By Cheney's standards (recruiting, retention, morale, equipment, supplies, veterans' benefits, inadequate training, unclear mission, overdeployed), George W. Bush is an unmitigated failure as Commander in Chief.
Cheney, relying on expertise gained while serving as Secretary of Defense, making him specially qualified for this analysis and also uniquely outraged, lays out the case against Bush as Commander in Chief with a massive list of failures: recruiting, retention, morale, equipment, supplies, veterans' benefits, inadequate training, unclear mission, overdeployed...
CHENEY:
Our military today is overused and under-resourced. ... overseas deployments have multiplied, stretching the services to the limit, and causing shortages of spare parts and equipment. All of this has brought on serious problems of readiness, recruiting, retention, and morale....
Let's look at the people in our military - these young men and women who give America the best years of their lives. One need only talk to those who serve, or the many who have left, to get the picture. ]They will tell you first-hand of parts in short supply, maintenance cancelled or delayed, exercises called off.
...In the circumstances I've described,
recruitment and retention inevitably become a problem. For the fifth consecutive year, the Army and Navy
will fail to meet their targets for commissioned officers. Both branches are facing a situation where
junior officers are increasingly headed for the door.In a recent GAO survey of more than a thousand officers and enlisted men, a majority said they intended to leave rather than stay and pursue a career. Why are they leaving? For many, the question really is, why stay -
when training is inadequate, equipment is lacking, units are undermanned and forces are deployed in more than a hundred places across the globe, often with unclear missions and inadequate support?As in civilian life, after all, career decisions are often family decisions. Today, military housing is often substandard. Many schools for military children are run-down and needing repair.
Overdeployed soldiers speak of what they call the birthday problem. When you miss a child's birthday for the third or fourth year in a row, in peacetime, reenlistment is a tougher call. ... We all know that everyone in the service, from the highest officer to the newest recruit, is not fully free to speak about mission or morale. That is as it should be.
But for the Vice President to claim - on their behalf, without fear of contradiction - that all is well in the military, is only to take further advantage of them.http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?speech_id=5386&keyword=&phrase=tougher+call&contain=(Yes. The "birthday problem". That IS a shameful way to treat our troops.)
Sadly, Cheney's criticisms are supported by the facts:
PBS: June '04: LT. GEN. JOHN VINES, U.S. Army: So currently, we are stretched extraordinarily thin.USAtoday: Jan. '04 Army expanding stop-loss order to keep soldiers from leavingCSM: Jan. '06 Stop-loss used to retain 50,000 US troopsWP: Oct. '05 Recruiting Shortfall Delays Army's Expansion PlansMSNBC: May '05 Army, Marines miss recruiting goals againCBS: Sept. '04 National Guard Recruiting LagsMPR: July '04 U.S. military faces recruiting and retention challengesDoD: July '06 Operations Tempo Remains Retention ChallengeGuardian: Dec. '03 The US army has promised to rush new body armour to Iraq by the end of this month after it emerged that tens of thousands of soldiers were sent to the front without the life-saving protective jackets: Parents of some of the troops have resorted to buying the jackets with their bullet-stopping ceramic inserts themselves and posting them to Iraq. The failure to equip ordinary soldiers properly has caused fury in Congress, where the shortfall in body armour has been contrasted with the generous allocations to other projects in this year's $379bn defence budget.
Most national guard troops and reservists deployed in Iraq have been sent with only Vietnam-era flak jackets that are much less effective in stopping shrapnel and bullets.
USAToday: Mar. '04l Soldiers in Iraq still buying their own body armor
The Associated Press
Soldiers headed for Iraq are still buying their own body armor -- and in many cases, their families are buying it for them -- despite assurances from the military that the gear will be in hand before they're in harm's way.
Body armor distributors have received steady inquiries from soldiers and families about purchasing the gear, which can cost several thousand dollars.
...Nancy Durst recently learned that her husband, a soldier with an Army reserve unit from Maine serving in Iraq, spent four months without body armor. She said she would have bought armor for her husband had vests not been cycled into his unit.
Even if her husband now has body armor, Durst said she was angry he was without it at any time. Her husband also has told her that reservists have not been given the same equipment as active duty soldiers. "They're so sick of being treated as second-class soldiers," she said....
"There still is a lingering level of mistrust with some families as to whether there are people thinking about the best equipment and needs of their loved ones," Turley said. "No one that I know of has been truly held accountable.
Veterans Against the Iraq War: Mar. '03: Republicans Seek to Slash VA Budget.
The Republican majority of the House Budget Committee is reducing President
Bush's proposed budget by about $844 million in health care and an additional $463 million in benefit programs including disability compensation, vocational rehabilitation, education survivor's benefits, and pension programs from next year's budget. In addition to these cuts, the GOP is planning to cut $15 billion from the veteran programs over the next 10 years.
The soldiers and sailors that are currently in harms way in the the Middle East, are about to have their future veterans' benefits and health care slashed.
Common Dreams: July '06 Homelessness a Threat for Iraq Vets
Herold Noel had nowhere to call home after returning from military service in Iraq. He slept in his Jeep, taking care to find a parking space where he wouldn't get a ticket.
"Then the nightmares would start," says the 26-year-old former Army private first class, who drove a fuel truck in Iraq. "I saw a baby decapitated when it was run over by a truck -- I relived that every night."
Across America on any given evening, hundreds of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan like Noel are homeless, according to government estimates.
The reasons for their plight are many. For some, residual stress from daily insurgent attacks and roadside bombs makes it tough to adjust to civilian life; some can't navigate government assistance programs; others simply can't afford a house or apartment.
..."I'm just an ordinary person who served. I'm not embarrassed about my homelessness, because the circumstances that created it were not my fault," says Beckford, 30, who was a military-supply specialist at a U.S. base in Iraq -- a sitting duck for around-the-clock attacks "where hell was your home."
It was a "hell" familiar to Noel during his eight months in Iraq. But it didn't stop when he returned home to New York last year and couldn't find a job to support his wife and three children. Without enough money to rent an apartment, he turned to the housing programs for vets, "but they were overbooked," Noel says.
While he was in Iraq, his family had lived in military housing in Georgia.
In New York, they ended up in a Bronx shelter "with people who were just out of prison, and with roaches," Noel says. "I'm a young black man from the ghetto, but this was culture shock. This is not what I fought for, what I almost died for. This is not what I was supposed to come home to."
WP: '06 Military Confirms Pre-deployment Training Failures
Bangor Daily News: July '06: Guardsmen recall Iraq dangers:
At first, our armor was just an old Vietnam-era flak jacket bungee-corded around the door," said Cowan, a patrol sergeant with the Kennebec County Sheriff's Office.
Jewett recalled a trip to Balad with Fish in a 5-ton truck with a loose windshield and no protection but for some "hillbilly armor," or steel welded onto the side. "I got there and started looking at the vehicles and thought, oh my god, the reports on CNN and all that are true. This is crap," Jewett said of his first impression of Iraq.
But they made the best of it, he said. "What can you do? You're there so you know you have to be focused and ready to go."??
The Vietnam-era communications equipment - "glorified," unencrypted CB radios - failed regularly, leaving the men unable to contact other members of the convoys, they said. "We were running blind," Jewett said.
The poor equipment once sent the men into the dangerous heart of Mosul, after radios died and the lead gun truck missed an instruction to take a right turn.
...The communications equipment also compromised their ability to transmit back to the base. "Here we are the greatest military in the world and our communication system failed on a regular basis," Cowan said.
"You'd have extended periods of time where you didn't have any communications with the base." "Once you leave the wire, you are on your own," Jewett said.
Equipment upgrades through the Army either were too costly or required excessive paperwork, Grady said. "We were almost at the point where we were gonna all pitch in a hundred bucks apiece and buy it ourselves," he said.
Do you fail to support the troops if you discuss these problems and point the finger of blame at the Commander in Chief during wartime? Is it wrong to have a public debate about the status of the military during wartime? Cheney says no, flatly dismissing any assertion that those who point out the military's problems are "running down the troops".
How dare anyone use such craven demagoguery to avoid taking responsibility for his own failures of leadership. Cheney's attack is withering:
CHENEY:...if you listened closely to his remarks..., you noticed that he did not dispute a single one of
assertions. Instead, he merely accused of trying to "run down America's military for political advantage." He said it was the "wrong message to send our allies and adversaries around the world."
There seems to be some confusion here. Maybe I can clear it up ...
...what lesson do draw from the fact that this Administration has failed to safeguard our nation's most vital national secrets?
... To point out that our military has been overextended, taken for granted, and neglected - that is no criticism of the military. That is a criticism of a president and a vice president, and the record they have built together.
A great debate is taking shape. The American people are listening. And they, in the end, make the decision, as they have done before. link
This is indeed a scathing attack by Dick Cheney on George W. Bush's record as Commander in Chief. Cheney also summarily smacks down those who try to stifle debate by resorting to that tired old canard that an attack in the President is an attack on the troops. Not true, says Cheney.
I propose we adopt this as the
"Cheney Doctrine for Patriots" in honor of the man who formulated it and who, I am sure, will pursue it with the utmost zeal:
1. Call for a great debate on the Bush Administration's conduct of the Iraq War.
2. Government officials who "run down the military" by neglect and gross mismanagement
do not support the troops. In fact, they disrespect and abuse the troops.
3. Dissent is patriotic. Those who criticize the President do not criticize the troops. Period.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/9/15114/08479
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