On Tuesday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and National Review editor Rich Lowry, perhaps the two most important voices in conservative journalism, explained their great new idea in a WaPo op-ed on Tuesday: we don’t need fewer troops in Iraq, we need more troops in Iraq. In addition to overlooking the fact that this hasn’t worked before, Kristol and Lowry went on to suggest that this would be politically popular with a country that seems anxious to bring troops home.
In response to their op-ed, Lawrence Korb, Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, and Peter Ogden, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress, explained today that the Kristol/Lowry plan would “threaten to break our nation’s all-volunteer Army and undermine our national security.”
In their search for additional troops and equipment for Iraq, the first place that Kristol and Lowry would have to look is the active Army. But even at existing deployment levels, the signs of strain on the active Army are evident. In July an official report revealed that two-thirds of the active U.S. Army was classified as “not ready for combat.” When one combines this news with the fact that roughly one-third of the active Army is deployed (and thus presumably ready for combat), the math is simple but the answer alarming: The active Army has close to zero combat-ready brigades in reserve.
The second place to seek new troops and equipment is the Army National Guard and Reserve. But the news here is, if anything, worse. When asked by reporters to comment on the strain that the active Army was under, the head of the National Guard said that his military branch was “in an even more dire situation than the active Army. We both have the same symptoms; I just have a higher fever.”
It’s as if Kristol and Lowry have moved from one fantasy land (the neo-con vision for Iraq before the invasion) to a new one. Forget whether more troops would actually help curb violence in Iraq — a painfully dubious claim in its own right — the Korb/Ogden point is that it simply isn’t a practical option.
Indeed, the Korb/Ogden op-ed coincides with their new piece for The New Republic on the same subject. It shows, among other things, an military equipment and manpower shortage for which there is no answer.
On equipment:
Combat-readiness worldwide has deteriorated due to the increased stress on the Army’s and the Marines’ equipment. The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions. The total Army–active and reserve–now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall. To ensure that the troops in Iraq have the equipment they need, the services have been compelled to send over equipment from their nondeployed and reserve units, such as National Guard units in Louisiana and Mississippi. Without equipment, it’s extremely difficult for nondeployed units to train for combat. Thus, one of the hidden effects of the Iraq war is that even the troops not currently committed to Iraq are weakened because of it.
And on personnel:
After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January — only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June. Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.
Alarmingly, this drop in boot camp attrition coincides with a lowering of recruitment standards. The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year.
The strains on the military are beginning to show. In July, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that thousands of white supremacists may have been able to infiltrate the military due to pressure from recruitment shortfalls. Private Steven Green, the soldier arrested for his alleged role in the rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her family, was allowed to join the Army despite legal, educational, and psychological problems. Green didn’t graduate from high school and had been arrested several times.
Of all of Bush’s misstatements from the 2000 presidential election, one of the most obviously-false attacks was on military readiness. Indeed, 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.'” BC00 campaign aides later acknowledged it was a bogus charge, but that didn’t stop Bush from repeating it.
The irony, of course, is that Bush proceeded to do exactly what he falsely accused Clinton of doing. As Mark Kleiman concluded, “I recall a schoolyard taunt in response to a threat: ‘Yeah? You and what army?’ George W. Bush, and whatever poor bastard succeeds him on January 20, 2009, are going to hear that taunt more and more.”