by Thomas Donnelly, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed
One Crusader's View (Full PDF Article)
We have a great duty to perform and we shall show ourselves a weak and poor-spirited people if we fail to set about doing it, or if we fail to do it aright.
--Theodore Roosevelt
America's Part of the World's Work
Lincoln Club Dinner
February 1899
A century later and with the painful costs of Iraq and Afghanistan ever in our minds, TR's call to American greatness can seem hubristic, jingoistic, anachronistic and its unguarded moments (and to a politically correct sensibility) outright racist. But Shawn Brimley's recent "Mediating between Crusaders and Conservatives" called this quote to my mind. Brimley's piece advances the original future-land-force-structure argument to its ultimate and proper point: what do we think about America's employment of its military, and most particularly the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, over the next generation? At its indivisible core, this is a debate about American purposes in the world.
Brimley's crusaders-or-conservatives taxonomy is likewise not a bad way to frame the landscape of debate; simplicity and clarity are indeed virtues and certainly ones that Roosevelt would have approved of. Yes, there many nuances among observers on all sides and indeed many points of analysis that those with profoundly divergent conclusions can agree upon. But let me offer an unreconstructed "crusader's" view, meant to explain more fully several issues than Brimley glossed over. Most of what follows will focus on the purposes of U.S. land forces in the Middle East, but I will also end with a few observations about force structure and size.
