Army and Navy see a different present, which yields a different future, which yields different force structure realities

■"Army Is Poised to Kill Spy-Plane Effort," by Jonathan Karp,Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2006, p. A3.

■"Army's Iraq Work Assailed By Briton: Senior Officer Points to Cultural Ignorance In an Essay Published by the U.S. Military," by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 11 January 2006, p. A17.

The Army is forced to pull out on a hugely expensive but iffy spy plane. Its budget numbers suck with the ongoing efforts in Iraq, and so it's forced to choose more wisely than it has in the past. Does the Army need more spy planes, or just more HUMINT and unmanned drones?

Navy, Army's partner in the spy plane deal, had done its usual: loading up the requirements on this thing for all aspects naval so that, in the end, the SOB was virtually too heavy to fly (thus the search for larger air frames and the skyrocketing costs).

Army is going in another direction than Navy, which is heading for a high-low mix of absurdly expensive and increasingly irrelevant mega-platfroms and a host of smaller littoral ships (Cebrowski's dream). Navy can't afford both types in the numbers desired, so it will end up with too few of each (hard to do mathematically, but it will manage).

Army, toughened up and made far more realistic on things like Future Combat System (forget the brochures, it will be much simpler than portrayed in the end) by its high optempo in the global war on terrorism, is moving ... against much of its institutional will, toward embracing the many and the cheaper. And the real revolution in the force is intellectual ... the subject of my upcoming Esquire piece.

So letting Brit one-star-equivalent rip the Army some new ones in a journal published by the service is not as wild as you might think. His complaints are reasonable, if overstated. Real importance of the piece is its publication, not its hyperbole.

This is the context I seek to establish on my usual grand scale in the article, "The Monks of War."

Still waiting on the first pass version!