I absolutely love it when people try to justify things. For someone who has spent quite a bit of time studying the mind and human behaviour, I find the lengths that people will go to in order to rationalize and then reconcile as fact what is, at heart, a misinformed opinion, to be fascinating.
At the moment, I am referring to Senator Barack Obama's recent statements about the war. For those of you who may have missed it, the Senator, in further voicing his opposition to operations in Iraq, stated that those operations were crippling the efforts in Afghanistan, a campaign that he does support. Specifically, he stated that the operations in Iraq were stretching the Army so thin that the force had to pull soldiers from units scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan and reassign them to units bound for Iraq, and that logistics were directed away from Afganistan and to Iraq to such an extent that units deployed to the former country are forced to use weapons captured from the enemy.
Now, that's a pretty shocking statement and, if it were true, should rightfully outrage each and every one of us. If that were the case, there should be a whole bunch of people compelled to testify before Congress, explaining the situation. Unfortunately for the good Senator, it's not true. At least, not in the way he framed it.
Despite the protestations from all his supporters that Senator Obama spoke the gospel on this issue, he got it wrong. The source for his statement was a then-Lieutenant (now a Captain) who stated that his platoon was not given enough access to train on certain weapons before deploying to Afghanistan, that something like fifteen of his men were transferred out of his platoon and reassigned to units deploying to Iraq (again, before the unit deployed to Afghanistan, and the officer in question went on to state that most, but not all, of those men were replaced before his platoon went overseas), and that once they were deployed, they lacked "enough" of such items like armoured Humvees.
But that isn't what the Senator said. And, despite what his supporters say, you can look at the Army officer's statements, which they conveniently include in their justifications and then, in a marvellous example of ideologically-driven doublethink, completely ignore, and see that the Senator got it wrong.
For people who have never been in the military, I guess that it must seem a strange concept that you never get enough training time or access to training materials. Soldiers like to train, because the more you train, the less you bleed when the little bits of lead start flying around for real. Likewise, for those who have never served, it might come as something of a shock to find out just how often you find out that you either don't have, or don't have enough of, something you thought you had. Either through simple mistakes, oversights or the fact that things break - and in the military, things generally break just when you need them the most - the Table of Organization and Elements rarely matches what you actually have on hand.
That being said, the fact of the matter is that the United States military, wherever it goes, is the best-supplied military in the world. If you compared the two, there is little difference between, say, the American base at Khandahar and a base in the United States - except, perhaps, that things go "Boom!" a little more often at Khandahar. But as an example, just about everything available in a Stateside PX is also available over there. The amenities do tend to get a bit thinner the farther out into the field you go, but the tools of the trade - the "bullets, beans and bandages," as the old saying goes - tend to remain plentiful.
The manpower and equipment issues are a bit thornier; yet they really don't have the connection that Senator Obama and his supporters are trying to imply. There is no question that there is a shortage of trigger-pullers in the Army. But that is a trend that has been in existence for at least the past twenty-five years, and is a trend that would have - and is going to, for that matter - continue, whether or not we ever became involved in either Afghanistan or Iraq. The truth of the matter is that Infantrymen are something of an endangered species in the Army and, as all the services become increasingly technical in nature, the number of men and women who's jobs it is to actually close with the enemy and put steel on target is going to continue to shrink. Furthermore, that is a situation which was grossly exacerbated by the force draw-downs initiated by George H.W. Bush following the end of the Cold War, and continued by Bill Clinton - both of whom, I seem to recall, held office before the current war.
The problem there is that when the Cold War ended, we suddenly decided that the year of jubilee had finally arrived, and that we could finally beat all those swords into plowshares. We invented the "peace dividend" and, deciding that the world was now a far less dangerous place, turned our budgetary knives on the military. But that was an illusion; a tempting one, to be sure, but an illusion nonetheless. Our problem was that the world remained the same old sad, dangerous place it has always been, and we retained the same overseas security committents we'd always had, as well as adding a few, such as Bosnia and Macedonia and Kosovo and, yes, the Persian Gulf. The only thing we did was to cut the size of the military by over half, while unreasonably expecting it to carry on with the same number of missions.
And then we wonder why the force has problems meeting its committments, why it has to extend tours for deployed personnel, why the frequency of TDYs has to be increased, and so on . . .
The equipment issue falls into the same boat. What the Army officer cited by Senator Obama actually said was that, once deployed to Afghanistan, his platoon didn't have enough armoured Humvees - something like only two out of the four or so that he required, between "missing" vehicles and those occupying space in the Battalion Motor Pool, waiting for repairs.
Thing is, the entire force has been chronically short of such vehicles, for the simple reason that Congress wasn't funding, and the Army wasn't buying, such vehicles in any great numbers prior to the commecement of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, someone should have foreseen a need for such things, but again we're talking about a systemic problem that existed prior to the current war. It's never a good thing to go into battle behind the power curve, but this isn't a new issue and, perversely, it seems to be a lesson that we, as a people, are entirely unwilling to learn. If you look back through our military history, you will find that being unprepared is the rule rather than the exception.
What concerns me about this, quite beyond the fact that I am a firm believer that the soldiers should be given every tool they need in order to get the job done and keep themselves as safe as anyone can be in combat, is that Senator Obama is claiming to have the "experience" necessary to be effective in the job he wants us to elect him to. Yet his statements on this matter betray, rather, not just his lack of experience, but a fundamental misunderstanding as to what is actually going on. How one gets from "we didn't have enough training time" and "we are short on some equipment" to "our soldiers are forced to use captured enemy equipment" is, to say the least, a bit baffling. Then again, so is using your source's statements, which contradict your argument, to support your own statements.
Even so, there is some truth to what Senator Obama said, even if the totality of his argument is incorrect. Enough truth that, whether or not you support the current war, anyone who truly cares should be greatly concerned. We can not continue to treat the military the way we have since 1992, and expect it to fulfill its missions. We can not continue to treat the men and women who serve in uniform as an afterthought, we can not continue to expect them to do more with less, and expect that we will have a force that is capable of defending us. Senator Obama is right about one thing: we need change. Just not, I think, the kind of change he is thinking of.
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