The Washington Post ran an article yesterday titled Army Officials Say Many More Active-Duty Troops Are Needed by Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer.
The gist of the story goes like this: the army is so overworked that we need more men, 30000 to be exact. On the contrary, what is so overworked is the phrase "the army is overworked".
There is a better solution than adding more soldiers.
Do we really have too small of an Army? According to the Pentagon Brass, of course the army is too small, of course.
From the article:
"You can't do what we've been tasked to do with the number of people we have," Undersecretary of the Army Nelson Ford said in an interview last week. "You can see a point where it's going to be very difficult to cope."
I say the Army is too big, and I know a solution to this whole military-industrial-complex contrivance. Here’s a hint: Why try to make a case for a bigger Army now when the plan is to draw down the Iraqi occupation?
The next point the article makes is to rehash the worn out story of dwell time. That is, there aren’t enough combat units so there isn’t sufficient time for the units redeployed stateside to recoup, refit, and retrain before they are turned around and ordered back to Iraq. There isn’t enough time for the soldiers to spend with their families.
I have a fix for that one, too. More from the article:
The Army is currently on track to grow to 547,000 active-duty soldiers next year, up from 482,000 before the war. But Ford and other Army officials say that, with rising demand for ground troops for Afghanistan and other contingencies, the increase is insufficient.
The service needs 580,000 soldiers "to meet current demand and get the dwell time," Ford said, referring to the amount of time soldiers have at home between deployments to train, rebuild and spend with families. "You can run a machine without oil for so long, and then the machine ceases," he said. "The people are the oil."
I can just hear him growling those words, "the people are the oil", but his point is to save the machine, right?
The key phrase here is "to meet current demand". Yes, currently there is a huge demand for fresh troops. But is the Pentagon looking to the future or the present? Aren’t we planning to reduce the number of troops in Iraq? How does this philosophy mesh with the President-Elect’s plan to end the damn thing – starting right away? Not so well I think.
The Defense Department’s plan is to keep about 140,000 troops in Iraq until the end of the Bush Administration. Obama wants to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan by 30, 000. And if we need to keep soldiers in Iraq for follow-on missions and contingencies, and the largest figure on that that I heard is 60,000, then roughly we can be looking at 50,000 soldiers redeploying at the two-brigade-per-month schedule that Barack had planned. One Stryker Brigade Combat Team numbers about 5,000 members.
So, the Undersecretary’s forecast of needing 33,000 additional soldiers may not be entirely accurate once you figure in Obama's redeployment plan.
But the overarching solution to our manpower problems isn’t adding more men to allow for dwell time, or throwing more money at it, or reconstituting some kind of draft. No, the only solution to lacking manpower for war is to NOT HAVE WARS OF CHOICE!
Idiots. Less wars. Less. That is the solution to the manpower problem. We could even have a smaller Army! That could mean that we take the $12 Billion that we spend on this useless occupation and we could have our Universal Health Care with some left over and maybe, once the occupation of Iraq is all but finished, we can start talking about peace.
Update: Link to WaPo article.