On admitting one's losses

Whether or not one believes Rumsfeld's "you go to war with the army you have" rhetoric, it surely has to be a bad sign for Bushco that the administration is now having to accept reductions in the size of its army due to the lack of new recruits:

U.S. President George Bush will use his new budget to propose cutting the size of the Army Reserve to its lowest level in three decades and stripping up to $4 billion from two fighter aircraft programs...

Under the plan, the authorized troop strength of the Army Reserve would drop from 205,000 — the current number of slots it is allowed — to 188,000, the actual number of soldiers it had at the end of 2005. Because of recruiting and other problems, the Army Reserve has been unable to fill its ranks to its authorized level.

Army leaders have said they are taking a similar approach to shrinking the National Guard. They are proposing to cut that force from its authorized level of 350,000 soldiers to 333,000, the actual number now on the rolls.

I have to wonder whether (in keeping with the Orwellian overtones of Bushco generally) the new strategy will be to claim that the actual numbers were always lower, and that the change is really an increase. (This may be the next great test of the strength of the Republican noise machine.) But there can be little doubt that the obvious decline in the sustainable size of the U.S. military reflects rather poorly on a president who's supposed to be strong on defence.