articles 10.01.2004

An editorial article in the Washington Post (free registration required) from a Washington Think Tank (The Brookings Institute) discusses the size of the military. Some "key fact" quotes from the article:

"No crisis in Army or Marine Corps recruiting and retention has developed, at least not yet."

"All of the Army's active-duty combat brigades were deployed overseas to a combat zone in 2003 or 2004, some of them twice."

"The soldiers of the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, who spent most of the past year in South Korea, are now to spend another year away from their families, in Iraq. "

And some conclusions:

"Taking all this together suggests that there is a crisis in today's ground forces -- but a crisis of fairness rather than numbers. We are, so far, able to sustain our deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq -- but only by badly overworking our current contingents of soldiers and Marines. And ideas being considered to address this problem, such as deploying Army troops for tours that are half as long but twice as frequent, will not change the basic obstacle."

"No nation can ever truly repay its uniformed men and women who risk, and sometimes lose, their lives for their country. But the United States should do its utmost to be fair to them. It need not and must not ask a small group of dedicated professionals to become strangers to their own families and their own country in the course of waging a war that, for better or worse, we are all engaged in now."