Honor the Army by Funding Them

In celebration of the U.S. Army’s 250^th anniversary this weekend, Washington is throwing a well-deserved party for our nation’s oldest military service, including a parade, concert, and fireworks. But to truly honor the Army, we need to get beyond marching bands and flag waving. What would help our Army the most right now would be to give it the funding it needs to meet its critical missions around the globe.

Unfortunately, among the services, Army funding has increasingly been seen as a slush fund to be raided to pay for priorities in other military branches. While this raiding of Army’s budget started in the Biden Administration, news reports indicate that the Trump Administration is looking at its own cuts.

President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have rightly made it the Administration’s goal to “make the military great again,” reversing the Biden Administration’s fixation on DEI and environmental initiatives in our armed forces and instead focusing resources and attention entirely on improving our warfighting capabilities. Maintaining strong funding and support for the Army will be vital to achieving this Administration’s goals.

Some of the pressure to raid Army funding is coming directly from other branches, eager to pilfer resources to pay for their own initiatives and new technologies in the face of tight budgets. For example, in an interview with Breaking Defense last month, Air Force Chief of Staff David Allvin made the case for shifting more funding to the Air Force at the expense of “slower-moving surface forces – such as ground troops and ships,” stating: “[W]e measure our ability to maneuver and move and get from A to B relative to the speed of sound, when some of our sister services are subject to the domains that they’re in, and so they do it more like the speed limit.”

Chief of Staff Allvin’s reasoning sounds logical, but in a world of competing interests and finite resources, we must be wary of falling victim to the “shiny object” fallacy, whereby the newest whiz-bang battlefield technology tries to replace tried and true tenets of warfighting. As the historian T.R. Fehrenbach famously said, “You may fly over a nation forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, if you desire to protect it, if you desire to keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did . . . in the mud.”

From a strategic perspective, the other branches tend to be more vulnerable to asymmetric tactics from a cost/benefit or return on investment (ROI) perspective. On the seas, a handful of anti-ship missiles can cripple an entire fleet. In the air, a few truckloads of autonomous explosive drones can neuter billions of dollars of your air superiority, and a few well-placed anti-satellite missiles can remove theater-wide informational advantage. Obviously, the same cat-and-mouse game of trying to inflict disproportionate damage/disruption to the enemy occurs among ground combatants, but nowhere near the cost disparity relative to the other branches.

So, if anything, instead of cutting the Army to reinforce other service branches, we should be investing more in weaponry, tanks and armored vehicles with advanced defensive technologies that can ensure the safety of our troops in the field. Taking care of the troops should be the number one priority, and this Administration has signaled that is exactly what it wants to do. emarkably, the proposed cuts in Army funding, training and equipment are coming at the same time that the Army is seeing a flood of new recruits, with the branch meeting its annual recruiting target of 61,000 four months ahead of schedule. After years of Americans eschewing military service for myriad reasons, this is a generational opportunity to shape the incoming force that will make up the ranks of the Army (officers and enlisted) for the decades to come. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are right to attribute a boost in interest in military service to new Administration’s policies.

Cutting Army funding at this pivotal time of renewed morale and a resurgence of the American spirit should be the last thing anyone wants to see. Our current leaders in the White House and Pentagon do not want a repeat of what happened in the early days of the Iraq War, where Army soldiers were being killed and injured due to a lack of adequately armored vehicles. The needless casualties led one Tennessee Army National Guardsman to ask then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?”

Secretary Rumsfeld’s response, that “you go to war with the Army you have,” is right. That is all the more reason to be investing more resources in our Army, not less. We need more training, more weapons and more advanced equipment. That is how we will protect our troops and make our military great again.

Greg Archetto was a foreign affairs officer in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and a security assistance officer at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, Office of Secretary of Defense. Greg has an MA in National Security/Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College.