ES, you just hit on my biggest beef with this administration. If Iraq is important, vitally important, a battle we must win, then wasn’t it worth risking a little more political capital to ensure victory?

I think that even in 2003, it would have been possible to bring more people in. It would might have forced Bush to give up a couple of other sacred cows (tax-cuts, etc) but it could have been done.

Now, it’s impossible, because who would want to join a battle when there’s still no commitment to winning and the administration still wont admit they goofed. I don’t like the idea of volunteering to be part of Bush’s political cover and I don’t like it when men and women like yourself are sent overseas by people who lack the courage of their convictions.

As for your service, thank you.

I agree with you, at least somewhat. The administration and Pentagon leadership have done a dis-service to the nation, especially when it became apparent more soldiers were needed and instead they chose to contract nearly everything out or putting reserve units on the front line nearly continuously.

Back in 2001, it was chic to join the military. No doubt about it. Two and three years later, that was no longer the case – who in their right mind want to live in crap, be shot at, and then having to do it all over again in twelve months? The military has had a hard time meeting its recruiting goals for a couple of years now. They have over come that in one of three ways. One is to provide signing bonuses and retention bonuses (one state is giving $20,000 bonus, GI Bill, and forgiveness of student loans up to $20,000). Clearly unheard of for the military, but the $$$ is staggering in of itself. Second is to lower the number of recruits being looked to be brought in (just a numbers game in the beginning and horrible at the end). Third is to lower the bar of the recruits quality – the dreaded Category IV personnel (these are the ones who have tested on the apptitude somewhere between 10 and 30 percent). Historically, the military capped the Cat IV to 2% per year, but in the middle of 2005 the number was altered by the Pentagon to be increased up to 4%, and a few months later it was reported the numbers were actually creeping up to 20%. Congress though mandates by law the numbers never to go over 25% – but for all the talk of a volunteer force needed to do the complex tasks at hand these days, the use of Cat IV personnel just throws that argument out the window.

In addition to that, the National Guard is the unsung hero in this whole episode. They are a reserve unit that is being treated as an active unit – and the rules for their deployment has just been altered once again to enable them to spend more time out in the field. No longer is it two of four years in the field, but now where it is two on, two off, and two on.

On top of that, we have stop loss (a back entrance to a draft IMO). There is also direction provided by the Pentagon in April I believe to have a plan in place to call up recently retired military personnel under the age of 60. This call up of retired folks will most probably not be a general call-up, but one where people with specific job skills will be needed (in the first Gulf War, the physical assistants were called up in this manner).

Granted the US Government should have done more to keep people being brought in, but I think their fear of a Vietnam backlash is too great for them. The recruiting numbers being spoken right now are somewhere between 20 and 40 thousand per year (off the cuff estimate) – with all I of the examples I have shown above, is it too much to ask for 20 to 40 thousand volunteers per year to make up the short fall? Can the public be called for this small sacrifice?

Was the Government dishonest with the sacrifices needed to wage this event to a successful state? Most probably. That though does not let people back home off the hook. They made their own decisions to best serve this event in its own particular way – they went on oblivious to the events that were around them. They lost focus. They lost steadfastness. They went on to do what was best for them.

With the expression of my point of view, and having volunteered to do two tours over the past four years, you can see that my anger at people back home fighting the ‘War of Ideas’ and providing ’support for the troops’. Having people wrap themselves in the flag to support the troops is not volunteering to help the country – far too many people these days are following the steps of Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh than our fathers who actually did something for the country in her hour of need.

“Forgive me Lord for the sins I have done and have left undone.”

After 9/11 the numbr of people joining the armed forces increased significantly just like in 1941. But there was no follow up call for more (unless you count army recruitment commercials). There was no message from the President saying we need all of you to make some small sacrifice to help this effort, we need more volunteers to win this struggle, etc. etc. Had this been done in 2001/2002, there would have been a lot more boots to put on the ground in 2003. Instead we were told to go out and spend and to not ask questions.

So when you imply that Gen-X didn’t give a crap. I say yes, we were practically ordered by the government not to give a crap.

P.s. I don’t know what the policy is around here on commenting in old posts but I had to go somewhere now that the Mighty Middle is closing up shop and ES made some intelligent comments that deserve a response.

People forget the administration has tried almost everything to bolster troops up to the point a draft would have been called. People forget the privatized security firms over there doing business, and very good business that is drawing soldiers out of the military to get higher paying jobs doing the same exact thing they were doing for Uncle Sam a few months earlier. The security firms are also not part of the chain of command for the military – though we pay handsomely for their services, they are a force among themselves.

I blame administration for not planning. I blame the 101st Fighting Keyboardists for their political covering fire by spreading the ‘truthiness’ of the administration’s talking point memos. I blame columnists and journalists (Bill Kristol, Judy whatever her name is, Charles Kratherhammer, Ann Coulter) for public deception with their hollow promises. Finally I blame the American public for sitting on the sideline and waiting for other people to do the dirty work for them – compare the X-generation folks to the men and women in 1941. The X-gen failed to live up to the earlier generation’s standard. In WW2, 25% of the population was in the war. Today, that number is somewhere around 0.1%.

http://www.compositesworld.com/news/cwweekly/2006/July/cw110582

God Bless Lockheed Martin.

It’s all they know and all they have left.

The “war on drugs”, anyone? (Speaking of quagmires…)

Actually a big part of the problem may be most of us Americans have lived their entire lives knowing only “little” wars, and because we know that America is the only superpower and has won “big” wars (such as WWII) in the past, we intuitively expect these “little” wars to be cakewalks. Then when they turn out not to be so one-sided after all, we tend to put too much blame on our own side and not give enough credit to our enemies (the Viet Cong, the Somali warlords, and now both the Sunni and Shi’ite militias in Iraq) who have figured out how to level the battlefield.

What I’m trying to get at with this post, and some previous ones, is the question of why we are fighting a war we define as vital, and then take actions which clearly signal that we lack seriousness. Have we forgotten what war is? Has the term been so overused as to become meaningless? Have we changed in some fundamental way so that the America of Hiroshima no longer exists? Was it propaganda all along, a lot of loud chest-beating without anyone meaning a word of it?

I think we should make war only when the necessity is so great that we can justify any means to achieve victory. It’s what they tell cops: don’t unholster the gun unless you intend to shoot someone. Is Iraq that kind of war? If so then why aren’t more people angry that we’re losing it?

There’s a disconnect here.

I personally believe that it would not have mattered how many men the US put into Iraq, or for how long, the result would have been the same.

To look to just two factions is also simplistic.

Iraq is in fact a three ring circus.

In addition to the two that you mention, there are also the Kurds. The Kurds are in fact probably the most subtle, and in many respects also the most powerful of the three factions.

The Shi’a / Sunni split is confusing, given that the various Iraqi “sides” are supported by Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, with informal attachments to AlQaeda and other less known power seekers.

The Kurds have one objective. That objective goes outside of Iraq.

Kurdistan.