That is BS too!
US will call up army retirees to plug Iraq gaps
July 9, 2004
Lieutenant-General Richard Cody ... forces stretched thin.
The Pentagon is planning for the worst in Iraq over the next year, preparing to send in more armoured units to fight an unrelenting insurgency, an army official has told the US Congress.
Defence officials detailed how they planned to deploy the forces, replacing 140,000 troops now in Iraq with 135,000 sent from bases in the US and Europe.
The proportion of reservists in Iraq will rise, from 39 per cent to 42 per cent, as commanders try to bolster critical specialties where they are short and where civilian contractors can no longer be used. Other gaps will be plugged by calling-up 5600 recent military retirees.
Up to 55 per cent of troops going to Iraq later this year will be serving a second time.
Overall, the plans presented to members of the House of Representatives armed services committee on Wednesday portrayed a military scrambling to meet future troop needs and confronting criticism that it is trying to do too much with too little.
The army's deputy chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Richard Cody, admitted that US forces had been stretched to breaking point as a result of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Are we stretched thin with our active and reserve component forces right now? Absolutely," General Cody told the committee.
An undersecretary of Defence, David Chu, told the hearing there were no plans to reinstate the draft, and the Bush Administration does not support conscription. In an effort to counter rumours that a draft to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was being prepared, Mr Chu said there was no reason to bring back the draft.
Pentagon officials defended the use of the ready reserve, a pool of about 118,000 former soldiers who have unexpired obligations to complete their military service.
Ready reserve soldiers have not been called up in significant numbers since 1990, amid preparations for the Persian Gulf War.
Mr Chu said that of the 5674 Individual Ready Reserve members mobilised for Iraq, he expected about 4000 would go.
The military officials acknowledged that the army had had to scramble to "backfill" in some areas where it was short of qualified people.
General Cody told the committee the most acute shortages were in military intelligence units, calculated to be short of 9000 intelligence specialists to staff the army's new Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition units, as well as its new unmanned aerial vehicles.
The increasing dangers of being in Iraq had also made it more difficult for army planners to hire contract workers to drive trucks and repair vehicles, General Cody said.
He said the planned troop rotation was a "worst-case plan" that required more combat service support troops, such as heavy equipment drivers and engineering units.
"We had to keep more engineer units over there because of the roads as well as some of the bridges, and we had to keep more truck drivers over there because the level of violence was such you couldn't get the civilian contractors to do some of that stuff."
smh.com.au |
