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."
So ... will our national defense be roughly as strong as it was right before we fought Germany and Japan, as a casual reader might assume? Not even close. What about the Army taken in isolation? No, that isn't accurate either. If these accounts were trying to maximize confusion or alarm at proposed cuts, then mission accomplished. But if the goal is helping readers to understand the size of our military (in absolute and relative terms) if the proposal takes effect, then the narrow focus on the Army and the pre-World War II comparison are poorly chosen.
The U.S. Armed Forces Circa 1940
Let's take a trip back to 1940 to see just how absurd it is to use it as a point of comparison (emphasis added):
The U.S. Army in 1939 ranked 17th in the world in size, consisting of slightly more than 200,000 Regular Army soldiers and slightly less than 200,000 National Guardsmen—all organized in woefully understrength and undertrained formations. The Army possessed only 329 crude light tanks and only a handful of truly modern combat aircraft within a total inventory of just over 1800 planes. It was a force equipped with the leftover weapons, materiel, and doctrine of the last war.
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