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| | Armchair Generalist: How Many Troops? |
 | | Certainly the military force has been reduced from 1989 (Army - 770,000, Marine Corps 197,000 of a DOD strength of 2.2 million) to today (Army - 500,000, Marine Corps 177,000 of a DOD strength of 1.4 million). |
 | | However, consider that about a third of annual defense funds go to training and paying military and civilian personnel and military infrastructure, a third goes to research, development, and acquisition, and a third goes to operations and maintenance of military forces. |
 | | I think there are alternatives, that we could retain the current force structure if certain Cold War acquisition projects were dropped (as former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had suggested), the BRAC process was stepped up, and our overseas presence was significantly reduced in favor of mobile expeditionary forces and international alliances. |
| armchairgeneralist.typepad.com /my_weblog/2005/02/how_many_troops.html (924 words) |
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