There is very little need to tell anyone what happened at Fort Hood yesterday. A Major who specialized in treating soldiers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder went on a shooting rampage killing 13 and wounding 30 more. This is a tragedy in many ways, for the families of the dead, for the wounded and their families, for the family of Maj. Hasan, for the soldiers of Fort Hood and for the nation.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
In a few days, assuming Maj. Hasan survives the wounds from being shot, we will start to find out the specifics of why he lost control and inflicted this horrible damage on the soldiers on his base, but there is a larger issue the Dog would like to address here. Have we gone past the point of sustainability for the Armed Services in our two wars?
The war in Afghanistan has been waged for the last 8 years and the Iraq war has been going for 6 years. We are at the point of having the longest war of our history (depending on when you clock the start and stop of the Vietnam war) and already we are past the longest time frame we were fighting in two wars or two fronts in our history.
Unlike any of our other long term conflicts we have an all volunteer force. Currently we have between the Army, the Marines, the National Guard and Army and Marine Reserves 1.35 million soldiers. Right now there are 124,000 troops in Iraq and another 68,000 in Afghanistan, for a total of 192,000 troops in war zones right now. This means 14% of our ground forces are in a war zone at any given time. To put it another way, if there is a 12 month deployment to a war zone in seven years every single soldier will have severed in one war zone or another. Of course it does not work that way. There are some soldiers who almost never deploy to war zones, as their jobs are support or they are deployed in specific areas like nuclear weapon depots. This makes the time, which combat soldiers have before they rotate back the conflict even shorter.
All combat operations have a cost. There is the cost of munitions, the cost of weapons systems, the cost of support in terms of food, water and lodging. Then there is the biggest and hardest to quantify cost, the human cost. We can count the cost in terms of lives lost, but this is far from the only human cost. To spend time in a war zone, to fight and survive the experience does not mean you have escaped unscathed. We know from the current reports that at least 20% of all soldiers who serve in Iraq or Afghanistan are coming back from the war zones with PTSD. This is probably a low estimate as there is a culture in the military of not reporting mental issues, the old "shut up and soldier, soldier!" mentality.
If we go back to the 14% in the field number, and apply that, it means 40,000 soldiers every year are having to deal with this problem. That is three percent of the entire ground forces of the US military every year for the last eight years. In that time we have nearly 25% of the ground troops with this problem. The question becomes can we sustain this level of cost to our soldiers and still have an effective military?
We have seen the number of military suicides rising. We have seen the numbers of sexual assaults by military personnel spike, we have seen the divorce and domestic abuse cases in military families increase dramatically. These are all direct results of the multiple and long deployments to the war zones. It is true that not every soldier who deploys will have these issues. It is also true that not everyone who deploys will develop PTSD, but when we are talking about significant numbers of troops doing so, then there is a real problem we have to address.
This problem is more than just one of individual soldiers. As the levels of PTSD grow in the ranks, it will effect the overall structure of the military. The more NCO’s (the back bone of any Army) that go to the war zones and come back, the more of them who will be affected by PTSD. This will not just affect their personal lives but their professional ones as well. This, in tern, will impact the new troops coming into the military. There is no way to say specifically how this will affect the over all effectiveness of the military, but there can be no doubt it will be a negative one. This impact will last years as the career soldiers stay in and the term soldiers rotate in and out.
It is one of the tragic ironies of war that to do it something so crazy effectively a soldier needs to be as sane as possible. There is no room for modern day Berserkers in counter insurgency or even in set piece warfare. This is part of the reason we have the screening process we do for entry into the Armed Services, to make sure we have people who can do this job the way it needs to be done. It is also the reason we instill the "Can Do" attitude in our soldiers. They do not quit, they go on, regardless of what is going on with them.
All this leads to the question, can we successfully conclude our two wars if they continue long times into the future? We do not expect to have our troops out of Iraq for another 13 months. This assumes everything goes well and we can leave (basically it is up to the Iraqi government, they may very well ask some of our troops to stay). That is nothing compared to the time lines we are looking at in Afghanistan. The time lines there are looking five to ten years in to the future, assuming we want to provide some kind of stability which allows the Afghans to avoid a bloody civil war when we leave.
The Dog has long felt the U.S. has ignored its responsibilities in regards to creating a stable Afghanistan. It is the major reason he has argued for our continued presence there. As the conquering nation, we have a responsibility to put a functional government in place if we are to leave. There has always been the chance we would fail in this regard, given the long term neglect of these responsibilities, but that did not relieve us of the need to attempt it.
It has come to the point where the Dog is wondering if this is actually possible given the state of our military. Building up Afghanistan successfully was always going to be complex, but it is impossible if you do not have the right tools. One of the key factors in any counter-insurgency campaign or nation building is providing the level of basic security needed to get the people to start to feel they can take part in the governance of their nation. An effective military is a primary requirement for this. If we have broken our military to the point where they can not do this over the long haul required, then perhaps this is no longer possible.
We will not institute a draft, this much is clear. We will not be able to grow our military to the level it needs in the time frame we have. We will have decades of time where we will be working through the consequences of the psychological damage to our troops, our NCO’s and our officers. The problem of mental stress of combat is not one that will go away while we are still engaged in a war. It will only continue to compound itself and grow more deadly.
The tragedy at Ft. Hood is bigger than the wounded and the dead. It may be the first of many more to come if we do not recognize that unlike bullets and planes, the soldiers we rely on are not simply replaceable. As we look to the future of our war in Afghanistan, we must include an evaluation of the state of our Armed Services from the human perspective. Not just will they go and fight, but also how affective will they be? What will be the cost going forward for our over-all military and does the slim chance of success in Afghanistan combined with the length of time required out weigh this cost?
The Dog is no longer sure it does.
The floor is yours.