians working in the Pentagon (gasp).
The Biden team is working to cut warfighting capabilities at a time when they are needed most. The Defense Department needs to find a better and cheaper strategy for protecting units and assets from drone attacks, but it must not come at the expense of true warfighting capabilities. If it does, we will be rejecting what we know to be true about the unchanging nature of war and engaging in wishful thinking about what the next war may look like.
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Garrett Exner is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, a member of the advisory council at Veterans on Duty, and a former Special Operations officer in the United States Marine Corps.
