Read it and weep:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/100ctzvm.asp
It’s still the Standard, man.
There will always be enough people for the Army. The government will just have to offer greater financial incentives than before. Basically, it will be a much more expensive military than ever before.
Yes, it’s the Standard. But when the conservative journal of record starts to bitch, you know it’s bad.
And what they’re bitching about isn’t finding enough people. They’re bitching that the administration and the civilian leadership of the Pentagon would rather strip the Army’s elite training units out of the system and send them to Iraq rather than admit that we need to increase the size of the army.
If Bush or Rumsfeld would just say, “Yeah, we need 2 more divisions,” the money will be found and the divisions will be raised (though it will take years). Instead, Bush’s political futureis getting more priority than the critical needs of an Army at war.
The Pentagon, however, has consistently refused to face reality. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, abetted by the senior military leadership, has instead been playing a shell game with American troops.
I don’t believe for a second the “senior military leadership” is behind this shit. It’s Rumsfeld and Bush.
I thought the same thing: the senior uniformed DoD despises Rumsfeld and his vision of a futuristic Army (small, urbanized fighting force), and resent the lack of manpower and armor with which they have to try and maintain security in Iraq with.
Certainly the senior Army leadership is pissed off. They have been since they saw how Shinseki was treated.
But I think you could probably make an argument aginst the chairman, Gen. Richard Meyers, who is Air Force. He was Rumsfeld’s choice for chairman because he was an advocate of transformation.
This is what the Army chiefs were worried about before the war. As one of the put it to James Fallows, the Navy gets to go home and the Marines with them, the Air Force is better off because it doesn’t have to patrol the no-fly zones anymore, and it’s the Army that gets left holding the sack of shit.
But the Army has been treated like shit by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. There have been a number of articles that quote Army officers off the record who are pissed off.
http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/homeland/safe.html
He will also increase the size of the Army by 40,000 active duty troops on a temporary basis.
What a wussy statement. We need like 5 times that. Stupid Kerry!
“Vote for Kerry: he’s an improvement, I guess.”
I find it kind of amazing that Kerry hasn’t figured out he can outflank Bush by being more hawkish than him - just not fucking it up. Calling for a big military expansion would totally push Bush into a corner.
Every other week I get a letter from Army recruiters telling me that I should be smart and sign up for a unit now so that I get my choice, rather than be conscripted into some random unit as the Army starts calling back all former soldiers that are subject to such under the contracts they agreed to when joining up.
I know tons of these letters are going out to former soldiers now in the Inactive Ready Reserves, so I have to wonder what effect, if any, this threat of a “shadow draft” is having on their views about the current administration and their handling of the war.