Hi GST; Re the US military stretched thin. Look at the latest things the civilian leadership is talking up, LOL:
Is the Army Stretched Too Thin?
Time, August 24, 2003
U.S. forces proved quite sufficient to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq, but may be too small to keep the peace once the tyrants are gone
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As for the idea of expanding the Army generally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is opposed. "The Joint Chiefs do tabletop exercises—they have done two or three recently," Rumsfeld said in an interview with TIME last week. "The analysis thus far says that we have sufficient forces to do the assigned missions." At the same time, Rumsfeld is considering a series of reforms that would effectively enlarge the fighting forces. One key change would turn many soldiers who are doing administrative and technical jobs in the Army into real fighters and replace them with civilians. That would keep the Army's head count flat but beef up the U.S. war machine.
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The Department of Defense is pondering what some officials think is a radical step: dispatching U.S. Marines—the nation's pre-eminent quick-and-dirty warriors—to Iraq early next year to replace the 101st.
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The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have taught the Pentagon two very different and seemingly contradictory lessons. First, as Rumsfeld likes to argue now, the U.S. does not need huge forces to invade and win.
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But if the U.S. needs smaller armies to invade targeted countries, it needs bigger armies to occupy them when the shooting stops.
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Peacekeeping is not what the U.S. troops were trained to do. Soldiers whose combat edge has been honed inside an M-1 tank are not well equipped to provide a war's victims with food and water. And the longer soldiers spend as occupiers, the less ready they feel for pure combat and the more unhappy they become. "The worst thing you can do, in terms of retention, is to have square pegs stuck in round holes," says David Chu, the Pentagon's personnel chief. "The guy or gal who doesn't get to do what he or she signed up to do is the most dissatisfied soldier."
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In any case, the Army believes, as it almost always does, that no drastic reform is needed. To prove that it has the postwar period mapped out, it has released a plan identifying the specific units that are to move in and out of Iraq into 2004. But to fill the slots, the Army is doing two things it has rarely done since the grim days of the Vietnam War. It has begun rotating officers and senior NCOs out of Iraq, which means replacing seasoned commanders with freshly arrived officers who don't know the country or the troops they are leading. And it is telling enlisted soldiers that they will be spending a year in Iraq, not the six months they expected. This is likely to hurt recruitment and make it tougher to hang on to troops when they consider re-enlisting. Those moves hurt morale in Vietnam and will probably do the same in Iraq.
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What really worries Rumsfeld is not Congress but the spouses, members of Army families who have had about all they can take of Dad (or, increasingly, Mom) being away six, nine and 12 months a year. Unlike the Army of 1973, which largely comprised single draftees, the Army today is married with children and all-volunteer. The long deployments are stressing marriages and families to the breaking point, and most active-duty personnel have skills valued in the civilian world, as the recruiting posters promise.
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time.com
The article doesn't mention it, but the concept of sending people who joined the military to, for example, work on computers, into urban combat is a joke. No amount of retraining will prepare these people. The result (and it is inevitable that the government will do this, as they don't want to start talking about a draft) will be a military that is even more whiny, trigger happy and ineffective in urban combat.
-- Carl |
