I know I mentioned it recently, but the quote continues to be relevant. In 2000, then-Gov. Bush blamed Clinton and Gore directly for “hollowing out” the military. “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, ‘Not ready for duty, sir.'”
Of course, if Bush wanted to make military preparedness a key element of his presidency, then his failures in this department are all the more dramatic. The president, of course, doesn’t see a problem — Bush told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto last summer, “We have a very strong military and we can deal with any threat to the homeland there is and will if we have to.”
Apparently, Bush is the only one who thinks so.
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 that would be vital 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 now at hand.
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 potential foreign crises…. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.
“We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it,” Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
Remember, Bush sought the presidency on a military-readiness platform and, for reasons that defy comprehension, believes we’re still well prepared.
Feel safer?
The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard A. 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.”
Democratic and Republican lawmakers received classified briefings last week on combat brigades and their equipment. Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz (D-Texas), chairman of the committee’s readiness panel, said: “I have seen the classified-only readiness reports. And based on those reports, I believe that we as a nation are at risk of major failure, should our Army be called to deploy to an emerging threat.”
Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), who attended the briefing, said, “We are at a crisis point across the board.” And Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), said, “This nation has got to replenish and fix what is soon going to be broken.”
The mind reels.