According to ColinPowell and othermilitary experts, ‘theactive army is aboutbroken.’
Could Bush’s Iraq Misadventure “Break the U.S. Army”?By Cliff Montgomery – May 5th, 2007President George W. Bush’s continuing “surge” of some 35,000 troops in addition to the 140,000 already deployed in Iraq is creating howls, particularly among America’s military leaders, that the U.S. army is now over-stretched and fast becoming “broken”.A growing number of senior retired officers–some of whom had first expressed optimism that America’s active-duty force of some 500,000 troops could handle Bush’s “global war on terror”– now say our military strength hasn’t been this weak since 1980, when the country’s top soldier, Gen. Edward Meyer, publicly declared that America had a “hollow Army”.”The active army is about broken,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell–who also served as chairman of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush–was quoted as saying in the April issue of Time magazine.Another highly decorated retired general who recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan discussed the situation in even more dire terms.”The truth is, the U.S. Army is in serious trouble and any recovery will be years in the making and, as a result, the country is in a position of strategic peril,” ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the National Journal. McCaffrey had also penned a much-cited memo for his colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point concerning the current Army crisis.”My bottom line is that the Army is unraveling, and if we don’t expend significant national energy to reverse that trend, sometime in the next two years we will break the Army just like we did during Vietnam,” he added.”Pressed by the demands of two wars, plus mandates to expand, reorganize, and modernize, the Army is nearing its breaking point,” according to the Journal, which also ran a companion piece on how the Army crisis has forced the service to lower its mental, physical and moral standards just to meet basic recruitment targets.For instance, some 15 percent of Army recruits last year were granted “waivers” from the Army’s minimum standards. About half of those were “moral waivers”–waivers allowing recruits to enter the service despite prior criminal records.From just over 1.6 million troops at the height of the Vietnam War, the Army’s active-duty force trickled down to a half million soldiers by the mid-1990s, during those first post-Cold War years.Counting reserve and National Guard forces, the Army’s total strength is currently about one million soldiers. But don’t be fooled; just less than 400,000 are trained for combat.While such numbers are considered adequate for typical conflicts with clear military and political objectives like the first Gulf War–or a clear, defined ‘War on al-Qaeda”–in which the U.S. may employ concentrated strikes and overwhelming force to prevail, the structure of the U.S. Army has proven far less suitable for the kind of ideological, fruitless-nation-building now being attempted in Iraq.Some U.S. military leaders, like then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, practically begged the Bush Administration before the 2003 Iraq War to realize that several hundred thousand troops would be needed if American soldiers would ever have a prayer of stabilizing the nation. But Bush’s then-defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was hell-bent to show that a “transformed” Army–one which used high-tech gadgets to make up for hard numbers–could handle any crisis.Rumsfeld infamously rejected repeated appeals by military commanders, Congress and even some of his neo-conservative allies to increase the size of the standing army.It was not until Rumsfeld was ousted following last November’s elections–almost four years into the nation-building, that a more reasonable voice was heard. In January, Bush’s new defense secretary, Robert Gates–whom many say is the best political choice Bush has made in years– called for an increase in Army numbers to almost 550,000 and in the Marines, from 175,000 to 202,000.But these increases will be phased in over five years. While understandable, it offers scant relief to stresses in the existing force, say military experts.There is yet another top concern at the moment: troop readiness and training. As more soldiers are rotated into Iraq for Bush’s “surge”, the amount of time devoted to the troops’ training has been substantially reduced.”Given the new policy of having (American) troops (interact more) among the Iraqis,” Lawrence Korb, the Pentagon’s chief personnel officer under President Ronald Reagan, told Time, “they should be giving our young soldiers more training, not less.”Adding to the lack of training time are shortages of equipment, such as tanks and Humvees, on U.S. bases where troop training takes place.”On the equipment side of the equation, the Army is pretty much broken,” Tom McNaugher, a military expert at the RAND Corporation, flatly told the Journal.
