Today's Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... has the following bad news for US soldiers serving in Iraq. They won't be going home.
U.S. Army Extends Iraq Duty for 4,000
By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
Monday, September 25, 2006; 11:29 AM
WASHINGTON -- In a new sign of mounting strain from the war in Iraq, the Army has extended the combat tours of about 4,000 soldiers who would otherwise be returning home, defense officials said Monday.
The 1st Brigade of 1st Armored Division, which is operating in the vicinity of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, will be kept in place for several weeks beyond its scheduled departure, the officials said.
Sometimes I have to wonder: will the US military ever rise up and turn its weapons on the real enemy - the administration that created this quagmire and insists on sending the troops back into it?
The Bush administration, the Rumsfeld DoD, is breaking down this nation's military. Recent reports say that we are less safe because the war in Iraq has motivated more terrorists to hate us. But perhaps even more important, we are less safe because we no longer have an effective military to defend us. It has become quite evident that the United States, for all its power, simply don't have the manpower necessary to conduct a war. We can't keep conducting this non-war we are trapped in forever, and the nation would be well and truly screwed if it found itself facing a real enemy, an enemy that actually threatened the US and its citizens.
The army in particular is broken, and becoming more broken as it is overused. Personnel and equipment are breaking down. Extended tours of duty are eroding the troops' effectiveness and devastating their morale. In Vietnam, an individual tour of duty lasted a calendar year, and the troops in the field knew to the day how long they had to go until they could escape "back to the world". It was unthinkable to extend this year by as much as a single day because the soldiers would simply not have stood for it. I can only imagine how these soldiers troops must be feeling now, learning they will be stuck in Iraq another six weeks after their deployment was supposed to be up. I can only wonder how many of them will take their own lives in despair, or turn their frustration on the innocent inhabitants of the country where they don't want to be, so that we will have another massacre, or another torture scandal to further erode the will of the troops serving there.
In Vietnam, soldiers could not be sent back there after they had done their year, unless they volunteered, but we are now hearing of troops sent back for tour after tour, or even called back to Iraq after they have been discharged from the service and were hoping to be able to get on with their
lives.
In late July the Army extended the Iraq tour of the Alaska-based 172nd Stryker Brigade. About 300 soldiers from that unit had already returned home and were required to go back to Iraq. The brigade is now operating in Baghdad.
The reasons for these extensions are different, but they both reflect the fact that the Army is hard pressed now to maintain rotations for Iraq and Afghanistan at the current pace. The 172nd was extended by four months in order to strengthen U.S. forces in Baghdad, where commanders are trying to avert a full-scale civil war.
The 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division was extended in order to allow its replacement unit, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, a minimum 12 months between overseas tours, the official said. The 3rd Infantry has already served two tours in Iraq, including the initial invasion of the country in March 2003.
...
The Army has a stated goal of giving active-duty soldiers two years at home between overseas combat tours, but it is unable to achieve that "dwell time," as the Army calls, because it does not have enough brigades to meet the demands of simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would not be a problem now if the situation in Iraq had improved enough to allow the Army to reduce its presence as originally planned.
Army Secretary Francis Harvey told The Associated Press last week that the amount of time between deployments has shrunk this year from 18 months to 14 months. In the case of the 3rd Infantry, it appears at least one brigade will get only about 12 months because it is heading for Iraq to replace the extended brigade of the 1st Armored.
At least these units belong to the regular army, at least they volunteered for this service. But the demands of the Iraq quagmire has placed an even greater strain on the reserves and the National Guard, which was never intended for this kind of service overseas. It is unlikely that the National Guard will ever recover. People are not going to sign up knowing they can be called back and sent into some ill-conceived military adventure with no end ever in sight.
Recently, a 52-year old woman was killed in Iraq, the oldest US woman in the US armed forces ever to be killed. What kind of desperate straits are we in that we have to be calling up 50-year-olds for combat overseas - be they women or men? When we have scraped every fiber off the bottom of the manpower barrel, then what?
It is time to say, No More. Bring the troops back home now, while they are still alive. Withdraw our military before it is entirely broken.