The Army and Marine Corps are planning to ask incoming Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Congress to approve permanent increases in personnel, as senior officials in both services assert that the nation's global military strategy has outstripped their resources.
In addition, the Army will press hard for "full access" to the 346,000-strong Army National Guard and the 196,000-strong Army Reserves by asking Gates to take the politically sensitive step of easing the Pentagon restrictions on the frequency and duration of involuntary call-ups for reservists, according to two senior Army officials.
Think about this for a moment. The Army wants full access to both the Army National Guard and Army reserves, which will allow the Army to start involuntary call-ups to these soldiers to bolster their already deteriorating forces in Iraq. Continuing with the WaPost article:
The push for more ground troops comes as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sharply decreased the readiness of Army and Marine Corps units rotating back to the United States, compromising the ability of U.S. ground forces to respond to other potential conflicts around the world.
"The Army has configured itself to sustain the effort in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, in Afghanistan. Beyond that, you've got some problems," said one of the senior Army officials. "Right now, the strategy exceeds the capability of the Army and Marines."
The strategy exceeds the capability of the Army and Marines. In other words, the Army can not enlist enough new recruits to replace those soldiers already serving in Iraq, or who are getting out when their contracts have expired. Young Americans are not signing up in the military. Because of falling enlistments, the Army has been forced to lower their own standards, just to meet their own limited recruitment goals. Consider this October 9, 2006 MSNBC story, titled Army tops recruit goal by lowering standards:
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army recruited more than 2,600 soldiers under new lower aptitude standards this year, helping the service beat its goal of 80,000 recruits in the throes of an unpopular war and mounting casualties.
The recruiting mark comes a year after the Army missed its recruitment target by the widest margin since 1979, which had triggered a boost in the number of recruiters, increased bonuses, and changes in standards.
The Army recruited 80,635 soldiers, roughly 7,000 more than last year. Of those, about 70,000 were first-time recruits who had never served before.
According to statistics obtained by The Associated Press, 3.8 percent of the first-time recruits scored below certain aptitude levels. In previous years, the Army had allowed only 2 percent of its recruits to have low aptitude scores. That limit was increased last year to 4 percent, the maximum allowed by the Defense Department.
[....]
About 17 percent of the first-time recruits, or about 13,600, were accepted under waivers for various medical, moral or criminal problems, including misdemeanor arrests or drunk driving. That is a slight increase from last year, the Army said.
Of those accepted under waivers, more than half were for “moral” reasons, mostly misdemeanor arrests. Thirty-eight percent were for medical reasons and 7 percent were drug and alcohol problems, including those who may have failed a drug test or acknowledged they had used drugs.
The Army is applying a Band-Aid to a severed limb. They have lowered the enlistment standards to about as low as they can go, and yet they still can't get enough recruits to ship to Iraq. Therefore, the Army will ratchet up the backdoor draft by taking control of both the Army National Guard and the Army Reserves. The problem with the Guard and the Reserves is that once the Army does start using up those troops; both the Guard and Reserves will have their own problems in re-enlistments and recruitments. Consider this in the MSNBC story:
The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve both fell slightly short of their recruiting goals. The Reserves recruited 25,378 of the targeted 25,500; and the Guard recruited 69,042 of the targeted 70,000.
If the regular Army forces the Guard and Reserve soldiers into serving multiple tours in Iraq, then you can bet that the Guard and Reserve recruiting numbers will also start dropping off.
But there are even more interesting details regarding the Army and Marine Corps woes. Going back to the WaPost article:
At least two-thirds of Army units in the United States today are rated as not ready to deploy -- lacking in manpower, training and, most critically, equipment -- according to senior U.S. officials and the Iraq Study Group report. The two ground services estimate that they will need $18 billion a year to repair, replace and upgrade destroyed and worn-out equipment.
Equipment problems. The war in Iraq has used up all of the Army's equipment. Here's a December 5, 2006 Washington Post story through MSNBC, titled Army battling to save equipment:
ANNISTON, Ala. - Field upon field of more than 1,000 battered M1 tanks, howitzers and other armored vehicles sit amid weeds here at the 15,000-acre Anniston Army Depot -- the idle, hulking formations symbolic of an Army that is wearing out faster than it is being rebuilt.
The Army and Marine Corps have sunk more than 40 percent of their ground combat equipment into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to government data. An estimated $17 billion-plus worth of military equipment is destroyed or worn out each year, blasted by bombs, ground down by desert sand and used up to nine times the rate in times of peace. The gear is piling up at depots such as Anniston, waiting to be repaired.
The depletion of major equipment such as tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and especially helicopters and armored Humvees has left many military units in the United States without adequate training gear, officials say. Partly as a result of the shortages, many U.S. units are rated "unready" to deploy, officials say, raising alarm in Congress and concern among military leaders at a time when Iraq strategy is under review by the White House and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
[....]
The military's ground forces are only beginning the vast and costly job of replacing, repairing and upgrading combat equipment -- work that will cost an estimated $17 billion to $19 billion annually for several more years, regardless of any shift in Iraq strategy. The Army alone has 280,000 major pieces of equipment in combat zones that will eventually have to be fixed or replaced. Before the war, the Army spent $2.5 billion to $3 billion a year on wear and tear.
[....]
The Army's five depots carry out the highest level of maintenance for Army gear ranging from rifles and other small arms to tanks, helicopters and missile systems. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Army has left behind hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment in Iraq and has relied heavily on field maintenance facilities in Kuwait.
But as the war has continued, Army leaders have recognized that they cannot afford to wait for a drawdown of troops before they begin overhauling equipment -- some of it 20 years old -- that is being used at extraordinary rates. Helicopters are flying two or three times their planned usage rates. Tank crews are driving more than 4,000 miles a year -- five times the normal rate. Truck fleets that convoy supplies down Iraq's bomb-laden roads are running at six times the planned mileage, according to Army data.
Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.
Is it no wonder that our military is being used up here? This is the equipment that is needed to be repaired at the Army depots--it is certainly not counting the equipment that is currently being worn out in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We don't have enough new recruits enlisting in the military, forcing the Army to take control of both the Army National Guard and Reserve in order to maintain the current operations in Iraq. What recruits that are joining the military are lower quality recruits--not the best and the brightest. And finally, the military equipment that the Army needs to fight its war in Iraq is being worn out and piling up at Army depots--just waiting to be repaired or replaced. All of this points out to a simple fact that the U.S. Army is unable to defend our country. Let's go back to the original WaPost story--Army, Marine Corps to ask for more troops:
If another crisis were to erupt requiring a large number of U.S. ground troops, the Army's plan would be to freeze its forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and divert to the new conflict the U.S.-based combat brigade that is first in line to deploy.
Beyond that, however, the Army would have to cobble together war-depleted units to form complete ones to dispatch to the new conflict -- at the risk of lost time, unit cohesion and preparedness, senior Army officials said. Moreover, the number of Army and Marine combat units available for an emergency would be limited to about half that of four years ago, experts said, unless the difficult decision to pull forces out of Iraq were made.
"We are concerned about gross readiness . . . and ending equipment and personnel shortfalls," said a senior Marine Corps official. The official added that Marine readiness has dropped and that the Corps is unable to fulfill many planned missions for the fight against terrorism.
Our military can't defend us against the Great War on Terrorism. If the Army ships a large number of Guard and Reserve troops to Iraq, then the military can't defend us against natural disasters of floods, hurricanes, fires, and such. We certainly wouldn't be able to stop a North Korean invasion of South Korea. Or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Or the many other smoldering spots in Cyprus, Kashmir, Lebanon, Balkans, or Sudan that can erupt in violence.
Another disaster.
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