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Military Mismanagement
November 1, 2006
Last month, “103 soldiers, Marines, airmen, and seamen died” in Iraq, “the war’s fourth-deadliest month, and the worst since January 2005.” “A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command,’ The New York Times reports today, “portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos.” One slide said violence is at an “all-time high.” Despite the grim news out of Iraq, Bush continues to implicitly accuse opponents of his Iraq policy of not supporting the troops. “Whatever party you’re in,” Bush said yesterday, “our troops deserve the full support of our government.” Yet his administration’s “strategic miscalculations and gross mismanagement of resources have pushed the all-volunteer force perilously close to its breaking point.” “Unfortunately,” the Center for American Progress’ Larry Korb, Max Bergmann, and Peter Ogden wrote, “the current state of the Army and the Marines has yet to become the rallying cry this election season. It should.”
- Some conservatives continue to call for sending more troops to Iraq despite the fact that there is a clear manpower shortage. Some of the Iraq war’s most ardent defenders have urged the president to send more troops to Iraq. First, a strategy of increasing U.S. troop presence in Iraq “risks further stoking the flames of the insurgency by feeding perceptions of long-term U.S. occupation among many Iraqis.” Second, we do not have the troops to send. “Sending more troops to Iraq would, at the moment, threaten to break our nation’s all-volunteer Army and undermine our national security.” Currently, the Army has “close to zero combat-ready brigades in reserve,” and the National Guard is “in an even more dire situation than the active Army.” (63 percent of all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans believe the Army and Marine Corps are overextended.) “The U.S. military suffers from a glaring manpower deficiency,” Korb and Ogden argue in Foreign Affairs. “This massive troop commitment [in Iraq] has put a serious and unsustainable strain on the U.S. military.”
- Operations in Iraq are taking a toll on military equipment. 42 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans say their equipment was below the military standard of being 90 percent operational. 35 percent say their Humvees and trucks were not up-armored when they arrived in-country. “[T]he Army is showing the wear and tear of constant battle after nearly five years of war.” As a result, the Army is being forced to cut resources to non-deployed forces to make sure front-line troops stay at the highest combat readiness. The Marines are also feeling the crunch. After three years in Iraq, “the Marine Corps has maintained 40 percent of its ground equipment, 50 percent of its communications equipment, and 20 percent of its aviation assets in Iraq. This equipment is used at as much as nine times its planned rate, abused by a harsh environment, and depleted due to losses in combat.”
- Donald Rumsfeld continues to push his failed policies at the Pentagon. Some conservatives have called for Rumsfeld’s resignation because of his mishandling of Iraq. “The president refused [to accept Rumsfeld’s resignation], Olympia Snow (R-ME) said last week.” If I had been in his place, I would have accepted it.” Others, such as House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), argue that Rumsfeld is the “best thing that’s happened to the Pentagon in 25 years.” “This Pentagon and our military need a transformation,” Boehner said last weekend. But Rumsfeld’s continued support for a “transformation” strategy to make the Army smaller and more agile ignores a clear lesson from Iraq: “the Army is suffering more from manpower deficiencies than from the absence of high-tech weaponry.” In addition, by removing himself from a recent budget dispute over the Army’s low funding, Rumsfeld “effectively washed his hands of his duty to reconcile the competing budget demands of the respective services.”
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