I'm curious, say we do cut the "existing" soldiers. Defense spending goes down and we say, "Hey! Let’s give out scholarships and give money to shelter and employ homeless." So Americas going great, everyone's happy. Instead of 1.5 million in the active duty military, we've dropped to 1 million.

Now, China declares war because Hilary Clinton used her private email to send information proving the US did something bad to CN.

China launched an attack with 2.3 million active duty.

We're now fighting a war with a 2:1 ratio. Sure, we have reserves, but so do the Chinese. And even if we didn’t cut reserve's numbers, we only have .8 million there.

So why don't we just recruit more people, reinstate the draft.

In order to train troops to fight against a technologically developed country, we'll need 2 months. Mind you, this is 2 weeks shorter than current army training and a month shorter than marine.

With Chinese long range bombers, in two months we've already lost the war.

So that's not going to work, why don't we just cut training down to a week.

Now we have soldiers that can shoot their weapon, and that’s about it. We can hold out longer, but we're only prolonging the war. Throwing untrained soldiers at trained soldiers only works when you can outnumber the enemy. Surely we can hold out. China isn’t that big, right?

US population: 318 million

China population:

1,381 million

Can you see now why we need soldiers to exist? We may not know exactly how a modern war will be fought, but we can reasonably deduce that we'll need longer training due to the amount of technology and tactics we'll need to learn. Time is no longer a protective factor for the US. Most bombers can cross the Pacific Ocean in less than 15 hours at cruising speed. Without idle personnel, already trained to do their job, we stand no chance against a modern attack.