For the American Left, there are many reasons to withdraw from Iraq: we’re caught in the middle of a sectarian civil war, the Iraqi government is a perfidious ally, Iraq is a diversion from the real war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and so on. Some of these arguments are strategically shortsighted, others are based on false premises (such as the fact that the sectarian civil war is over in Iraq and bin Laden is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan), but at least they are more or less logically coherent. What makes almost no sense is the proposal that we turn success in Iraq into defeat so that we can “fix the military.”

Fixing the “broken” military is a reliable campaign talking point for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; the Democrats have embraced the idea that soldiers are a new constituency in their Coalition of the Victimized. Obama’s victory speech after the South Carolina primary in January grouped soldiers and their families with “the mother who can’t get Medicaid for her sick child,” the “teacher who works another shift at Dunkin Donuts” and the “Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager for a $7-an-hour job at Walmart.”

The fix-the-military argument was recently made at greater length by the New York Times. On May 18, the paper’s editorialists noted that the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a serious toll on the Army and Marine Corps, wearing down not only people but equipment “at an unprecedented rate.” Well, the loss rates would not have been surprising to the defenders of Bastogne, the armies at Antietam, or the servicemen and women in any other major war, but it is true that US land forces have been asked to do too much with too little for too long.

The question is how we should respond to this fact. The Times and its anti-war allies argue that the remedy is not to expand the force to meet the wartime mission, but to reduce the mission to what a small force can handle, consistent with a decent family life, defense budgets constrained to historic lows and peacetime recruitment and promotion “standards.”

In other words, let’s not fix the problem. Let’s give up.

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The Army and the Marines are indeed under great stress, but, as service leaders, officers, and sergeants-major take great pains to explain, they are far from broken. If anything, the tactical performance and discipline of US forces in the field has improved significantly in recent years. The Iraq surge is a case study of counterinsurgency warfare planned and executed brilliantly. Broken forces do not conduct such operations. From the level of team and squad to supreme command, US forces have adapted themselves remarkably to a war they were not at first ready to fight. In retrospect what is remarkable is how resilient and flexible the all-volunteer, professional force has proven to be.

The compelling reason to reinvest in America’s Army and Marine Corps is not to withdraw and prepare for the “next war,” but to build land forces capable of sustaining and prevailing in the so-called “Long War,” the effort to secure more legitimate governments, and thus a more durable stability, in vital regions like the Persian Gulf.

So what does a Long War land force look like?

To begin with, it’s bigger. Much bigger: We need a total active-duty Army and Marine Corps of about one million. That is almost exactly the same as the two land services were at the end of the Cold War, but it’s a lot more than the total of about 700,000, and much more than the 750,000 called for by the Bush Administration’s plan – a plan, by the way, endorsed by Obama. John McCain has recommended an expansion to 900,000. (So who’s for “staying the course”?)

This larger Long War force must also be durable. This places a premium on active-duty, long-service professionals. Irregular warfare calls for regulars, not conscripts. Those who advocate a return to the draft want to end the war, not win it. The next president should do what President Bush has not: Ask Americans to serve the nation in uniform. This is a matter not only of moral conscience, but military effectiveness. The alleys of Baghdad or the hills of Helmand are not places to deploy draftees. The next president would also be wise to increase incentives for career officers and NCOs. In fact, the greatest career incentives would be to expand the size and modernize the equipment of the force; victory is the greatest reward for soldiering.

The demand for durability also means clarifying, as best we can, the distinct roles of the Army and the Marine Corps. To fix the Marines, first fix the Army. As retired Marine Lieutenant General – and former New York Times military correspondent – Bernard Trainor recently wrote, “Marines have been almost indistinguishable from the Army for the past five years of the Iraq war. Marines repeatedly must supplement our shorthanded Army, which cannot satisfy its assignments unassisted.” Restructuring and repairing the Army will allow the Marine Corps to resume its traditional – and still critical – function as a sea-based expeditionary force. Fixing the active Army would also alleviate the burdens on the National Guard, which is also almost indistinguishable from the active force.

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US land forces must also be flexible forces; in Pentagonese, they must be “full-spectrum forces.” More specifically, it means that conventional or general-purpose units must be sometimes as adept at delivering community services as delivering firepower. Creating unique “peacekeeping” or “advisory” units is both unwise and unaffordable and would distort the structure of the services. Nor, alternatively, is it an option to pretend that irregular warfare missions are not a legitimate, “warfighting” task.

We also need to modernize land-force equipment; technology should be as energetically applied to transform the conduct of land warfare. The difference won’t be seen in better tanks, although we will naturally need new generations of land combat vehicles, but to better link US land forces in a network. The battlefield will not become totally transparent, but it can be made less opaque. And what will still be a small force must make the most of its most valuable assets – the individual, dismounted soldier or Marine whose job it is, in an unfamiliar place and culture, to distinguish friend from foe and whose most important decision may be when not to fire.

Finally, the need to balance strategic risks means that the other services must take on a variety of other missions. These may be part of the Long War – such as providing unmanned aerial vehicle coverage or maritime patrol off the Horn of Africa – or entirely different, such as hedging against China’s growing military power. That, too, is part of facing the world as it is rather than imagining the world as we would wish it to be.

The total cost of an 800,000-strong active duty Army, expanded, modernized, and restructured to the extent that we advocate, would be about $240 billion – a substantial sum, to be sure. Yet the Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2017 – about the year by which, in our estimate, such an expansion could be complete – the U.S. GDP will exceed $21 trillion. Thus, the total burden of the expanded force, by the time the process neared completion, would remain at less than 1.2 percent of the projected GDP.

In the end, the Left can’t have it both ways. America’s volunteer soldiers and Marines are not victims to be rescued but fighting men and women who should be supported. “Supporting the troops” does not mean legislating defeat, delaying the appropriation of funds they desperately need, or attempting to micromanage the conflict from Washington. America should provide better benefits to its servicemen and women both in uniform and retired, should offer a new GI bill, and in general should treat the very best Americans as well as they deserve to be treated. But advocating such measures while working actively to force the military to accept a defeat it has not earned in the name of allowing it to “reset” for another conflict that we must not ever fight is not supporting the troops. It’s just political camouflage.

The reason to rebuild and reshape America’s land forces is to give them the means to win the critical wars we’re fighting now, not to retreat into some self-realization exercise measured by high-school diplomas, home-station “dwell times” or predictable promotions. “Readiness,” in a military context, means being ready to fight. Our military has been fighting for seven years now. It’s past time to get ready to win the war we’re fighting now.

Thomas Donnelly and Frederick Kagan are co-authors of “Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power” (AEI Press).