As a former Guardsman (whose IRR [Inactive Ready Reserve] status has thankfully lapsed), I still worry about a future draft given the intractable nature of the war in Iraq. Since combat casualties have fallen off the national radar only to be replaced with demented saliva-spitting pols like Zell Miller, the projected troop strength realities are getting no coverage at all.
To wit,
Eric Alterman's blog yesterday offered a letter from an unnamed Texas Homeland Security employee and military intelligence reservist who was offering clarification on the term "cross-leveling." While his explanation of the term is helpful, what is more compelling is his description of the Army's need to raid reserve units and spread soldiers among units with which they have had no training and no opportunity to develop unit comraderie. Moreover, the Army is running out of soldiers to recycle due to two-year duty restrictions:
While in Iraq, Rivera gets traded back and forth among several locations and teams. He finally ends up at Abu Ghraib. He is not part of a trained, cohesive unit, but really just a bunch of part-time strangers thrown together in a bad situation. The whole place is like that. Naturally, this creates the lack of a clear chain of command and you can see the results. This doesn't excuse what happened, but the torture is a symptom of a broken reserve system.
This is a happening all over. My unit is continually pimped for replacements. One or two here. Five or six there. Right now we're getting ready to send a conglomerate unit of about 100. What is happening is that they are taking non-intelligence soldiers like mechanics sending them to shake and bake schools and shipping them over as intelligence units. They are not taking any of the senior leadership because then they couldn't maintain the facade of not calling our unit back up.
This is not just happening to intelligence units either. The Texas National Guard is sending a Brigade over to Iraq. I know some senior leaders in the guard because of my full-time Texas Homeland Security gig. These guys are saying that they had to rob the entire Texas National Guard to field this Brigade at full strength. By the time you sort all the guys who can't deploy with all the empty seats in units, you are usually left at about 60-70% strength so they've had to take soldiers from the remaining guard units to fill the one going to Iraq. So on paper we still have three available Brigades, but the reality is that they are now hollow.
Then entire letter he wrote to Eric Alterman is worthwhile reading; I highly recommend it. It follows the letter yesterday by the esteemed and always informative Charlie Pierce.
(Sorry, I don't know how to do the pretty grey boxes for quotes.)