August 1, 2013.

Branches of Military Battle Over Sinking War Chest

"Arms bending and stretching!" she rapped out. "Take your time, by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two three, four!..."

Fights between branches of the U.S. military have erupted over responsibility for everything from drones to clocks as America's armed forces battle to keep their share of a shrinking defense budget.

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late Fifties everything had faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.

The emerging debate is expected to be the most intense in two decades as the branches of the military seek to retool their missions to match the needs of future conflicts.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down, into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister----or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Wednesday recommended cutting the Army to its smallest size since before World War II and making other force reductions that would prepare the military to live under a reduced budget. Final decisions are months away, fueling a bureaucratic battle over how the U.S. will project power around the world.