Galloway: Time to fix what four years of war has broken

[Coexist]

This commentary is a stark look at our military today.

Former secretary of state James Baker and his independent commission are searching for a new strategy for Iraq, and legislators of both parties will soon begin looking for a compromise answer to the same knotty problem. But it's past time to start repairing the damage the Bush administration's way of war has done to our Army and our Marine Corps.

<snip>
Army officials say they're a total of some $25 billion short of what they need to sustain the current levels of operations. Because that's not available, they've been robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Patrick. Money budgeted to repair family housing and mow the grass and open the recreation centers on our Army bases is going, instead, to pay for the wars.

<snip>
Only by lowering standards of mental acuity and ability, accepting recruits up to age 45, paying large cash bonuses to anyone who signs on the dotted line, taking in more high school dropouts and granting waivers to recruits with criminal records, bodies covered in tattoos or both can the Army fill the holes left by those who leave every year.

<snip>
We cannot have business as usual in the Pentagon. We cannot continue to fund huge aircraft and ship purchases for the Air Force and Navy while starving the Army and Marines who are bearing the brunt of the fighting and dying in this brave new world of ours. Boots on the ground are not as glamorous - or as lucrative to defense contractors - as the high technology so beloved by Mr. Rumsfeld. But in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, there is still no substitute for them.

Please follow the link and read the entire thing.

I am not an advocate of unrestrained military spending, but we do need a strong military, with fair pay and benefits - NOT obscenely successful defense contractors.

[Donnachaidh]

1. NO parent should be willing to send their children to a war over OIL

And that is what Iraq is all about.

[lapfog_1]

2. I'm going to go out on a limb here.

Fundamentally, there wasn't anything really wrong with the "Rumsfeld revolution".

He wanted the forces to be lighter, faster, less people, more technology.

Of course, he should have been about less contractors and for the elimination of a number of weapons programs.

This would be a fine military to have IF you are going to only engage in wars that are similar to Gulf War I. That is to say, set piece military v. military on a defined battleground.

It's a military that sucks, however, at doing things like an occupation or urban guerrilla warfare. That army needs to have more troops, some personal high tech, much less weapons systems, much better personal armour, and more special forces.

Put it another way, one military needs planes and cruise missiles and aircraft carriers, the other one needs translators and diplomats, body armour, smart rifles, and comm gear and more people.

Rumsfled was fighting war "B" with the military he designed for war "A". Fatal mistake.

Not that we should be in Iraq to begin with.