More draftier, a lot, like

From that smart kid, Matt Yglesias:

Pay no attention to the redeployment of the Army NTC OPFOR to combat duty in Iraq. Thinking too seriously about what this implied for the future of the US military and about how badly overstretched our forces are right now will not be good for your health or your tax status. Incidentally, wasn't the redeployment of the Blackhorse to the Middle East part of the plot of a Tom Clancy book?

I guess that's how the WH does its military planning, see if there's a Tom Clancy parallel. I wrote about this a couple months back:

You know, I write spy novels and some science fiction. The reason I bring this up is not to peddle books, but to make an observation. Bush & Co's actions sound like the plot of a fucking spy novel. It's as if they're taking literary license with the war, the way I would when I ask my audience to suspend their belief in the flow of time and the details. (If writers didn't, novels would be SO long and boring, and filled with minutiae, that no one would want to read them.) But wars don't proceed like novels do. The president is not an omnipotent being, like a writer, who can mold the world so the outcome is in his favor. War, and running a country, involves minutiae on a biblical scale and all the details have to be addressed BEFORE war is declared. It's as if Bush thinks the world works like a TV show or a pulp fiction novel.

That's why they thought they could take Afghanistan using Special Ops forces alone. Some civilian in the Pentagon must have read Rainbow Six and said, 'we can do it that way'. Seems Tom Clancy never saw the need for a draft, but when we put a training unit on combat alert, a draft is probable. If the Air Force and the Navy put the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels on combat alert, a draft is imminent. I wouldn't be surprised if the Top Gun School personnel at Miramar are already training up for Iraq.