I’ve used this cite before, but it backs up the above, so I’ll repost it here. It’s the CBO estimate of what would be needed to maintain troops at or near current levels past March 2004. That date is significant because it represents one year after the start of the conflict, and policy is to rotate troops out of a war zone after one year.
Basically, it involves a huge amount of juggling, and shows as well that the logistical problem of keeping a large country under indefinite occupation by mainly US forces (because of our rejection of the UN, of course) was never completely thought through:
China and Taiwan know too.
The British army is getting a trifle overstretched ,we have the permament irish terrorist/organised crime problem etc etc we are used to winning conflicts ,we have won two "vietnams "Malaya and the borneo confrontation plus Oman but when when we fight with Americans lately it all seems to go tits up ref iraq.
Am I the only one who reads the article in the OP, then finds dark irony in this quote?
Of course, Bush was lying when he said that, but the irony remains.
hell I’ve been noticing and worrying about the long and frequent deployments of the National Guard, myself. you know, those folks where the ads for recruitment say “1 weekend a month and two weeks a year”? yet they’re being deployed overseas for months?
National Guard troops have regular jobs here, their employers (in the past anyhow) were probably pleased to hire them, don’t know if they are now or will be in the future (um, boss, I need the next 8 months off);
Someone’s going sue over those ads if they keep showing them!
The invasion was planned just fine. It’s the occupation that’s causing so many problems.
I thought we’d switched to full year deployments. IIRC, they have to show up and get ready somewhere for a while, yet their deployment time doesn’t begin until they arrive wherever they’re headed. So a deployment of a year can actuallly mean that they’re away from their regular lives for longer than a year.
(Simon - I picked the number ‘8 months’ 'cause I remembered seeing a newstory about a deployment and thinking damn that’s a long time, but being too lazy to look up the real number - it may indeed have been 12 months or more. I just didn’t want to post something like 12 months + and have some neo con come in and demand proof that it was that long and having to say “ok, ok, so it’s only 11.5 months, so sue me” 
)
Yeah, that’s a pretty big bone of contention for a lot of people. Not everyone is as happy as I am to be activated for long periods of time. With some of us, like me, we know that we’re going away for long deployments a good bit, and even when we’re not deployed we have to do a lot more than one weekend a month, two weeks a year. Hell, I have to fly almost weekly to maintain my currency requirements, even when I’m not activated. But they sell it that way, and a lot of people feel like they were misled.
After the 9/11 patriotic bravado wears off, I wonder how this will affect retention. Methinks that the Guard and Reserve components will be in the hurt locker in about five years. Out of the fifteen or so people that came into my section last year I am the only one who is definitely planning to stay, and at least ten of them have said that they’re doing their six years and getting out.
That’s good news and bad news. The good news: no competition for promotions (if I stay with the Guard I’ll be a Tech Sergeant by 2007, Master by 2010 so long as I don’t screw up). The bad news: I get deployed longer and more often. Not that that’s really a bad thing, mind you, but it plays hell with family stuff.
Time will tell, I guess.
Airman the future for recruitment is exactly what I was concerned about. To me, the NG is vital, it allows us to keep available a fairly large force, w/o having to be concerned about actually having a fairly large force unless it’s needed.
plus, they aren quite frequently called out for natural disasters at home, where, once again, their service is absolutely necessary for all of us.
what I see is a frightening waste of some of our more precious and necessary resources, that may indeed negatively impact our status for years to come.
What wring said.
Well sure, now that it has been blabbed all over the place!
wring,
When things started, it was for 6 mos tours. Then, when it became apparent that we were gonna have too many people over there for too long, we had to switch to 12 month deployments.
The gig has pretty much changed to “12 months boots on the ground”, which is pissing some reservists and their families off, so the whole rotation ends up being longer than a year from the moment they report. I’ll dig up a cite.
Today’s NYT had an interesting Op-Ed piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/opinion/07TRUS.html?pagewanted=2
From the preceding I make 2 conclusions.
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The GWB administration did a piss-poor job of planning the endgame.
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We have some smart, flexible soldiers on the ground in Iraq.
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GWB has basically made all the mistakes and taken the credit for a superior military inherited from the previous administration.
Think about how difficult it must have been to scale down the Cold-War military, yet still maintain top quality troops (see above) while building high-tech equipment (JDAMS, UAVs, battlefield communications gear, etc.) for the next century’s battles. Yet that is what Bill Clinton did, all while reducing the share of military spending in the US economy by about 1/2.
Remarkable. It shows the benefits of solid fact-based policy analysis.
As Dick Cheney put it in 2000, “A commander in chief leads the military built by those who came before him. There is little that he or his defense secretary can do to improve the force they have to deploy. It is all the work of previous administrations… And when that war [Gulf War I] ended, the first thing I did was to place a call to California, and say thank you to President Ronald Reagan”.
An honorable man and an honorable party would grant the same courtesy to William Jefferson Clinton.
To be fair, there actually was quite abit of planning on the part of the State Dept. This extensive planning was discarded, (til recently), in favor of the “We’ll be greeted with hugs and flowers” planning. IIRC, the CIA, the DIA and the State Dept all provided ample warnings and info about things that certain prominent members of the Admin said couldn’t’ve been anticipated.
To be fair, even though these things are his responsibility he had lots of help. He didn’t make all of these mistakes himself.
SimonX: Quite correct. Furthermore, even the Iraqi exiles warned of the need for a large troop presence to curb looting. I also seem to recall experts in post-conflict management making the same point.
Broadly speaking, I suppose President W, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz and presumably Dick Cheney all made the wrong call, while General Shinseki, various regional specialists and the Joint Chiefs of Staff proved to have superior judgement.
It is better to support the planners than engage in wishful thinking. I’ve given this quote before, but I believe it is relevant here:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.marshall.html
The order came down: cook the evidence to support our pre-determined conclusions. Conflicting points of view were consciously supressed in the rush to war.