One of the most interesting developments in recent weeks has been the debate unfolding in Washington over the size of the American military. It’s interesting because the usual shoes are on unusual feet. Democrats like Senators Kerry and Clinton have been calling for an increase in the size of the standing Army. So has the Weekly Standard, which, in a recent editorial, called the American military “dangerously small.” Meanwhile, the Army itself, in an exception to the usual bureaucratic rule calling for an institution to seek an increase in its headcount no matter what, is vigorously resisting an increase in end strength. The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has also been opposing such an increase.

The ground in this fight shifted somewhat the other day when the Army announced last month that it would grow to 510,000 soldiers over the next four years. That’s an increase of about 30,000, but Army officials are emphasizing that it is only temporary.

American regular troop strength overall right now is about 1.4 million. That’s not counting the Reserves and the National Guard. Alarmists note that that number is much smaller than previous wartime eras in American history — the full-time Armed Forces were about 2.7 million before the war in Vietnam, for example, according to an article by Lawrence Korb in the March/April 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs. The American Army — just the Army, not the Navy or the Marines — grew as large as 8.3 million during World War II. And there’s no question that America today is in a war, just as much as Vietnam or World War II were wars.

But there’s a difference. Today’s Army relies far more on technology as a force multiplier. The technology is moving so fast that America was able to conquer all of Iraq last year with roughly half the troops that it took to merely boot the Iraqis out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War a bit more than a decade earlier. There are more efficient ways to spend money, in other words, than on troops alone.

The Army chief of staff, General Schoomaker, last month told the House Armed Services Committee that he “adamantly opposes” a permanent increase to the size of the Army. He told the House Armed Services Committee late last month that a bigger army isn’t necessarily a better one. “In the early ’70s, we had an Army with a lot of people that was hollow,” he said. “It couldn’t train, couldn’t move, couldn’t fly, couldn’t do the kind of things the Army was required to do.”

We’d be inclined to trust General Schoomaker’s judgment on this one more than that of Generals Clinton and Kerry.