It’s way too late for that now. You can’t do reconstruction projects in the middle of a war zone.
I wish I could set you down with a logistics officer for half an hour. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to keep a complex army like ours running. Think our troops and their supplies get from America to Iraq by magic? Somebody (or actually, a whole passel of somebodies) has got to be in charge of knowing every last widget our troops need over there, and making sure it gets to them. It’s got to be packed, organized, and transported. Equipment has to be maintained. Back home, bases have to be kept operational, and new recruits have to be trained. And trust me, that’s just a fraction of it. That’s what most of our military does - support, so that the actual fighters have what they need in order to fight.
There’s really no way to change that, other than to hand more of the support operations over to private outfits like Halliburton. We’ve already done a certain amount of that, and it seems to have been one of our government’s less inspired ideas.
Everyone goes through Basic Combat Training in the Army. But afterwards you go to Advanced Individual Training. It would be a bit ridiculous to pull a soldier thats trained in being a Computer Technician or a russian translator and plopping him or her Iraq just for the sake of numbers. Believe it or not, not every job in the army boils down to how to kill people.
As a non commissioned officer in the Army I have to tell you that the Department of the Army will decide who deserves to be in the Army. Pulling soldiers from other duty stations and missions just to make a huge force in Iraq is simplistic thinking. As someone else said, you’d be better off talking to a logistics officer for that. I’m sure there are posters here that can explain that to you better than I.
Unless you’d like there to be a draft…but i don’t think you’d like it if we just went around yanking people into enlisting because they deserved to be a soldier.
The problem is that the locals have to know what is going to happen so that they can choose their allegiances.
In some ways, I think that this is going to have to be an intelligence led solution, the USA is good at Hi-Tech arms and has muscle, but it does not have sneaky Arabic speakers on the ground trading cash and protection for pinpointing individuals that can be scooped up in unmarked vans - and disappeared.
I’m thinking of us, the UK in Ireland, and the way the Syrians pinned down The Lebanon, and to a lesser extent the way Israel has been operating in Ghaza and the West Bank for some time.
Unfortunately urban warfare requires stooping to the level of the local opponents, infiltration and counter terror. Why use a uniformed snatch squad on a small band of insurgents, when a couple of locals can bomb them ?
I totally disagree. It doesn’t matter if whatever you’re building keeps getting knocked down. What matters is that you’re employing people and stimulating the economy.
(I won’t mention how poorly that’s been executed) I see no reason why civilians can’t perform those duties. What, you don’t think people would “join the Army” if all they did was load boxes onto planes? If the people doing those jobs now have been trained for combat, they should be on the ground in Iraq.
Uhh… how about fedex? God, anyone but military contractors (I’ll agree with you here). Sure the government makes it seem like those people are the only ones capable of anything. But that’s just not true. They keep getting hired because they’re in cahoots with the current administration. Other corporations can do such jobs much cheaper and probably better. Or the Army can hire civilians directly (which it obviously does anyway, but it can just make it clear they’re hiring for non-combat duties).
No, I understand we can’t send those guys to weed terrorists out of caves. But computer technicians and translators can pass for cops. Just the fact they’re sitting on a street corner eating donuts does a lot. And you know, I bet these non-combat guys would be a lot nicer and more pleasant when policing the Iraqi people (hearts and minds angle).
Umm, no. I don’t know what you think the problem in Iraq is, but picture an early-90s Tupac-style ghetto but more desperation, more guns, and Mullahs instead of rappers. Iraq is just filled with a bunch of aimless lawlessness and male gangs. Is combatting gangs about allegiances, trading cash, and disappearing individual people? No! Combating them is about flooding the place with police and order, and solving the economic conditions which lead kids to this pointless violence.
Anyone who tries to make out the problem in Iraq more higher-scale is succumbing to Bush and doesn’t want to admit that Iraq’s been turned into an ordinary hellhole. They try to make it out as if there’s some complex interplay of political factors orthogonal to what we did there. There aren’t, it’s just gangland. The LA police deparment should be in command, not some generals who have no idea what they’re doing (who don’t even understand the issues).
But anyway, what about my other concerns: Army troops lolligaging in Europe and South America. And Marines and Air Force which should be flooding Iraq.
Alex, please look up how long it took for the army to get into position for Gulf War I. You can’t bring tanks as carry on luggage. Not to mention the other facilities. I’m unaware that there has been any problem with logistics in Iraq. My understanding is that the Army does a world class job on this.
There are a lot of civilian contractors in Iraq now, and a lot of them are getting killed. They’re all making more money than the soldiers, so going civilian does not make it cheaper - even not counting Halliburton corruption.
There’s one other thing - the military is in other places for a reason. I think we still have troops in South Korea, and the last thing we want to do now is to remove them.
I do more or less agree with you about reconstruction. If we had done a decent job of it before things went to hell totally we’d be in better shape. I still think it might be worth a shot (they appear to have run out of money without actually finishing much) - if we gave protection to the sites, and got them working, even if they got blown up the people might blame the insurgents instead of us.
Baker is one of his Dad’s people, not his, and is no more likely to influence his thinking than has Dad himself. This commission was not sponsored by or supported by the White House.