The current New York Times Editorial entitled "A Real-World Army" calls for
President Bush publicly acknowledging the need to increase the size of the overstretched Army and Marine Corps.
Larger ground forces are an absolute necessity for the sort of battles America is likely to fight during the coming decades: extended clashes with ground-based insurgents rather than high-tech shootouts with rival superpowers.
This is Mainstream Pigheaded stupidity.
More.....
Below is my letter:
To the Editor:
Regarding your editorial "A Real-World Army", wherein you suggest that facing the problems of the next few decades requires a much larger armed forces, I think, based on our experience with the 2003 Iraq war, won in three weeks, and proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" with a stunt landing on an aircraft carrier, that we have quite sufficient forces designed to defeat any conventional force that chooses to challenge the United States.
What we do not have, and currently have no rationale for deploying, within either Democratic or Republican political philosophy, is a police force for coordinating a multinational, pre-agreed upon force of upwards of 500,000 police and rapid reaction urban military swat teams, capable of ensuring security to a population whose previous government has been destroyed by American military dominance.
The current disaster in Iraq is proof that while we can win any war, quickly and with minimal casualties, we do not have, ourselves, nor developed the international cooperation and will to deploy, sufficient forces to police the occupation that inevitably follows a quick victory.
Further, we do not yet have a justification for nation-building involving the training of judicial, governmental and educational establishments and the re-building of infrastructure that, within a five year maximum, would be capable of running the country we conquered in three weeks. The time frame must be limited, transparent and published for all to see. Anything less will insure the local population will only conclude we are there for an unlimited long term occupation for external profit, and they will mount an insurgency, which, as we have failed to learn over and over in the 20th and now 21st century, will defeat conventional forces every time.
We do not need more of the same. Stay the course, whether it is policy or types of military forces, is a failed course.
So what is required to accomplish the successful reintegration of a failed state such as Iraq, into the international community.
And presuming Darfur is the likely mission, what is required to prepare American public opinion for the such a mission?
Finally, can North Korea be dealt with in a similar fashion, assuming China leads the charge?