WaPo: Military Ill Prepared For Other Conflicts ("Serious & Deepening")

[Hissyspit]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/AR2007031801534.html

Military Ill Prepared For Other Conflicts

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 19, 2007; Page A01

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.

- snip -

The Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard A. Cody, described as "stark" the level of readiness of Army units in the United States, which would be called on if another war breaks out. "The readiness continues to decline of our next-to-deploy forces," Cody told the House Armed Services Committee's readiness panel last week. "And those forces, by the way, are . . . also your strategic reserve."

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[napi21]

1. Hell, they could have had that headline on the front page any day

or every day for the past several years! I blame THAT completely on Rummy too! He made two MAJOR mistakes. One, believing a smaller military is better and can do everything ever required of them. Two, trying to hide the cost of the military by hiring thousands of civilian mercinaries!