Perhaps the reason recruitment is down is because prospective recruits are realizing that joining the Army means the real possibility of actually going to war. Imagine that! For over three decades the military sold itself as a great way to learn life skills and pay for college. Too many young skulls of mush signed up not because they loved their country so much they were willing to die defending it, but because they saw all of the posters and commercials telling them how the military gets them in shape, teaches them leadership, takes them around the world and sends them to college all the while paying them a salary with pretty good benefits.
You cannot hold onto a base infrastructure that was designed for a 500 ship Navy and 20 division army and size of an Air Force that is equivalent to 20 Divisions when you have under one hundred ships, 10 divisions and 10 AEFs.
We also cannot cut back on Military R & D for the simple reason that Clinton allowed us to fall backwards in most research areas.
If we want to have a military of the size that justifies the sort of base structure we had in the Cold War than we need to substantially increase the defense budget, and that will mean canning the social programs established during the Clinton years.
Remember just to stand up 1 division take around 1.5 Billion dollars.
Clinton -with the help of a GOP Congress - fired 500,000 military personnel and during the same period hired roughly the same amount of federal employees for the various expansion of "social programs."
While I am all for bring back the size and the strength of the Cold War military, I think it would be wise to do that with the curent level of technology.
To get anywhere closr to that would mean that we would have to come very close to doubling the aprox. 500 billion a year we already spend on the DoD. Yes, you could probable pull a substantial portion out of Medicaid fraud alone, but the point is that we have to have the political will to do so.
Remember that the Democrats would much rather see that money spent of troops than R & D, as the later makes the country stronger whereas the former is a just more government jobs for them.