Army Busted

[Dardedar]

Army Vice Chief of Staff General Richard Cody sternly rebukes all of those who’ve been blowing sunshine up everyone's ass and spreading baseless happy talk for five years with regard to the war in Iraq:

"Today’s Army is out of balance. 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 . . . Current operational requirements for forces and insufficient time between deployments require a focus on counterinsurgency training and equipping to the detriment of preparedness for the full range of military missions.

Given the current theater demand for Army forces, we are unable to provide a sustainable tempo of deployments for our Soldiers and Families. Soldiers, Families, support systems, and equipment are stretched and stressed by the demands of lengthy and repeated deployments, with insufficient recovery time. Equipment used repeatedly in harsh environments is wearing out more rapidly than programmed. Army support systems, designed for the pre-9/11 peacetime Army, are straining under the accumulation of stress from six years at war. 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."

LINK

[Dardedar]

DAR
More.

Frontline: Rumsfeld's War

Dated: Oct. 26, 2004

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The Future: Is the Army Broken?

Thomas Ricks
Pentagon correspondent, The Washington Post.

"…What does the phrase "breaking the Army" mean to you?"

"Breaking the Army" means, essentially, losing the people who make it such a good Army. The United States has not always had a great military. It's had a lot of brave men always, a lot of èlan and vigor, but a well-trained, professional military is a very different thing. We have that. We haven't had it for very long. We've had it for 20 years. And it's not a given that you keep it. You make a military by going out and getting good people, not screwballs, by training them and by keeping them together in units that have cohesion among their peers and trust of the people that lead them.

You break that by breaking all those pieces, by not giving them adequate training, by giving them tasks they can't do, by moving them around so frequently that they don't know the guy on their right or their left, by deploying them so often that their wife wants them to leave the military, and ultimately they do. ... You put in a bunch of strangers who are maybe not as well trained, who are not as trusted. The sergeants start getting disgusted with this and say: "I don't want to lead this unit. I have better things to do with my life. I gave at the office. I've done Iraq two or three times." They start leaving. That's the backbone of your Army, when the well-trained sergeant who is a good leader says: "I'm sick of this. I've done seven or 12 years. I don't want to stick around for 20 to get my full retirement. I'm leaving now." ... And then a good sergeant looks and says: "Well, my buddy John left, and my buddy Bill left. I'm leaving. I'm not going to stick around." And so the worry I hear among some generals now is that, while they think in the short term that they are okay, the longer this keeps up, the more training degrades, the lower-quality personnel you might get, the more people might decide to leave. It all kind of intensifies, and the decline can be precipitous."

And what does it mean if you break the Army? What happens?

"Well, the nightmare is the Army of the late 1970s. I remember looking at some statistics. I just fell off my chair. I was astonished. I think it was the Marine Corps in one year, in the late 1970s, had over 1,000 violent racial incidents, any one of which likely would make a front-page story in The Washington Post. Back then it was routine.

What does it mean when you break an Army? It means you have officers having to wear pistols on their hips to go into barracks at night for fear of being attacked. It means widespread drug use. It means people not joining the Army because they don't want to go into that environment, and [it means] a race to the bottom. It is very hard to turn around. The great achievement of today's colonels and generals is that they are the guys who turned it around in the wake of the Vietnam War. When there was every incentive to leave the Army, they rebuilt the Army. And now the tragedy for some of these guys is, this magnificent Army they spent 25 years rebuilding is now really going through the agony of Iraq, where it's fighting a fight it is not designed for. It's a sprinter, and it's in a marathon. It's a high-intensity war organization fighting a guerrilla war. These guys are sweating and bleeding every day. They are pouring their hearts and souls into it, but it is not really what they are trained to do, and it might not be the best way to do it."

LINK

[Doug]

John Hamre, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.…The administration really had planned on doing away with and dismantling the schoolhouses that train the military [in] how to deal with civilians after wars. When they first came to office, they just did away with it. They said, "We're not going to do any of that stuff." We're now in the very midst of having to build all of that, and much more robust.


Interviewer: They did? When?

Hamre:
We had a schoolhouse down in Louisiana -- Fort Polk, I think it was -- that was training on civil interaction, and they basically said: "We don't do nation-building. We're not going to do that." And they were doing away with it. Now we realize that's exactly what this phase four is all about. We weren't particularly good at it when I was there, although we had developed some capability. But this is much bigger, much more complicated, and I think the military, frankly, is a bit adrift in dealing with this. …

Same link as above.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

If your ultimate plan is to destroy the government - be it by running it into so much debt it falls apart or otherwise "drown it in a bathtub" - one of the first things you have to do is destroy the military. You replace it either with mercenaries or with an army whose oath of office is to you rather than the country/constitution. I'd say the Rs are well on their way with this.