"… just another banana republic."
John D. Hutson, a retired rear admiral and the former top uniformed lawyer for the Navy, argued that a habeas right was fundamental to American law and identity. “Without these kinds of [habeas] protections, we’re just another banana republic,” Admiral Hutson said.
The military is speaking up, lately — and torture isn’t their only concern. So, let’s put the assault on the Constitution and the morphing of this nation into a police state and quasi-fascist entity on the back burner, just for the moment. Let’s just look at Bush’s two wars … Iraq and Afghanistan … both of which we’re “losing.”
Here’s a collection on the swiss-cheese’ry of the Stay The Course argument … not only is there no “there” there, it’s so bad it would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. I’d remind you that Bush is waiting for history to redeem him … you read all this, then you tell me that his cheese hasn’t slipped off his cracker.
Remember that tired old default line about how the Generals “get however many troops they need?” Not according to the Generals. Remember how we’re recruiting just fine and we have the troops we need to kick the world’s ass? Last article tells us that of out of 17 brigades fighting the Bush Wars, only a maximum of three are fully trained and equipped. There ya go — sitting ducks. I refuse to believe the official numbers of dead and wounded … and I think this nation will go ballistic when they’re eventually made public.
The Military wants Rummy gone, and gone now — stunning, I think, that this voice has unhesitatingly supported the Left’s cry for Don’s replacement; it’s not typical of “military mind” to criticize commanders. It should be noted that the newly-retired Generals speaking out today could be recalled … they risk much. Must be dire, eh? Oooooh, yeah — and they are in a unique position to understand just HOW dire.
Oh, and — by the way — if we want to continue to lose hearts and minds in such a spectacular way, we’ll need to come up with several billion more. Cough it up, Patriots … “spreading democracy” costs plenty, in George Bush’s America.
Worthy of note, the collection below is all mainstream media — welcome to the mutiny, dearhearts!
Jude
General: Appeals for More Troops Were Denied
Three retired soldiers slam Rumsfeld’s policies at a Democratic hearing in which the party tries to take the offensive on the war in Iraq.
Noam N. Levey
September 26, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-iraqpol26sep26,1,617751.story
WASHINGTON — Adding to criticism of the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq, a retired senior general who commanded an infantry division in the conflict said Monday that requests by commanders for more soldiers were repeatedly turned down.
“Many of us routinely asked for more troops,” retired Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste said, contradicting statements by President Bush and his senior aides that the administration had given the military all the resources it had asked for.
“There simply aren’t enough troops there to accomplish the task,” said Batiste, who has previously called for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign. “It’s a shell game we’re playing in Iraq, and we’ve been doing it since day one. And we’re still doing it today.”
The general’s remarks, echoed by two other retired soldiers Monday, came at a special hearing called by Democratic senators in what they said was a new initiative to increase oversight of the war effort.
Senior Republican lawmakers dismissed the hearing as a stunt orchestrated with November elections in mind.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to address Batiste’s comments directly, instead pointing to past public statements by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Rumsfeld had regularly consulted the senior military leadership on troop levels.
In April, when retired generals including Batiste called for Rumsfeld to resign, Pace said: “We had then [in Iraq invasion planning] and have now every opportunity to speak our minds, and if we do not, shame on us, because the opportunity is there.”
Batiste’s comments added fuel to questions about how the administration pursued its goals in Iraq and about the war’s consequences.
Several newspapers, including The Times, reported Sunday that the nation’s intelligence agencies had concluded that the Iraq war intensified the threat of global terrorism.
Administration officials responded that the articles on the war assessment contained in the classified National Intelligence Estimate did not represent the full report.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow continued to discount the news reports. “One thing that the reports do not say is that war in Iraq has made terrorism worse,” Snow said.
The senior Republican and Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee called Monday for the document to be declassified, a request the administration is resisting.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement that the disclosure of the assessment and the testimony at Democrats’ hearing dealt “a fatal blow to any claim that staying the current course is an acceptable strategy for success in Iraq.”
Batiste, in his testimony, renewed his April call for Rumsfeld to resign. Joining him were retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton and retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes.
All three of them Iraq veterans, they lambasted what they called the Defense secretary’s reluctance to commit more troops and other resources to the war.
“The whole thing is absolutely disingenuous,” Batiste said of the administration’s position that the number of soldiers deployed was sufficient to secure Iraq. “We started with a strategy and a plan that was under-resourced in soldiers and Marines and airmen and sailors by a factor of three.”
A career Army officer — and military aide to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war — Batiste commanded the 1st Infantry Division from 2002 until his retirement in 2005. Batiste commanded about 22,000 soldiers sent to north-central Iraq from February 2004 to February 2005.
Eaton, who oversaw efforts to train and equip Iraqi security forces in 2003 and 2004, also said he was not given enough U.S. troops to do the job.
About 145,000 American troops are serving in Iraq.
In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki drew harsh criticism from administration officials for predicting that “hundreds of thousands” of U.S. troops might be needed to keep the peace in a postwar Iraq.
Batiste and Eaton said Monday that a lack of troops was helping fuel the anti-U.S. insurgency. And Batiste went a step further, suggesting that insufficient troop levels contributed to the abuse of Iraqis by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities.
As the violence in Iraq has continued, the administration has faced increasing criticism that it went to war with an inadequate force and failed to anticipate the problems of rebuilding.
The Pentagon has steadfastly defended its war planning and deployments.
Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of all U.S. troops in the Middle East, has argued that higher troop levels would be counterproductive because they would anger local communities and undercut Iraqi forces’ incentive for taking over security responsibilities.
For Democrats — often divided over the war and on the defensive because of White House and Republican congressional leaders’ charges that the Democrats want to “cut and run” — Monday’s hearing was an attempt to take the offensive.
“I hope this here will be a wake-up call to our Republican colleagues in the House and Senate to start having hearings, to start doing their congressional responsibility,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y .), who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Still, the party faces a challenge in formulating an alternative approach.
Responding to questions by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Batiste, Eaton and Hammes strongly warned against an early withdrawal of American forces from Iraq — a position that several leading Democrats in Congress have advocated.
Clinton has not supported early withdrawal but has said that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended.
Three Retired Officers Demand Rumsfeld’s Resignation
William Branigin
Monday, September 25, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/25/AR2006092500731.html
Three retired military officers who served in Iraq called today for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, telling a Democratic “oversight hearing” on Capitol Hill that the Pentagon chief bungled planning for the U.S. invasion, dismissed the prospect of an insurgency and sent American troops into the fray with inadequate equipment.
The testimony by the three –two retired Army major generals and a former Marine colonel — came a day after disclosure of a classified intelligence assessment that concluded the war in Iraq has fueled recruitment of violent Islamic extremists, helping to create a new generation of potential terrorists around the world and worsening the U.S. position.
In testimony before the Democratic Policy Committee today, retired Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 and served as a senior military assistant to former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, charged that Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq.”
He told the committee, “If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents.”
Joining his call for Rumsfeld to resign were retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who was responsible for training Iraq’s military and police in 2003 and 2004, and retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, who served in Iraq in 2004 and helped establish bases for the reconstituted Iraqi armed forces.
Rumsfeld, appearing at a news briefing with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, rejected the demands for his resignation. Asked about the Capitol Hill hearing and whether he was considering stepping down, Rumsfeld shook his head slightly and mouthed the word “no” before calling for the next question.
Democrats today sought to make the most of the National Intelligence Assessment and of the retired officers’ remarks at the hearing, which Democratic leaders said they had to hold by themselves outside the regular congressional process because of the Republican leadership’s persistent “neglect” of oversight.
“On the heels of the disclosure that America’s intelligence community has concluded that the war in Iraq has increased the terrorist threat, today’s hearing deals a fatal blow to any claim that staying the current course is an acceptable strategy for success in Iraq,” said a statement issued by the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
Batiste charged in his testimony that Rumsfeld “is not a competent wartime leader” and surrounded himself with “compliant” subordinates.
“Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build ‘his plan,’ which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace and set Iraq up for self-reliance,” Batiste said.
In addition, Rumsfeld “refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency,” the retired general said. “At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan,” Batiste added.
“Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq,” Batiste said. “He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency.”
Eaton told the panel, “We went in with a bad plan,” adding that “stay the course is not a strategy.”
Hammes said removing the regime of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein “introduced major instability not just in Iraq, but in the greater Middle East.” And while the Bush administration has repeatedly said the war in Iraq is critical to U.S. security, “it has asked nothing of the majority of U.S. citizens,” he said.
“While asking major sacrifices, to include the ultimate sacrifice, from those Americans who are serving in Iraq, we are not even asking our fellow citizens to pay for the war,” Hammes complained. “Instead we are charging it to our children and grandchildren.”
Responding to critics who have charged that the National Intelligence Assessment shows the failure of Bush’s Iraq war policy, the White House today sought to put the best face on the document, which was completed in April and disclosed in the news media Sunday.
“One thing that the reports do not say is that war in Iraq has made terrorism worse,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said.
The National Intelligence Assessment “is not limited to Iraq,” he told a news briefing. “The false impression has been created that the NIE focuses solely on Iraq and terrorism. This NIE examines global terrorism in its totality, the morphing of al-Qaeda and its affiliates and other jihadist movements. It assesses that a variety of factors, in addition to Iraq, fuel the spread of jihadism, including longstanding social grievances, slowness of the pace of reform and the use of the Internet. And it also notes that should jihadists be perceived to have failed in Iraq, fewer will be inspired to carry on the fight.”
All these points already have been stated publicly by Bush, Snow asserted.
“Obviously, we’re not going to go into what the classified report does say, but what we did see in the newspapers yesterday, the substance, is precisely what the president has been saying,” he told reporters.
Separately, Vice President Cheney today accused Democrats of advancing a “strategy of resignation and defeatism in the face of determined enemies.”
In a speech at a Republican fundraiser in Milwaukee, Cheney indicated that he was not backing away from national security issues despite Democrats’ criticism that the administration has mishandled the war in Iraq.
“As we make our case to the voters in this election season, it’s vital to keep issues of national security at the top of the agenda,” Cheney told Wisconsin Republicans, Reuters news agency reported. He specifically criticized Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, as well as Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV ( D-W.Va.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Reid replied in a statement, “When the U.S. intelligence community confirmed that America is losing the war on terror because of Bush failures in Iraq, this White House lost all credibility on matters of national security. With Iraq in a civil war, Afghanistan moving backwards and our own borders unsecured, it’s clear George Bush and Dick Cheney are desperate to hide their record and distort the truth.”
Iraq, Overstretched Army Bring Bush New Grief
Jim Lobe
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by the Inter Press Service
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0926-03.htm
WASHINGTON - With the U.S. intelligence community agreed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have made this country less safe from terrorist threats, President George W. Bush appears now to be facing a growing revolt among top military commanders who say U.S. ground forces are stretched close to the breaking point.
According to Monday’s Los Angeles Times, the Army’s top officer, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, has called for nearly a 50 percent increase in spending — to nearly 140 billion dollars — in 2008 to cope with the situation in Iraq and maintain minimal readiness for possible emergencies.
To convey his seriousness, Schoomaker reportedly withheld the Army’s scheduled budget request last month in what the Times called an “unprecedented… protest” against previous rejections by the White House of funding increases.
The news of Schoomaker’s action, which is almost certain to intensify the growing debate over what to do in Iraq just seven weeks before the Nov. 7 mid-term Congressional elections, comes just days after the New York Times reported that the Army is considering activating substantially more National Guard troops or reservists.
Such a decision, which would run counter to previous administration pledges to limit overseas deployments for the Guard, would pose serious political risks for the Republicans if it was taken before the elections.
Unlike career soldiers, the Guard consists mainly of “citizen-soldiers” with families and jobs and deep roots in local communities. When the Pentagon last called up substantial numbers of Guard units for service in Iraq and Afghanistan in late 2003 and 2004, the move elicited a strong backlash in communities across the country.
With the war even less popular now than it was then, any major new call-up is likely to trigger renewed protests, particularly in light of the growing sense both among the national security elites and the general population that the administration’s decision to invade Iraq was a major mistake and that the war is unwinnable.
Recent public opinion polls have shown that the public has become increasingly pessimistic about the war’s outcome and its impact on the larger “global war on terror”.
Earlier this month, for example, a New York Times/CBS poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed the war in Iraq was going either “somewhat” (28 percent) or “very badly” (33 percent).
For most of the past year, a majority of respondents in various polls have said they believe the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake and that it has made the United States less, rather than more, safe from terrorism.
The fact that a similar conclusion was reportedly reached by the 16 agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that make up the U.S. intelligence community last April in a rare National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is likely to add to the public’s pessimism.
The NIE, some of whose contents were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post over the weekend, found that the Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism worldwide and aggravated the terrorist threat faced by the United States and other countries.
While the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, insisted Sunday that the newspaper accounts of the report’s conclusions were partial and selective, they nonetheless backed up what a number of former senior intelligence analysts — most recently, the recently retired head of the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Programme, Emile Nakhleh — have been saying individually for much of the past year.
While Democratic lawmakers called Monday for the administration to immediately declassify the NIE, “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States”, so that the public could decide for itself, it is certain to intensify the debate about whether to begin withdrawing from Iraq or whether to “stay the course” there, despite the growing sectarian violence and the wear and tear on U.S. ground forces.
For most of the past year, the administration and senior military commanders expressed hope that they could reduce U.S. forces in Iraq from the approximately 140,000 troops who were there last December to help protect the parliamentary elections by as much as 30,000 by the end of this year.
But, with the rise in sectarian violence, particularly in Baghdad, that followed the bombing last winter of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra, Washington has been forced to abandon those hopes. Last week, the senior U.S. Middle East commander, Gen. John Abizaid, made it official when he told reporters here that he needed at least 140,000 troops in Iraq through next spring.
Even this number of troops, however, has not proved sufficient to curb the violence in Baghdad, while a recent report from the senior Marine intelligence officer in Anbar province, which comprises about one-third of Iraq’s total territory, warned that the 30,000 U.S. troops deployed there could not defeat the Sunni insurgency without the addition of at least 13,000 troops and substantially more economic assistance.
Adding to the burden on the army and the marines, the resurgence of the Taliban has forced Washington to cancel plans to reduce forces in Afghanistan from 19,000 earlier this year to around 16,000 by this fall.
Instead, Washington currently has more than 20,000 troops deployed there amid signs that more may be needed if NATO fails to provide more troops of its own or if, in light of the retreat of Pakistani forces from neighbouring Waziristan, the Taliban mount an even bigger offensive from across the border next spring after the snows melt.
These commitments have taken a huge, unanticipated toll on U.S. land forces, not just in manpower, but in equipment and money, as well.
Before the war, the Pentagon’s political appointees confidently predicted that Iraq’s oil production would very quickly pay for the invasion’s financial costs and that Washington could draw down U.S. forces to as few as 30,000 by the end of 2003.
In fact, about 400 billion dollars — almost all of it for military operations — has been appropriated for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since September 2001, and current operations there are running at about nine billion dollars a month.
The Army, which has some 500,000 active-duty soldiers, has been allocated 98 billion dollar this year, and the White House has cleared it to receive 114 billion dollars for 2008. But Schoomaker has reportedly asked for 139 billion dollars, including at least 13 billion dollars needed to repair equipment. “There’s no sense in us submitting a budget that we can’t execute, a broken budget,” he warned recently in a speech here.
In addition to strains on both the land forces and their equipment, senior military leaders are also worried about attrition among mid-ranking officers, in particular, and the quality and cost of new recruits.
The military has greatly intensified its recruitment efforts, relaxed its age and education requirements for enlistment, and offered unprecedented bonuses and benefits packages — worth thousands of dollars — to enlistees and active-duty soldiers who re-enlist.
It has also increased enlistments by individuals with “’serious criminal misconduct” in their records,” and eased requirements of non-citizens — of which there are currently about 40,000 in the armed services — and made them eligible to citizenship after only one day of active-duty military service.
Security and War Take Center Stage as Campaign Break Nears
KATE ZERNIKE and CARL HULSE
September 26, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/us/politics/26detain.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — Republicans and Democrats scrambled Monday to gain the advantage in their final week before breaking to campaign for crucial midterm elections, with Republicans trying to push through bills on national security and Democrats trying to keep the focus on the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq.
Though Republicans had resolved a major party disagreement over the treatment and trials for terrorism suspects, a new dispute emerged Monday, as Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he thought a crucial provision of the legislation was unconstitutional and would doom the bill before the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Democrats convened a session with three former high-ranking military officers who harshly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and said the Bush administration’s failure to adjust its strategy as the conflict unfolded was immoral.
The Democrats also seized on the newly disclosed National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war had fueled the threat from terrorists to argue that the war had made the country less safe.
Republicans had hoped to use the month before the campaign break to emphasize their national security initiatives, but they have repeatedly run into trouble.
Last week, a trio of Republican senators, led by John W. Warner of Virginia, reached a compromise with the White House after weeks of fiercely resisting President Bush’s push to use the legislation to redefine the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions.
But Mr. Specter said Monday that he still had major concerns about a provision in the bill that would deny terrorism suspects a habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in court.
After convening a hearing with lawyers who criticized the provision as un-American and shameful, Mr. Specter said he would seek to amend the legislation on the floor.
“If it comes back to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will teach Congress another lesson,” Mr. Specter said, referring to a decision in June that struck down the administration’s earlier attempt to establish trials for terror suspects. “I don’t know that I would support a bill that strips habeas corpus.”
But even Mr. Specter said he doubted that his hearing would have any effect on the bill’s proceeding to the floor. In the House, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he was working with the Senate and the White House and expected to have a bill that would pass the Senate and the House, avoiding the need for a conference between the two. House leaders said the bill would go to the floor on Wednesday.
Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, took steps on Monday to ensure there would be enough time to debate the measure, saying debate could begin as early as Tuesday.
But at the Senate judiciary hearing, lawyers urged Mr. Specter to delay any legislation.
John D. Hutson, a retired rear admiral and the former top uniformed lawyer for the Navy, argued that a habeas right was fundamental to American law and identity. “Without these kinds of protections, we’re just another banana republic,” Admiral Hutson said.
Many of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Admiral Hutson contended, had been caught in a dragnet, and while some may be criminals, he said, it is impossible to know without habeas hearings where the government can produce its evidence.
Thomas P. Sullivan, a former United States attorney in Chicago who has represented detainees at Guantánamo, testified that it was “beyond my capacity to accept” that the Senate would push through a habeas provision “on the eve of elections” with so little public hearing.
“I believe that if this bill is passed with these habeas-stripping provisions in it, then after I am dead and the members of this Senate hearing are dead, an apology will be made,” Mr. Sullivan said, “just as we did for the incarceration of the Japanese citizens in the Second World War.”
“This is shameful,” he added, to the applause of protesters dressed in the orange of Guantánamo jumpsuits, “and it is momentous.”
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and lawyers who support the provision said that status review hearings served the same purpose as a habeas right. But Admiral Hutson said the review hearings did not give detainees the same rights to lawyers, or to see the evidence against them, and would set a dangerous precedent for Americans captured by other countries.
On Iraq, Democrats have accused Republicans of failing to conduct adequate Congressional oversight of the war. They have conducted their own party committee sessions examining the war, have sought to give them the appearance of formal Congressional hearings, and plan to hold similar events outside Washington after Congress goes into recess.
At the hearing on Monday, three retired officers said Mr. Rumsfeld had browbeat the military, ignored expert advice and allowed American troops to press on in Iraq without needed equipment or manpower while arrogantly refusing to acknowledge any mistakes.
“The disconnect between our rhetoric and our actions is both astonishing and immoral,” said Col. Thomas X. Hammes of the Marines. But the officers, all of whom have served in Iraq and have been previously critical of the conduct of the war, did not endorse a withdrawal, with Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton of the Army saying, “We very much need to succeed.”
The Democrats gained the participation of a Republican, Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, a war opponent who supported the Democratic view that Republicans had not asked enough tough questions on the war.
“I don’t want our history to show that I didn’t do my job as a congressman in helping the American people know the facts and the truth,” Mr. Jones said.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the second-ranking Republican, dismissed the Democratic session as “another partisan media event.”
“And while it may rile up their liberal base,” Mr. McConnell said, “it won’t kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack.”
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that the administration would not let its approach on Iraq be determined by political pressure and took aim at Democratic leaders. “For the sake of our security,” Mr. Cheney said, “this nation must reject any strategy of resignation and defeatism in the face of determined enemies.”
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, retorted, “When the United States intelligence community confirmed that America is losing the war on terror because of Bush failures in Iraq, this White House lost all credibility on matters of national security.”
Unit Makes Do as Army Strives to Plug Gaps
By DAVID S. CLOUD
September 25, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/us/25infantry.html
FORT STEWART, Ga. — The pressures that the conflict in Iraq is putting on the Army are apparent amid the towering pine trees of southeast Georgia, where the Third Infantry Division is preparing for the likelihood that it will go back to Iraq for a third tour.
Col. Tom James, who commands the division’s Second Brigade, acknowledged that his unit’s equipment levels had fallen so low that it now had no tanks or other armored vehicles to use in training and that his soldiers were rated as largely untrained in attack and defense.
The rest of the division, which helped lead the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and conducted the first probes into Baghdad, is moving back to full strength after many months of being a shell of its former self.
But at a time when Pentagon officials are saying the Army is stretched so thin that it may be forced to go back on its pledge to limit National Guard deployment overseas, the division’s situation is symptomatic of how the shortages are playing out on the ground.
The enormous strains on equipment and personnel, because of longer-than-expected deployments, have left active Army units with little combat power in reserve. The Second Brigade, for example, has only half of the roughly 3,500 soldiers it is supposed to have. The unit trains on computer simulators, meant to recreate the experience of firing a tank’s main gun or driving in a convoy under attack.
“It’s a good tool before you get the equipment you need,” Colonel James said. But a few years ago, he said, having a combat brigade in a mechanized infantry division at such a low state of readiness would have been “unheard of.”
Other than the 17 brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, only two or three combat brigades in the entire Army — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully trained and sufficiently equipped to respond quickly to crises, said a senior Army general.
Most other units of the active-duty Army, which is growing to 42 brigades, are resting or being refitted at their home bases. But even that cycle, which is supposed to take two years, is being compressed to a year or less because of the need to prepare units quickly to return to Iraq.
After coming from Iraq in 2003, the Third Infantry Division was sent back in 2005. Then, within weeks of returning home last January, it was told by the Army that one of its four brigades had to be ready to go back again, this time in only 11 months. The three other brigades would have to be ready by mid-2007, Army planners said.
Yet almost all of the division’s equipment had been left in Iraq for their replacements, and thousands of its soldiers left the Army or were reassigned shortly after coming home, leaving the division largely hollow. Most senior officers were replaced in June.
In addition to preparing for Iraq, the Army assigned the division other missions it had to be ready to execute, including responding to hurricanes and other natural disasters and deploying to Korea if conflict broke out there.
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who took command in June, says officials at Army headquarters ask him every month how ready his division is to handle a crisis in Korea. The answer, General Lynch says, is that he is getting there.
Since this summer, 1,000 soldiers a month have been arriving at Fort Stewart, 400 of them just out of basic training. As a result, the First and Third Brigades are now at or near their authorized troop strength, but many of the soldiers are raw.
The two brigades started receiving tanks and other equipment to begin training in the field only in the last month, leaving the division only partly able to respond immediately if called to Korea, General Lynch said.
“I’m confident two of the four brigade combat teams would say, ‘O.K., let’s go,’ ” General Lynch said in an interview. “The Second and Fourth Brigades would say, ‘O.K., boss, but we’ve got no equipment. What are we going to use?’ So we’d have to figure out where we’re going to draw their equipment.”
Meanwhile, the division is also preparing for deployment to Iraq on an abbreviated timeline.
The brief time at home does not sit well with some soldiers. Specialist George Patterson, who re-enlisted after returning from Iraq in January, said last week that he was surprised to learn he could end up being home with his wife and daughter for only a year.
“I knew I would be going back,” Specialist Patterson said. “Did I think I would leave and go back in the same year? No. It kind of stinks.”
Instead of allowing more than a year to prepare to deploy, the First Brigade training schedule has been squeezed into only a few months, so the brigade can be ready to deploy as ordered by early December. Though the unit has not yet been formally designated for Iraq, most soldiers say there is little doubt they are headed there early next year.
Some combat-skills training not likely to be used in Iraq has been shortened substantially, said Col. John Charlton, the brigade commander. “It’s about taking all the requirements and compressing them, which is a challenge,” he said.
The timetable also leaves officers and their soldiers less time to form close relationships that can be vital, several officers said.
And soldiers have less time to learn their weapons systems. Many of the major weapons systems, like artillery and even tanks, are unlikely to be used frequently in a counterinsurgency fight like Iraq.
The division has only a few dozen fully armored Humvees for training because most of the vehicles are in use in Iraq. Nor does it have all the tanks and trucks it is supposed to have when at full strength.
“There is enough equipment, and I would almost say just enough equipment,” said Lt. Col. Sean Morrissey, the division’s logistics officer. “We’re accustomed to, ‘I need 100 trucks. Where’s my hundred trucks?’ Well, we’re nowhere near that.”
Last week, in training areas deep in the Fort Stewart woods, First Brigade soldiers were still learning to use other systems important in Iraq, like unmanned aerial vehicles, which are used for conducting surveillance.
Standing at a training airfield with three of the aircraft nearby, Sgt. Mark Melbourne, the senior noncommissioned officer for the brigade’s unmanned aerial vehicles platoon, said only 6 of the brigade’s 15 operators had qualified so far in operating the aircraft from a ground station.
All of them are supposed to be qualified by next month, but the training has been slowed by frequent rain, Sergeant Melbourne said.
This week, the First Brigade began a full-scale mission rehearsal for Iraq.
Normally, armored units preparing for Iraq are sent to Fort Irwin, Calif., for such training, but transporting a brigade’s worth of equipment and soldiers there takes a month, which the schedule would not permit.
So the trainers and Arabic-speaking role players, who will simulate conditions the unit is likely to encounter in Iraq, were brought here to conduct the three-week exercise in a Georgia pine forest, rather than in the California desert.
Army Warns Rumsfeld It’s Billions Short
An extraordinary action by the chief of staff sends a message: The Pentagon must increase the budget or reduce commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.
Peter Spiegel
Monday, September 25, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0925-08.htm
WASHINGTON — The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.
“This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times,” said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.
Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.
According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army’s budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker’s request a 41% increase over current levels.
“It’s incredibly huge,” said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. “These are just incredible numbers.”
Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.
About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among military branches and government agencies.
But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service’s expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism — outlined in strategic plans issued this year — as well as fast-growing personnel and equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its normal budget.
“It’s kind of like the old rancher saying: ‘I’m going to size the herd to the amount of hay that I have,’ ” said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army’s top budget official. “[Schoomaker] can’t size the herd to the size of the amount of hay that he has because he’s got to maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment.”
The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.
Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld’s office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said.
After Schoomaker confronted Rumsfeld with the Army’s own estimates for maintaining the current size and commitments — and the steps that would have to be taken to meet the lower figure, which included cutting four combat brigades and an entire division headquarters unit — Rumsfeld agreed to set up a task force to investigate Army funding.
Although no formal notification is required, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, who has backed Schoomaker in his push for additional funding, wrote to Rumsfeld early last month to inform him that the Army would miss the Aug. 15 deadline for its budget plan. Harvey said the delay in submitting the plan, formally called a Program Objective Memorandum, was the result of the extended review by the task force.
The study group — which included three-star officers from the Army and Rumsfeld’s office — has since agreed with the Army’s initial assessment. Officials say negotiations have moved to higher levels of the Bush administration, involving top aides to Rumsfeld and White House Budget Director Rob Portman.
“Now the discussion is: Where are we going to go? Do we lower our strategy or do we raise our resources?” said the senior Pentagon official. “That’s where we’re at.”
Pressure on the Army budget has been growing since late May, when the House and Senate appropriations committees proposed defense spending for 2007 of $4 billion to $9 billion below the White House’s original request.
Funding was further complicated this summer, when rising sectarian violence in Baghdad forced the Pentagon to shelve plans to gradually reduce troops in Iraq.
Because of those pressures, the Army in July announced it was freezing civilian hiring and new weapons contract awards and was scaling back on personnel travel restrictions, among other cost cuts.
Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about a need to expand war funding legislation to pay for repair of hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles after heavy use in Iraq.
He has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next year for repairs, nearly double this year’s appropriation — and more than quadruple the cost two years ago. According to an Army budget document obtained by The Times, Army officials are planning repair requests of $13 billion in 2008 and $13.5 billion in 2009.
In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon.
“There’s no sense in us submitting a budget that we can’t execute, a broken budget,” Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address.
Military budget expert Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, said that despite widespread recognition that the Army should be getting more resources because of war-related costs, its share of the Defense Department budget has been largely unchanged since the 2003 invasion.
However, a good portion of the new money the Army seeks is not directly tied to the war, Kosiak cautioned, but rather to new weapons it wants — particularly the $200-billion Future Combat System, a family of armored vehicles that is eventually to replace nearly every tank and transporter the Army has.
“This isn’t a problem one can totally pass off on current military operations,” Kosiak said. “The FCS program is very ambitious — some would say overly ambitious.”
Even with Rumsfeld’s backing, any request for an increase could force a conflict with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has repeatedly pushed the Pentagon to restrain its annual budget submission.
“Year after year there were attempts to raise the ceiling, but year after year OMB has refused,” said a former Pentagon official familiar with the debate. “The difference this year is the Army has said that if a raise in the ceiling isn’t going to be considered, they won’t even play the game.”
Added the senior Army official: “If you’re Rob Portman advising the president of the United States and duking it out with the [secretary of Defense], it’s a pretty sporting little event.”
Army officials said that Schoomaker’s failure to file his 2008 Program Objective Memorandum was not intended as a rebuke to Rumsfeld, and that the Defense secretary had backed Schoomaker since the chief of staff raised the issue with him directly.
Still, some Army officials said Schoomaker expressed concern about recent White House budget moves, such as the decision in May to use $1.9 billion out of the most recent emergency spending bill for border security, including deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops at the Mexican border.
Army officials said $1.2 billion of that money came out of funds originally intended for Army war expenses.
“The president has got to take care of his border mission; he needs to find a source of funds so he can play a zero-sum game — he takes it out of defense,” the senior Army official said. “But when he takes it out of defense, the lion’s share is coming out of the outfit that’s really in extremis in the current operating environment in the war.”
Rumsfeld has not set a new deadline for the Army to submit its budget plan. The Army official said staffers thought they could submit a revised plan by November, in time for President Bush to unveil his 2008 budget early next year.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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