Tuesday, August 1, 2006

The bottom of the barrel

Raw Story

Experts: Not a single Army Combat team left ready to deploy

A group of national security experts formed by Democratic leadership has reported to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) that, "there is not a single non-deployed Army Brigade Combat Team in the United States that is ready to deploy," RAW STORY has learned.

"The bottom line," the group concludes in a letter to Democratic leadership, "is that our Army currently has no ready, strategic reserve."

This degraded readiness condition stems from the heavy deployment of combat forces the Army has sustained these past four years. Predictably, this has resulted in accelerated wearout of large quantities of Army equipment, disruptions in training schedules, and strains on meeting recruitment and reenlistment goals. We called attention to this looming problem in an earlier report, "The US Military: Under Strain and at Risk," January 2006, but that report was met with indifference and denial by the administration. This problem can no longer be denied.

The administration's willingness to put our nation at such strategic risk is deeply disturbing. And its failure to adequately support the soldiers who are risking their lives for this nation is unacceptable. The readiness degradation that has already occurred could lead to a downward spiral that will take years to correct unless promptly addressed. Under these conditions, it is important for the Congress to step forward to exercise its oversight responsibilities for equipping and training the Armed Services.

Bush and Rumsfeld have taken the best Army in the world and broken it from overuse and abuse and they have no intention of trying to mend it, like a rich kid with an expensive 4x4 who just keeps rammin' rocks with it but who's scared to ask daddy for money to fix it because daddy'll figure out what he's been up to and take it away.

If something like Grenada should happen, they'd have to send the cooks and bakers. I'll skip the jokes about how being forced to eat army chow would make anybody surrender and probably violates the Geneva Convention to boot.

Point is, the U.S. is in deep shit if anything should come up, and it just might, given Bush's big mouth.

As far as Congress stepping forward to exercise its oversight responsibilities, they haven't done so yet in any matter involving removing their lips from Bush's unit. There's no reason to believe they'll start now.

November. Our only hope.

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