Critics of the Obama administration's latest plan to cut defense spending and reduce American troop levels, announced this week by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, say these moves will imperil the nation's security - but they had better think twice about the analogies they employ in making their case. For example, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina issued a sharply critical joint statement Tuesday attacking the plan and referring to it as "reminiscent of the years prior to World War II."

If only.

In 1940, the year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army had 243,000 troops on active duty - less than half today's number. As the risk grew of being dragged into the war that had started in Europe in 1939 - even earlier in Asia - active duty forces rapidly expanded to more than 600,000 by September 1941, three months before our entry into World War II. By November 1942, the Army had already mounted an invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch, and the Marines had landed on and were fighting for Guadalcanal. Neither Japan nor Nazi Germany was ever able to thwart the American amphibious warfare concept developed during the prewar years.

The Navy took only six months to recover from Pearl Harbor and inflict a mortal wound on the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway. More important, though, is the agility with which the Navy shifted its whole approach to war at sea - thanks to the prewar ideas of some key innovators. It entered the war with 17 battleships - several of them sank at Pearl Harbor - and just seven aircraft carriers. By war's end, the Navy had more than 100 carriers. Only eight new battleships were built. And the submarine force, which comprised just 2 percent of all naval personnel, accounted for more than half of all Japanese losses at sea.

Thus the pre-World War II American military model is one to emulate, not one from which to shrink. Small standing forces were quite able to scale up rapidly to meet the demands of a major global war. Tremendous agility, the product of intense and creative prewar thinking, allowed shifting technological emphasis away from older systems to embrace new ones - on land, at sea and in the air. Yes, there were some costly early experiences: for the Army at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, for the Marines at Tarawa in the Pacific. But our combat troops and their leaders learned important lessons from these crucibles that helped hone ideas developed during the prewar years, forging from them a tactical and strategic mastery of the highest order. And giving us great leaders whose names will be remembered through the ages: Patton, Bradley, Spruance and Halsey - to name just a few.

How different our recent record has been. Instead of scaling up our standing forces, overcoming hard initial experiences, and innovating, our military was sizable from the start, replete with all-volunteer "professionals," and armed with the Powell Doctrine mind-set of applying "overwhelming force." Yet easy early successes in Iraq and Afghanistan devolved into quagmires. Now American troops are gone from Iraq, al Qaeda is back, and that sad land is burning. The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan teeters on the brink of total withdrawal - the looming prospect being another abject retreat, ceding the battleground to the enemy.

And yet, in the wake of these costly misadventures - aside from the thousands of lives lost and the tens of thousands shattered, the financial toll is upward of $2 trillion over the past dozen years - many somehow see a reaffirmation of the need for a large standing army, and a set of costly new aircraft carriers. The only seeming innovation is the call for more and more aerial drones. But drones can do little to stop the march of al Qaeda and its affiliates, which now operate, beyond Iraq, in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Mali, Mauretania - and other troubled places.

No, the modest spending cuts of some $50 billion that President Obama calls for will not imperil the republic. Indeed, they can more than be made up for by tightening the defense contracting process. A Government Accountability Office report in 2009, for example, noted that the 96 largest procurement projects averaged 40 percent cost overruns - totaling some $300 billion, about the size of the entire defense budget just before 9/11.

And no, the proposed 15 percent troop cut to the standing Army and 5 percent reduction in the number of Marines will not weaken the national security. Today's wars are small and irregular; they can be waged by smaller forces - especially Army Rangers and Green Berets, along with Navy SEALs, some Marines, and Air Force special operators. And if a big war ever again looms, we should simply follow the innovative path pursued in the run-up to World War II - an example to be emulated, not an analogy to be misapplied.