03-23-2007, 10:22 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 2,288
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I'm sure Bill Kristol would love for us to invade Iran, but whose army would we use? Ours is stretched thin at the moment: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/local/story.asp?ID=179980
Quote:
Shortfalls hobble military readiness
Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post
March 19, 2007
WASHINGTON – 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 necessary 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 at hand.
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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 other foreign crises.
"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it," Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
The Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard 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."
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked last month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the preparedness of Army units in the United States. He stated simply: "No ... I am not comfortable."
Pace said the unexpected demand for more troops in Iraq – from the 10 brigades that commanders last year projected they would need by the end of 2006, to the 20 brigades scheduled to be there by June – prompted him to recommend permanently adding 92,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps, saying it would "make a large difference in our ability to be prepared for unforeseen contingencies."
Indeed, the recent increase of more than 32,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has pushed already severe readiness problems to what some officials and lawmakers consider a crisis point. Schoomaker said last week that sustaining the troop increase in Iraq beyond August would be "a challenge."
The troop increase has also created an acute shortfall in the Army's equipment stored overseas – known as "pre-positioned stock" – which would be critical to outfit U.S. combat forces quickly should another conflict erupt, officials said.
The Army should have five full combat brigades' worth of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units rotate in and out of the country.
[the rest of the article requires a password, but you get the idea]
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