Last month, Secretary of Defense James Mattis urged Congress to allow the Pentagon to reduce its excess overhead. Mattis has requested this authority before – as have at least four of his predecessors (Carter, Panetta, Hagel, and Gates) – but the latest request accompanies a new Pentagon report that assesses the military’s infrastructure needs based on a much larger force structure than the one it has today. Even if the military, and especially the Army, were to grow back to the levels seen when the United States was actively fighting wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq (2012), the DoD is...