The West's military problem on the ground

The US lacks the will to be an effective Great Power (see penultimate para), much less a superpower. The rest of the West is equally unwilling.

Consider: the US, along with various other countries, is engaged in two serious fighting wars now, Iraq and Afstan. The US has just reached a population of 300 million; their regular Army and Marine Corps total some 700,000 personnel.

In the early 1900s, at the height of the "insurgent" phase of the Boer War, the UK had a population of around 38 million--about 13% of the US today with the latter's population just having reached 300 million. Yet the British fielded an army of some 500,000 (all volunteer) in South Africa (with some colonial, including Canadian contigents, as part of their "coalition"; by the way Canada then had a tiny population compared to today and still took 267 deaths in stride).

Put another way, if ceteris paribus US troop numbers in Iraq now were equivalent to UK numbers in South Africa then, on a per capita basis the US would have about 3.75 million troops in Iraq. Absurd of course as a basis for comparison of the military effort needed in very different circumstances (there were many fewer Boers than there are Iraqis), but interesting as an indication of relative national effort.

Note also that the Boer War was--for its time--as controversial in the UK as the Iraq war is in the US (or the Afstan war in Canada), with the main British opposition party, the Liberals, against the war.

Compare again the troop strengths raised by the US and UK for carrying out these controversial and difficult wars with their respective population sizes at the time. And also consider, in light of the number of ground troops they either have or are willing to commit to action, the resolution of the rest of the Western world today. We really offer very little in the face of a large--or even relatively small but very determined--number of local foes willing to fight hard for some time. Suicide bombers just make things worse for us in terms of being unable to bring our greater combat power effectively to bear.

Western countries lack both the numbers and the will to prevail it would seem. It may be time for a fortress strategy simply to defend our homelands. Unless in our military endeavours abroad there are natives--used non-perjoratively--able and willing to fight well alongside us as we try to help them. That just may, with time, be the saving grace in Afstan. But...¿Quién sabe? Surely not Iraq though.

And of course once the war was well underway there were no porous borders the Boers (see footnote 21) could use to their significant advantage.

This column in The Daily Telegraph leads obliquely to similar conclusions.

Back at boots on the ground:

Equally troubling is America's manpower deficit. There is undoubtedly something perplexing about the apparent shortage of American combat-effective troops at a time when the American prison population exceeds 2 million: 14 times the number of American troops in Iraq. Those who warned last year that the force assigned to occupy Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein was too small have since been vindicated. Remarkably, the U.S. military presence in Iraq as I write [2004] is almost identical in size to the British presence in 1920. But in those days the population of the country was much smaller. The British had approximately one soldier for every 20 Iraqis; the United States has one for every 160...

Adapted from the new book Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, published by the Penguin Press. © 2004 by Niall Ferguson.