Marble Composition

Listening to the Generals

Or, put another way: In stating we will not leave Iraq during his presidency, will George W. Bush stand by while our military degrades into "not combat ready" status? Here's why I ask, from Think Progress:

The President has called up 2,500 inactive Marine reservists for involuntary duty to make up for manpower shortages. Even though many Marines have already served three tours in Iraq, the Marine Corps came up 1,200 volunteers short of its requirements. Defense commentator Fred Kagan from the conservative American Enterprise Institute put it bluntly:

It is one of an avalanche of symptoms that the ground forces are overstretched by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. … This administration needs to understand this is not a short-term problem, and it really needs a systemic fix in the size of the ground forces.

But the Marines are not just short manpower. A report released today by the Center for American Progress shows that the war in Iraq is increasingly taking its toll on the equipment of the Marine Corps. Vehicles like the Humvee and M1A1 tanks built to last for 15 years or more are wearing out in less than five. The cost to replace and repair the equipment damaged and destroyed is enormous – more than $5 billion a year.

To make up for the equipment shortfalls, the Marines have been taking equipment from units outside of Iraq and from their strategic reserves. Unable to train with the equipment that they will be using in combat, the readiness of Marine Corps units outside of Iraq are suffering.

If it comes to a point when the Generals tell Bush, "we can no longer sustain the occupation of Iraq militarily", assuming one of them who is not retired would step forward and say such a thing, would Bush shift his stance, or hang onto his daft vision that we must hang on until his mission really is "accomplished"? I'd bet on the latter. Let's grab a little more from the article from someone who actually served in Iraq:

"You can send Marines back for a third or fourth time, but you have to understand you are destroying their lives," said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "It is not what they intended the all-volunteer military to look like."

I'd like to believe that Bush would not destroy our nation's military in order to say, "see, I told you so", but I'm losing confidence every day.

[On a personal note, it seems the military is accepting people up to the age of 42. Without revealing my age on this heavily trafficed website, I would actually qualify for service. In what I would think is sound judgement, I'm not going to sign up because I'm a smoker (and a geezer for Christ's sake) and would surely be more of a detriment than an asset. But that's just me. If I'm drafted, I'll serve.]

By the way, I'm really fucking pissed about what this is doing to our Marine Corps. Maybe I didn't make that clear...

posted by FuzzFinger @ 8/23/2006 06:21:00 PM