The Bush Legacy 2

One of Bush’s justifications is that our presence in Iraq demonstrates the willingness of the US to fight for its interests. Of course as it turned out, our real concerns are elsewhere but thanks to the folly of the administration’s venture into Iraq, we are left in a weakened position to deal with problems in the future and new crises we may face immediately. Ann Scott Tyson, a Washington Post Staff Writer published this article today.

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.

"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

Indeed, the recent increase of more than 32,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has pushed already severe readiness problems to what some officials and lawmakers consider a crisis point. Schoomaker said last week that sustaining the troop increase in Iraq beyond August would be "a challenge." The Marines' commandant, Gen. James T. Conway, expressed concern to defense reporters last week that it would bring the Marine Corps "right on the margin" of breaking the minimum time at home for Marines between combat tours. U.S. commanders in Iraq say they may need to keep troop levels elevated into early 2008.

The troop increase has also created an acute shortfall in the Army's equipment stored overseas -- known as "pre-positioned stock" -- which would be critical to outfit U.S. combat forces quickly should another conflict erupt, officials said.

The Army should have five full combat brigades' worth of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units to rotate in and out of the country. Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, according to military and government officials.

"Without the pre-positioned stocks, we would not have been able to meet the surge requirement," Schoomaker said. "It will take us two years to rebuild those stocks. That's part of my concern about our strategic depth."

Equipment is also lacking among Army units in the United States, the vast majority of which are rated "not ready" by the Army, based on measures of available gear, training and personnel, according to senior military officers and government officials. Active-duty Army combat brigades in the United States face shortages of heavy, medium and light tactical vehicles such as Humvees; radios; night-vision goggles; and some weapons, Cody said.

The shortages have deepened as scarce equipment and personnel are funneled to those units next in line to deploy overseas, creating ever bigger holes in the units that will leave later. "It's like a hurricane drawing everything into the center of the eye," said a senior Army officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

"For the National Guard, those shortages are even more," Cody said. Army National Guard figures show that 88 percent of its units are "not ready." Yet National Guard combat brigades -- four of which have been notified already -- will be increasingly called upon next year to relieve the active-duty troops in Iraq, with the Army Guard and Reserve expected to grow from 20 percent of the force to 30 percent, officials said.

And unlike before the Iraq war, the Army does not currently have a brigade ready to deploy within hours to an overseas hot spot, officials say.

The Marine Corps is not training for amphibious, mountain or jungle warfare, nor conducting large-scale live-fire maneuvers, Conway said. "We've got a little bit of a blindside there," he said. The Marine Corps and Army both lack sufficient manpower to give troops a break from the combat zone long enough to complete their full spectrum of training, senior officials said.

Under current Army and Marine Corps plans, it will take two to three years after the Iraq war ends and about $17 billion a year to restore their equipment levels. It will take five years and at least $75 billion for the Army to increase its active-duty ranks to 547,000 soldiers, up from the current 509,000, and for the Marine Corps to increase its numbers to 202,000, up from 180,000.

A Vote For Failure

John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, recently said about Democratic plans to change policy in Iraq that doing so would be a vote for failure. This is completely backwards. We have already failed in Iraq; 3,000 plus dead, 20,000 plus wounded, one million Iraqi’s having fled the country, and the US hated around the world. Therefore a vote to stay longer is a vote for continued failure. A vote to get out is a vote to end failure and to use our resources in a way that will counter the real threats we face.

Boehner also claims that the Democrats are micromanaging the war and that they should not interfere with the Generals on the ground. This is the height of disingenuous posturing. Bush interfered with General Shinseki who wanted 200,000 troops in Iraq following the invasion by removing him from command. Bush got rid of General Abazaid when he opposed the recent surge in troops. Generals follow orders. The orders are whatever political policy Bush wants to follow.

The Bush policy right now is to do everything he can to not admit to the failure he created in Iraq and “his” Generals will carry that policy out as ordered or be subject to early retirement. If Dennis Kucinich became President tomorrow, he would quickly appoint Generals who would further his view of the war. I doubt that Boehner would then be screaming to allow those Generals freedom to do what they wanted.

The Reverse-Nuremberg Defense

In defending its egregious acts of the past six years, the Bush Administration has perfected the Reverse-Nuremberg Defense. As you recall, the Nuremberg defense was used by the Nazis following WWII to explain why they should not be convicted for the killings, gassing, human experiments, and genocide they perpetrated. The excuse was that they were just following orders and therefore not responsible for their own actions. This was not successful.

Bush and company have reversed that approach. Yesterday General Kevin Kiley, the general who was not fired although he should have been, in response to a Congressman’s question about how Kiley couldn’t have know about the dire conditions of soldier’s quarters located across the street from his house, said, "I don't do barracks inspections at Walter Reed”

At about the same time, our erstwhile Vice President (a man who with any shred of responsibility would have retired years ago to atone for the series of errors in judgment and false public statements he has made), said, “There will be no excuses, only action. And the federal bureaucracy will not slow that action down.”

Well I’m glad he cleared that up. After six years of controlling the Executive Branch, which I believe includes the Armed Forces, and with no oversight from Congress to thwart any of their actions, it turns out that Bush, Cheney, and Kiley are not responsible for what happened. It is those subordinates, including the dreaded Washington Bureaucracy, who are the villains. Those people just didn’t listen to the clear and deeply concerned orders from their superiors, who therefore are just not to blame. The buck stops there.

The reality is that this is one more example of not giving a damn for anyone beyond the inhabitants of corporate executive suites. The most sacrosanct cause in the Bush Administration is to grant tax cuts to the richest of the rich and make them permanent. If this tax welfare for the rich is to be preserved by skimping on the number of troops needed to secure Iraq following the invasion, by shortchanging expenditures on body and vehicle armor, by surging troops without bothering to provide training or equipment, and by decreasing the VA budget, so be it. It is the same theory that screams that abortion is murder but ignores children from the day of birth.

Support Our Troops 2

It is getting harder and harder for Republicans to claim they “Support Our Troops” as every day passes and another headline exposes the lie behind the statement. For the past week Walter Reed’s treatment of wounded US soldiers has shocked the public and Congress. The Administration strived for years to keep word of Iraqi and Afghanistan wounds and death outside public awareness. But a situation known to insiders and complained about to no avail was reported in the Washington Post and now everyone is trying to resolve the situation.

The new Secretary of Defense, who doesn’t bear responsibility for the events can’t even get it right. Yesterday he fired the head of Walter Reed, who has been in the job for less than a year, has been trying to correct the situation and has the support of his staff, while promoting the General who headed Walter Reed from 2002 through 2004, during which time the lack of treatment began, and whose reaction to the news reports was to blast the messenger rather than admit the problem existed.

Today the Post reported on a preliminary analysis prepared by a congressional commission studying the state of US military reserve forces. It demonstrates once again how the Bush decision to invade Iraq completely underestimated the costs and implications of doing so. Bush and Rumsfeld’s inability to understand what they were undertaking, their lack of planning, and their adherence to belief’s untested by anyone other than their small group of advisors led them into the morass we face today. Their insistence on thinking they could succeed in Iraq with a fraction of the troops they were told they needed results in the condition described below:

Nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated "not ready" -- largely as a result of shortfalls in billions of dollars' worth of equipment -- jeopardizing their capability to respond to crises at home and abroad
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The report found that heavy deployments of the National Guard and reserves since 2001 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other anti-terrorism missions have deepened shortages, forced the cobbling together of units and hurt recruiting.

"We can't sustain the [National Guard and reserves] on the course we're on," said Arnold L. Punaro, chairman of the 13-member Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, established by Congress in 2005.

"The Department of Defense is not adequately equipping the National Guard for its domestic missions," the commission's report found. It faulted the Pentagon for a lack of budgeting for "civil support" in domestic emergencies, criticizing the "flawed assumption" that as long as the military is prepared to fight a major war, it is ready to respond to a disaster or emergency at home.

The equipment shortage extends to Gulf Coast states such as Louisiana and Mississippi -- devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina -- where Guard units have only a fraction of what they would need to respond to another large-scale disaster.

Army National Guard units in the United States have on average about half of their authorized stock of dual-use equipment, needed both for fighting wars and for domestic missions, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. The National Guard estimates that it would require $38 billion for equipment to restore domestic Army and Air National Guard units to full readiness. The Army has budgeted $21 billion to augment Guard equipment through 2011.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the use of U.S. military reservists has risen from about 12.7 million days of service in 2001 to an estimated 63 million days in 2006. The current increase of U.S. troops in Iraq is expected to require the call-up of as many as four National Guard combat brigades beginning early next year.

But while the 830,000-strong selected reserves make up more than a third of the total military, they receive only 3 percent of equipment funding and 8 percent of the Defense Department budget, the report said.

National Guard units deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been required to leave large quantities of gear in the combat zone. Partly as a result, 88 percent of Guard units in the United States are now so poorly equipped that they are rated "not ready," according to Guard data and the report, which cited the National Guard Bureau chief, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum. Forty-five percent of the Air National Guard is also "not ready," according to Guard data.

The report also said prospects for Guard recruiting and retention remain "highly problematic," despite successes last year. Fewer former active-duty military personnel have joined the reserves over the past 10 years -- they made up 38 percent of the Army National Guard recruits last year, compared with 61 percent in 1997. Polling data for youths and their parents also show that favorable views of service in the Guard and reserves have declined since November 2001, the report said.