The Daily Background
| Army Chief of Staff warns war ‘will break’ militay if the current deployment strategy doesn’t change
by Arlen Parsa
The Army’s Chief of Staff wants more troops. But he doesn’t mean he wants more troops for Iraq, he just wants more troops for the Army. Why? Because otherwise the Iraq war is going to “break” the military otherwise. Writes the Washington Post:
Warning that the active-duty Army “will break” under the strain of today’s war-zone rotations, the nation’s top Army general yesterday called for expanding the force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops.
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, issued his most dire assessment yet of the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the nation’s main ground force. At one point, he banged his hand on a House committee-room table, saying the continuation of today’s Pentagon policies is “not right.”
Also of note, the Chief of Staff was not exactly gung-ho about a troop surge in Iraq. Apparently he told the President who has been discussing the idea with several Pentagon officials over the last several days “We should not surge without a purpose, and that purpose should be measurable and get us something.” The Post also notes that “Democrats, who will take charge of Congress next month, said yesterday that they plan to hold hearings on the “urgent” and “critical” readiness problems of the Army and Marine Corps.”
Earlier this year, analysis conducted at the request of Democratic leadership found that “there is not a single non-deployed Army Brigade Combat Team in the United States that is ready to deploy.”
Rumsfeld’s wet dream of a small, light but strong military winning quickly in Iraq by dealing only with the Iraqi Army and no sectarian violence afterwards (”I don’t think anyone could have predicted” sectarian violence, the SecDef later said) was simply not realistic. Winning “on the cheap” as Rumsfeld said he wanted to do, simply wasn’t realistic. Former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, the man who Schoomaker replaced, was fired by the Rumsfeld before the invasion because he said more troops were needed for a sectarian struggle after the initial invasion. Sectarian strife that Rumsfeld said nobody had ever predicted.
