The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is dead. The Marines' version of the F-35 is on a two-year time-out. The Pentagon is going to ask Congress for $553 billion in non-war cash for fiscal 2012. At his Pentagon press conference this afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed a lot of the expected outcomes for his "efficiencies" initiative for your defense dollars. And then he launched a big surprise: the Army and Marine Corps are going to shrink in the near future.

Yes, that's right – Gates, the defense secretary who grew the Army and the Marine Corps, intends to be the man who'll cut them. Just not down to where he found them.

After fiscal 2015, Gates said he wants to cut active-duty soldiers by 27,000, which would mean the Army will have 520,000 soldiers outside of the Guard and reserves. Pending a Marine Corps personnel review, the Corps will go from 202,000 Marines to between 182,000 and 187,000. Those cuts are premised on the "assumption," as Gates termed it, that U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan "would be significantly reduced" by then. (It's highly unlikely that the U.S. military will be out of Afghanistan by then, though.)

Those are still higher "end-strength" numbers than either service had when Gates entered the Pentagon in late 2006: the Army had 480,000 troops and the Marines numbered 175,000. He cited those numbers to argue that the cuts wouldn't leave the country woefully unprepared for another potential war: "When it comes to global reach and striking power, the gap between the U.S. military and the rest of the world – including our biggest potential rivals – will continue to be vast, and in some key areas will grow even wider.

But it's still a gamble on the presumption that America will, at the least, have time to give the Army and Marine Corps a breather before embarking on another troop-intensive war. The stresses of a decade's worth of constant deployment have taken their toll on both services in myriad ways: measured in suicide rates and post-traumatic stress, family cohesion, and the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Increasing the size of the Army and Marines were Gates' way of mitigating those effects. While both services will still be larger than they were before 2007, the move implicitly says that after 2015, we'll have more of a peacetime Army and Marine Corps. What, no one wants to invade Yemen?

Advocates of a bigger military don't seem to be initially disturbed. Sen. John McCain's initial reaction to his meeting with Gates this morning doesn't even mention the shrinkage. Rep. Buck McKeon, the House Armed Services Committee chairman, merely commented, "At first glance, I’m particularly concerned about the proposed cuts to the U.S. Marine Corps." All that could change when the services brief the Hill next week, though.

But the peacetime military is going to change, too. Overshadowed by some of the other changes Gates announced – some of which my colleague David Axe is covering; others I'll save for a separate post – is an impending cut to the tens of thousands of troops in Europe, where Gates said the U.S. has an "excess force structure." Withdrawing them is diplomatically dicey, since European countries (especially Germany) view them as a symbol of U.S. commitment to them and to NATO; and also benefit economically from catering to them. Gates wasn't specific about how many would leave: he's studying the issue for now, and said that nothing will change before 2015 or "without consulting our allies."

Photo: DoD

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