Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Readiness – Impact – Threat Perception

The perception of U.S. military weakness is also giving the green light to adversaries to proliferate – only the plan can roll back this threat

Kagan 6 (Frederick, former professor of military history at West Point and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “New Thinking, Old Realities”, National Security Outlook, 10/16/06 http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25010,filter.all/pub_detail.asp)KM

Above all, America’s conventional military strength remains critical, traditional power politics continue to control the world, and the lessons of thousands of years of human history still apply. In counterinsurgencies, the first requirement of success is the establishment of security throughout the country or region. This task is manpower-intensive and incompatible with a small footprint approach. Political, economic, and reconciliation tracks are not sustainable without security, as countless historical examples show. Success in Iraq––and Afghanistan––requires a heavier deployment of U.S. forces with orders not just to train indigenous soldiers, but also to bring peace to those troubled lands. Military strength and the visible will to use it is also essential to persuading regimes like those in Tehran and Pyongyang to abandon programs they wish to pursue. We have been trying the diplomatic approach, unsupported by meaningful military threat, for nearly fifteen years with North Korea, and the result has been utter failure. A similar approach in Iran will not be more successful. It may not be necessary to attack those two states to force them to give up their weapons of mass destruction programs, but there is no hope of convincing them to do so if they do not believe that we can and will defeat them. Nor is there any likelihood that a “small footprint” (almost a “no footprint”) approach in the Horn of Africa will contain the Islamist threat there. The United States is at war, and the enemy is the same one we have been fighting for sixty years. A totalitarian regime controls North Korea. Totalitarian ideologues hold power in Iran, have just seized power in southern Somalia, and seek power throughout the Middle East. Their goals are subtly different, but they share several key features: the destruction of democracy, which they hate; the elimination of liberalism and religious toleration; and the destruction of the United States. Victory will require a mobilization of America’s military might and the willingness to use it. Adaptive and unpredictable enemies like al Qaeda will require us to change part of our approach and some of our forces constantly. Winning throughout the Muslim world will require economic, political, and cultural initiatives alongside the use of military power. But nothing will be possible without adequate military force, which the United States is currently lacking. If we do not begin the necessary mobilization of our resources now, then our military power will become irrelevant, our strategies will fail, and our security will falter.

Adversaries are constantly sizing up U.S. force capabilities – only a bigger military can address threats in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea

Army Times 6 (Rick Maze, "A bigger military in the long term; It's too late to ease current personnel crisis but not future problems, officials say," 12/11, www.armytimes.com/issues/stories/0–ARMYPAPER–2393732.php)KM

But retired Gen. John Keane, a former vice chief of staff, said it is “self-evident” that the Army and Marine Corps are too small — not just to sustain their commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, but to remain ready to cope with other contingencies. With almost all deployable Army forces focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, the service’s ability to provide forces that would be able to win a conventional conflict in Korea or elsewhere is atrophying, Keane said in a Nov. 30 interview. “What [Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter] Schoomaker needs right now is a larger Army, which would give him the capability to set aside three or four divisions to focus on conventional war,” Keane said. No such force exists, and its absence is not unnoticed, he said. “Our adversaries know exactly what the readiness is of every one of our divisions. They have people working this full time.”

Readiness – Impact – Miscalculation

These adversaries will be tempted to challenge the U.S. – sparking war through miscalculation.
Gordon 7 (Michael, chief military correspondent for the New York Times, Survival, Winter 06–07, Break Point? Iraq and America’s Military Forces, http://www.journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/media/e2wquwrwth0v8u1trg3h/contributions/m/7/6/7/m76738823338363h.pdf)KM

Levels of availability A greater worry has been the operational availability of American ground forces. The army has a system for deploying the 42 new Brigade Combat Teams it is establishing as part of an ongoing programme to restructure its units. The goal is for an active brigade to spend two years at home for each year it is deployed overseas. So many units are needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, that combat brigades are generally spending only a year at home for each year they are deployed. As one general put it, the brigades are either deployed, have just got back or are preparing to rotate back to Iraq and Afghanistan again. As a consequence, no more than a handful - perhaps as few as two or three Brigade Combat Teams - are immediately available for contingencies elsewhere.

Readiness – Impact – North Korea

Lack of readiness causes North Korean conflict.
Carpenter 8 (1/9/08 Ted Galen, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16622)

At the same time, U.S. officials must stop letting hope triumph over experience when it comes to dealing with North Korea on the nuclear issue. Those officials also need to consider a fall-back plan if the six-party talks fail to produce an effective and worthwhile solution. Relying on deterrence supplemented by a regional missile defense program may be the most feasible option. Another possibility is to induce China to remove the current ruling elite in its troublesome client state and replace it with a more pliable regime, in exchange for a U.S. promise to end its military presence on the peninsula.
That escalates to nuclear war

Ogura and Oh 97 Professor of Economics at Toyama University, Professor of Innovation Management at the Middle East Technical University in Northern Cyprus[Toshimaru and Oh, “Nuclear Clouds Over the Korean Peninsula and Japan” Monthly Review, April]

North Korea, South Korea, and Japan have achieved quasi- or virtual nuclear armament Although these countries do not produce or possess actual bombs, they posses sufficient technological know-how to possess one or several nuclear arsenals. Thus, virtual armament creates a new nightmare in this region – nuclear annihilation. Given the concentration of economic affluence and military power in this region and its growing importance to the world system, any hot conflict among these countries would threaten to escalate into a global conflagaration.