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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (115852)	5/24/2005 11:10:50 AM
From: unclewest	Respond to of 793838

so we will have an army that becomes too small not so much to fight in iraq but to defend american interests elsewhere and the bad guys in NK and IRan know this too. A fine mess we are in and i think we can agree on that much. I agree. I have been squawking about the inherent problems in maintaining too small an Armed Force for years. I have been predicting the present looming dilemma since last year. We used a draft in WWI. Immediately following hostilities we reverted to an all-volunteer force. For WWII we increased our military strength from around 600,000 to 16 million. At the end of that war we once again reverted to an all volunteer force. As you know, we used the draft in Nam too. That build-up occurred from 66-69. In 73 we threw out the draft, and in 1975 the last draftees were discharged, once again giving us an all volunteer Army. But in 1975 things were different. We no longer had the ability to increase our Armed Forces quickly or significantly. For the next 17 years we held our force strength levels to between 1.8 - 2.2 million. Then clinton began his big chop to bring us down to 1.4 million and we have no way to recover. uw