That IS the net meaning here. Pull out five brigades by Christmas or it breaks...but we can't pull out those brigades by Christmas...ipso facto, the Army will be broken.
“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”
General: Cut Iraq strength by one-third
By Gina Cavallaro
Staff writer
The U.S. would have to slash combat forces in Iraq to 10 brigades by Christmas to keep the Army from breaking, said retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. See McCaffrey’s GWOT presentation.
Saying he thinks “we’re stuck now,” he acknowledged that pulling out five of the 15 brigades now on duty in Iraq by the end of December is not feasible.
“We can’t precipitously withdraw. It will ignite all-out civil war, possibly among not only Iraq but its six neighbors,” he said in a telephone interview Nov. 16.
McCaffrey predicted that the Army, particularly the National Guard, is on the verge of breaking because the effort is vastly underresourced and cannot be sustained for long.
“You’ve got a foreign policy, a national security policy in Washington and they’re not resourced to carry it out,” said McCaffrey, who called for an increase of 80,000 soldiers and 25,000 Marines in each service. “The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced,” he told Army Times.
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It is already broken and
It is already broken and needs about 5 years of rebuilding, spare parts and training to recover its edge.
OTOH, when it does recover, it will be a fully " blooded" Army with an NCO and officer corps thoroughly experienced wirh combat command in conventional, COINÂ and special operations.
The analogy here is the qualitative jump the German Army made between the World Wars and the Red Army did from the Russian Civil War to WWII ( initial poor Soviet performance was due to Stalin having killing off 90% of his experienced generals in 1937-38)
I understand why that is an
I understand why that is an advantage. I also remember hearing how we got that same advantage from Vietnam.
We did. Ironically, the U.S.
We did.
Ironically, the U.S. Army became an effective, if not great, counterinsurgency force by 1970. The Communist side had to switch to relying on NVA regulars because the Viet Cong were broken after Tet.
However the Army leadership, three-stars and above, systematically destroyed the COIN knowledge base in the 1970's and 1980's; to the point where it has been alleged,of having the officialrecords of " lessons learned" in COIN shredded and burned so these operations could not be reconstituted. Personnel who were COIN advocates had their careers ended early. Basically, the institutional memory was deliberately erased to where even in 2005, the Army leadership resisted using COIN in Iraq and Afghanistan in favor of conventional " search and destroy" sweeps that do little except create new insurgents.
That won't happen this time around since no one outside of Navy seems to believe China is the USSR redux or that guerilla warfare is going away anytime soon.
However the Army leadership,
Jeezus. You NEVER destroy knowledge.
The vast number of
The vast number of inexplicably "missing" Vietnam era files of this kind have recently come to the attention of researchers, usually ex-military guys with PhD's. Not "classified" but simply...gone (they should be declassified now like the State FRUS equivalents). In an bureaucracy that invented the idea of filling things out in triplicate. No one has pointed fingers at anyone in particular yet.
But they will eventually.