If only our media went for truth and understanding instead of big headlines. News on the military.

Tue Feb 25, 2014 at 11:18 AM PST

Media chooses paranoia over substance in reporting proposed Pentagon troop reductions. Again.

by Hunter
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Not trying to undermine the military.
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Hey, could we just stop doing this? I'm not saying it will be easy, I'm not saying it won't involve a certain amount of diligence, I'm just suggesting that perhaps every news outlet in America does not need to chase the tennis ball just because somebody threw it.
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    On Monday, large swaths of the news media reported on the Obama Administration's proposed military budget using the same misleading frame. As the New York Times stated in its headline, "Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to Pre-World War II Level." Fox News chose the same emphasis. "The Army had already been preparing to shrink to 490,000 active-duty members from a wartime peak of 570,000," it stated, noting it will now be between 440,000 and 450,000. "That would make it the smallest since just before the U.S. entered World War II." Reuters' headline: "Budget cuts to slash U.S. Army to smallest since before World War Two."

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You know what's coming next, right? It turns out that by limiting the talking point to "Army," the headline news turns out to be grossly misleading. Pre-World War II, there was no separate Air Force. Pre-World-War II, the Marines were a small fraction of the size of the Army and Navy. You don't have to get into arguments over whether military forces are more capable now even in smaller numbers, or the relative efficiency of bayonets vs. cruise missiles or any of the rest of it. The combined personnel of the modern armed forces is about three times the size of the pre-1940s military, and even the steeper end of proposed cuts are in no danger of changing that:
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    In terms of manpower, if you'd totally eliminated the Army and the Navy on December 31, 2013, the combined total of the Marine Corps and the Air Force alone-523,425 people-would still be significantly bigger than the whole military circa 1940.
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    Also, if the Army is indeed cut to between 440,000 and 450,000 personnel, as the Obama Administration has proposed, the Army could be characterized as operating with the smallest force "since just before the U.S. entered World War II," but it would also be accurate to say that the Army of 2014 will have 170,977 more people than the Army of 1940. And again, whereas the Army of 1940 encompassed the fighter pilots and bombers of that era, today we've got a whole separate Air Force composed of several hundred thousand uniformed men and women, plus a modern Navy and Marine Corps with significantly more personnel.