Might I suggest that if Frederick Kagan wants to grow the Army and Marines to 900,000 by 2012, than he had better strap on some boots and join the rest of the 1.7 million men and women who have already deployed in and out of the warzone while he’s enjoyed a comfy perch at the American Enterprise Institute these last six years.

The man is barely 40-years-old, but speaks about moving soldiers and Marines around the Middle East like chess pieces, and, according to his Wikipedia bio, has spent his entire career behind Ivy walls, and not one day in a uniform. His “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” the well circulated plan that served as a template for the so-called “surge” strategy in January ’07, only belied his tone deaf, and highly detached position, when he wrote so blithely, “The ground forces must accept longer tours for several years. National Guard units will have to accept increased deployments during this period.”

Thanks to a war strategy orchestrated and promoted by Kagan and his Washington peers and colleagues, the Army is in a real jam today. It acknowledges that it needs more men and women to ease the brutal deployment tempo of the active duty, but knows it can’t lower its recruiting standards much further. Already, it is accepting more high school drop-outs and convicted criminals, those with physical impediments and behavior problems. Hell, the Army set up a recruiting booth – complete with training videos and a huge blow-up GI Johnny – at my son’s school field day this week. He’s in elementary school!

Tens of thousands of Americans will be heading down to The Mall to pay respects to our war dead and veterans this Memorial Day weekend. Tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines who have returned from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan today lay maimed in hospitals, in beds at home, shuttling back and forth to VA centers for both physical and mental injuries, looking for jobs, self-medicating, taxing and straining and testing their families with their new realities.

Instead of letting it go for one day, Kagan pushes for more boots, more of a global footprint, more opportunity for bloodshed and heartbreak, while his own family of academics and proponents of military force sit back as golden spectators, in demand at Washington panel discussions and media interviews. In his WSJ commentary, Kagan doesn’t miss the chance to take a partisan shot at Barack Obama, who doesn’t want to grow the Army as much as Kagan and McCain do.

Funny, Obama’s academic creds are similar to Kagan’s, but Kagan never gets excoriated for being an aloof smarty pants. Maybe the Army needs more aloof smarty pants. Like right now.