American Military Overstretched Thanks to Bush Administration Bungling

I think we know by now that Donald Rumsfeld doesn't know what he's doing and Henry Kissinger's best days are behind him despite his bizarre recommendation to Bush to hang on to Rummy. We went to war in Iraq without finishing the job in Afghanistan and we're beginning to pay the price for trying to run two incompetent wars from the White House, the Vice President's office and the politically appointed civilian wing of the Pentagon. Drew Brown of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has the story on America's military:

The war in Iraq has become such a drain on the Army and the Marines that it's seriously damaged the U.S. military's ability to respond if other crises arise, two Democratic congressmen said Thursday.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Reps. John Murtha, D-Pa., and Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, warned that because funding for the military has been siphoned off to pay for the war, the Army and Marines are running dangerously short of the necessary troops, equipment and training to stay combat ready.

"This makes deployments impossible unless we are prepared to put our troops at risk," said Abercrombie, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "It also makes conducting homeland security or disaster response missions more difficult, if not unacceptable in terms of public confidence."

They said combat readiness for the Army especially had dropped to levels not seen since the end of the Vietnam War and would continue to deteriorate for as long as U.S. forces remained in Iraq. Because most of the active-duty U.S. ground forces are committed to the war, they said, the U.S. military lacks a strategic reserve to respond to other crises.

"We don't have a combat unit that is really trained to the point where it can be deployed," said Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. "We don't have a strategic reserve unless you say the Navy and Air Force are strategic reserves."

We're supposed to have the resources to fight two wars but there's a catch: we're not supposed to be fighting two wars. If we had finished the job in Afghanistan, that would have meant a large reserve of the military with all its equipment and its continued training ready for a quick deployment if necessary in case of a second war anywhere in the world. If you're doing diplomacy and your enemies know you have that reserve, it makes them cautious and the second war may not even be necessary if you understand all the tools in the foreign policy kit. But, by allowing ourselves to be tied down by voluntarily taking on a second war we did not need (and botching it besides), we're having trouble finishing either war in a way that makes sense (largely because we missed the important window of opportunity to stabilize and rebuild either country); and nearly continuous war for five years along with the massive tax cuts for America's wealthy has left our military overextended, underequipped and increasingly, undertrained. That is where we now stand and it is likely to be the legacy Bush will be leaving us when he returns to Crawford, Texas in two years. And there are people in the Bush administration seriously thinking of taking on Iran.