General Casey: Bigger Army Faster
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Military, Money, WarSCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii (AP) — The Army’s new chief of staff said he wants to accelerate by two years a plan to increase the nation’s active-duty soldiers by 65,000.The Army has set 2012 as its target date for a force expansion to 547,000 troops, but Gen. George Casey said he told his staff to have the soldiers ready earlier. [...]
Casey said his staff has submitted a proposal for the accelerated timeline but that he has yet to approve the plan. He said the Army was stretched and would remain that way until the additional troops were trained and equipped.
Casey told a group of soldiers’ spouses that one of his tasks is to try to limit the impact of the strain on soldiers and their families.
“We live in a difficult period for the Army because the demand for our forces exceeds the supply,” he said.
You go to war with the forces you have, but what if it’s a war of choice? Isn’t it the President’s responsibility to not stretch our forces so thin that we A) wear them out and B) don’t have enough forces to fight on other fronts if the need arises?
Expanding our military is a good step, but you and I both know that in order to fight any sort of nation building war, we’re easily going to need double that amount. Iraq has shown us that much. Hopefully we’ve learned our lesson.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 and is filed under Military, Money, War. 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.
May 1st, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Increase the numbers for the military? Sure. But getting serious about new equipment would be an even better idea. Not only would it allow the existing troops to do their jobs better, I suspect it could be done a lot faster. And even the stuff we do have is in serious need of replacement/repair — heavy use in sand and dust play hell with machinery.