Supporting the Troops
CNN: Army Guard ‘in dire situation’
Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum spoke to a group defense reporters after Army officials, analysts and members of Congress disclosed that two-thirds of the active Army’s brigades are not ready for war.
The budget won’t allow the military to complete the personnel training and equipment repairs and replacement that must be done when units return home after deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan, they say.
“I am further behind or in an even more dire situation than the active Army, but we both have the same symptoms, I just have a higher fever,” Blum said.
When Bush was running in 2000 he claimed that Clinton had destroyed the military because 20% of the Army’s divisions weren’t combat ready in a time of peace. Now, 6 years later, 67% of the Army and, apparently, a higher percentage of the National Guard isn’t ready for combat while two occupations are in progress.
The problems are, to a great extent, related to budget, i.e. they haven’t asked for enough money to fix or replace equipment, or to provide training. Rumsfeld has broken the Department of Defense and Congress is complicit because it didn’t provide any oversight.
2 comments
If I am not mistaken – I also thought they were still requesting these as *emergency spending requests* and not showing any of these Iraq war costs as line items in their Regular Annual Federal Budget(to hide the numbers…as IF that that makes me *go away*).
How six short years have FUBARed everything – so much gone wrong in so short a time.
This one stuck a chord Waking Up is Hard to Do
Rumsfeld has this vision of making the DoD “efficient” and he hasn’t been reporting the real cost of what he’s doing. Enron accounting is rampant. They have been “stealing” money from the regular budget to cover war costs, so Congress can’t find out how expensive the war really is.