Are We Ready For The Next Fight?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Foreign Policy, Military
Everybody knows that our resources have been stretched thin as a result of the Iraq war.
Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.
Remember I was talking about the costs of war earlier? Well, here are some more. We only have so many people to fight in this volunteer army until we start running out of them. And there’s no way in hell we can institute a draft again. So that means we shouldn’t rush headlong into one war after another after another…
“We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it,” Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
And remember, at the beginning of this whole thing, Bush and Rumsfeld wanted even FEWER troops to fight wars. Can you imagine?
The hard reality of war is that it takes time to change an entire country, and we simply don’t have the means to do it. Not unless we have significant help from other countries around the world, which we absolutely do not this time around.
Lastly, here’s where we actually stand…
The Army should have five full combat brigades’ worth of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units to rotate in and out of the country. Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, according to military and government officials.
Just a little food for thought on this anniversary day.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 and is filed under Foreign Policy, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
I knew the situations concerning troop levels & equipment shortages were bad. I never had a clue how bad it was until reading the WaPo article this morning.
Hundreds of billions spent for these wars, yet we haven’t replenished our supply stocks? Enlistments & reenlistments are way down due to the unending nature of these conflicts. Now Bush wants a surge of 21,500 troops + another 8000 more support troops that we don’t have & can’t equip? And what about Afghanistan?
Guess I’ll stop now before I become incoherent with rage.
March 19th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
[...] Justin at Donklephant: Are We Ready For The Next Fight? [...]
March 19th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
After reading the WAPO article, it seems that Rumsfeld and Bush had the right idea. I don’t know why you portray it as pejorative; you seem to be contradicting yourself Justin.
If we expect to be stretched thin in coming conflicts, wouldn’t we want to transform the military and develop the logistical ability to fight wars with fewer troops?
March 19th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Excellent post. Nobody in the media talks about how dangerously thin the military is being stretched. A couple more years of this and the draft will have to be reinstated.