Hey! You're supposed to be ignoring me!
Not that I'd want to divert anybody from the W worship operation that seems to have gone into high gear here in the last couple days, but there was a semi-related news bit buried in the paper a few days ago, e.g.
"We need to look at that mix very carefully and see if we put, in some cases, 100 percent of our capability in the reserve component," General Myers said. The current approach has created a situation where "you can't even do some of the things you need to do day to day without calling up the reserves," he added.
For example, in devising war plans for Iraq, a desert nation that fired chemical weapons against Iran and its own population, planners had to wrestle with the fact that 100 percent of the Army's water supply battalions and 100 percent of its chemical brigades are in the reserve arm.
Almost all Army civil affairs personnel who help rebuild war-torn nations reside in the reserve arm, as do more than 80 percent of medical brigades and psychological operations units. Two-thirds of the military police battalions — an increasingly important mission in an era of heightened terrorist threat — are in the reserve arms. nytimes.com
So, the capability is there. Why everybody in the whole world is supposed to be obligated to say "how high" when W says "jump" is another story. The role of NATO isn't supposed to be to support whatever war W sees fit to start, near as I can tell, though maybe the ever diplomatic and democratic Perle could arrange a rewrite of the charter. |
