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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: LindyBill who wrote (52736)	7/4/2004 7:46:11 AM
From: unclewest	of 793883

Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which is responsible for more than half a million Army and Air National Guard personnel, was adamant in saying that the Reserves and Guard could sustain the pace and scope required by the current mission. "We are stretched but we are not broken," General Blum said. "I will tell you that we can sustain this if we do two things: if we give soldiers predictability on when they are going to go and when they are going to come home, and some reasonable predictability on how frequently they will be recalled." General Blum's comments do not hold water. His requirement to be able to predict will never happen unless he can get the terrorists to coordinate with him and schedule and notify us about their attacks on us far enough in advance that we can alert the reserves that they will be required to report for duty to counterattack. There is another aspect of deploying large numbers of reserves and Guardsmen overseas he has not considered. They are our strategic reserve for protecting the homeland. They cannot do that from Iraq. And lets not forget, those folks signed up for reserve duty not prolonged active duty. Our top generals predict this war is going to last decades. The reserves are a solution to a short-term problem not a thirty year war. We are stretched so thin that force protection has become more important that winning battles. If and when we get into a mass casualty situation, we will really be in trouble. With large chunks of our reserves already deployed and no quick way to get large numbers of replacements, we will have to withdraw to protect the remaining force. I believe the Captain also has it wrong about not needing the draft to add a few 10 thousand men. I believe our military end strength is being manipulated to work with the number of available volunteers. Our end strength is not imo being set at a level needed to sustain current and projected combat operations. It is being set at the level our recruiters think they can maintain. As proof, I offer this thought. How many young men and women, otherwise qualified and wanting to volunteer, are being turned down at military recruiting stations because we don't need them? I know of none.

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