MILITARY DEVELOPMENTS BODE ILL FOR OUR FUTURE SECURITY
By Georgie Anne Geyer
WASHINGTON -- A number of dangerous developments in our military have suddenly come together -- pushed forward by the war in Iraq (news - web sites) -- that should give Americans grounds for worry about the future security of our nation.
The figures are starting to add up in the newspaper articles. The Army will recall more than 5,000 veteran soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve to active duty (instead of reducing the number of troops in Iraq, as had been promised). Recent studies by the U.S. Army show that one in five U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq suffers serious mental health problems associated with post-traumatic stress syndrome. (Similar rates in the U.S. adult population are 3 percent to 4 percent; in the first Gulf War (news - web sites), 2 percent to 10 percent suffered such problems; and in Vietnam, a far bloodier war fought by a conscript army, 15 percent suffered the same problems.)
Our military establishment, belatedly beginning to free itself from the neocons' and White House's idea of perpetual war, is finally speaking the truth.
Gen. Richard A. Cody, the new Army vice chief of staff, testified recently in Congress: "Are we stretched too thin with our active and reserve component forces right now? Absolutely."
"The war in Iraq is wrecking the Army and the Marine Corps," retired Navy Capt. John Byron writes in the July issue of Proceedings, the professional journal of naval officers. "Troop rotations are in shambles, and the all-volunteer force is starting to crumble as we extend combat tours and struggle to get enough boots on the ground."
Even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose love of warfare was instrumental in fueling this war, stated in a speech at an international security conference in Singapore that the United States and its coalition may be winning some battles, but may be losing the war against the source of the problem, Islamic terrorism.
"It's quite clear to me," he was quoted by The Associated Press at the conference, "that we do not have a coherent approach to this."
The Washington Post recently reported that the Army has added 8,000 slots to the 25,000 infantrymen it trains annually at Fort Benning, Georgia -- and to replace drill sergeants deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites) to train locals, it has mobilized about 100 reservists to drill the new soldiers. You do not have to be a West Point scholar of military strategy to realize how reckless this scenario is becoming.
But when we hear these comments and reconnoiter this administration's warfare landscape, we find some deeply disturbing responses.
What would an even relatively responsible family or institution do in the face of such unnecessary overstretching of one's capacities? The responsible father or American official would reassess his or her obligations, make sober judgments based upon the level of true needs, and recalculate his responses.
But -- and this is the interesting part -- that is not what the administration is doing.
Watch the television talk shows. Men (and a few women) from the conservative think tanks and the Republican administration argue, as though they never made a mistake in Iraq: We must plow ahead in exactly the same field.
The Rumsfeldian civilian Pentagon (news - web sites) (not the uniformed military, who abhor the neocon, imperialist and Israeli Likud Party civilians) talks about a "broad transformation" of the U.S. military -- particularly in terms of rebasing American troops away from Europe and South Korea (news - web sites) and toward new zones of trouble. But after Iraq and failures in Afghanistan, what they are essentially talking about is "restructuring" against enemies they can't even vaguely know or define.
Curiously enough, some of the Bush administration's war party mention restoring a draft so that all American boys -- and girls -- can partake of the joy of serving in their abstract wars of personal agenda and ambition.
Think for just a moment how crazy this really makes them out to be! A draft would bring to the fore all the corrective elements in American society whose absence from the play during the last four years has allowed these neocon adventurers to do what they have done. A draft would connect average American citizens to their government and force them to become voices in the irresponsible deployment young Americans.
Don't the administration's hawks know this? It is a kind of perverse tribute to their fanaticism that they do not. They are so focused on the horizon -- where they imagine an imperialist America in league with a "reconfigured" Middle East in which Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s Israel is the major player -- that they cannot see that a draft would doom their adventures.
All of this discussion is not about how we can dredge up every college boy, young father and budding woman professional to be sent to all the corners of the globe for the military adventures of a few in Washington. Rather, we should be considering how to reinstate an American government that can make rational policy choices that will truly serve American interests.
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