Thumbs Up to the Bush administration for reducing the tours of duty for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from 15 to 12 months.Ummm - WHAAAA????
We already ask so much of our soldiers, and we're glad to applaud anything that gives them a bit of relief. We're sure that three months less of combat per tour is a welcome change for them and their families.
Here is Steve Coll from his column in The New Yorker last week...
Last week, (General Richard A. Cody) appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and testified that this method of engineering (tasking our military to fight terrorism, quell the Taliban, invade and pacify Iraq, and, at the same time, prepare for future strategic challenges, whether in China or Korea or Africa all at once) has failed. “Today’s Army is out of balance,” Cody said. He continued:Besides, if George W. Milhous Bush and his Repug cronies gave a damn about the mental and physical well being of our forces, the least they could have done was support Sen. Jim Webb's amendment last year limiting deployments and mandating more downtime before our troops are returned to battle.
The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . . Soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed. . . . Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.
...
In this environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that General Cody’s plainspoken, valedictory dissent about the Army’s health attracted little attention. His testimony marked a rare public surfacing of the contentious debates at the Pentagon over the strategic costs of the surge. These debates involve overlapping disagreements about doctrine (particularly the importance of counter-insurgency), global priorities (Iraq versus Afghanistan, for instance), and resources. At their core, however, lies Cody’s essential observation: the Army is running on fumes, but (Gen. David) Petraeus and his fellow surge advocates are driving flat out in Iraq, with no destination in sight. It hardly matters whether Petraeus would recommend keeping a hundred and thirty thousand or more combat troops in Iraq for a hundred years, or only ten. Neither scenario is plausible—at least, not without a draft or a radical change in incentives for volunteers.
Flag officers in the Bush Administration’s military have learned that they can be marginalized or retired if they speak out too boldly. The Administration does not romanticize the role of the loyal opposition. Last month, Admiral William J. Fallon, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, announced his early retirement, under pressure from the White House, after he argued privately for a faster drawdown from Iraq, to bolster efforts in Afghanistan and to restore a more balanced global military posture. Publicly, Fallon also described the “drumbeat of conflict” against Iran as “not helpful.”
But that of course was impossible because it would have amounted to giving a Democrat who had served recognition at the Repugs' expense, even though the "welcome change" for our troops and their families would have come a hell of a lot sooner.
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