Anything, anything, ANYTHING to keep out the gays!
(is 3fingerspointback)
The first thing to note is that the military force structure has not significantly changed from before the war. This means, that we still only need to recruit the same number of troops as during peacetime. Each will be spending more time on active duty, but the number that we need hasn't changed.
Consider for a moment what would happen if we paid our soldiers roughly $200,000/year, which would actually not be far out of line compared with what we actually pay military contracting companies, and would still be small compared to the federal budget. Wouldn't we see a huge increase in military recruits? Following significant shortfalls in military recruitment in 2005, standards were lowered and enlistment bonuses were raised to around $40,000, and military recruitment targets have been met so far in 2006. Casualty numbers have been flat, and so even with the falling popularity of the war, there's no reason to believe that this level of forces can't be maintained indefinitely. The real question is how much salaries and bonuses will have to be raised.
General Shinseki's estimate was that, based on the experience in Bosnia, 400,000 - 500,000 troops would be needed to keep the peace in Iraq. This has generally been conceded to have been roughly correct. Despite this, the current force structure with what are viewed as minimally acceptable breaks in troop rotations only allows an average of roughly 110,000 troops on the ground. Note that both of these counts exclude such things as sailors on military vessels in the region and large numbers of support troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The result has been that troop levels in Iraq have simply been set to be what the military sees as the maximum number which can be sustained without an change in the military force structure. When the military sees a temporary need for troops, rotations are extended and we see "Individual Ready Reserve" callups. Actually, these are somewhat routine when there is a shortfall in people with a particular skill set. What is unusual about this callup is that the military brass acknowledges that it is being made simply to meet total force numbers.
There were similar changes in troop rotations during the Fallujah engagement as well as during the Iraqi elections. It is clear that the military sees the current violence in Baghdad as a similar need temporary need for troops.
This is indicated even more clearly by the extension of the tour of duty of the 172nd Striker Brigade, which had already served a full year in Iraq near Mosul, and had given away most of their heavy equipment and had most of the rest packed up to ship home. They even had some of their members already returned from Iraq and in Alaska when they were suddenly ordered to stay in (or return to) Iraq and to move to Baghdad.
This development takes on more significance when you realize that this brigade is considered the single most effective battle-hardened and most effective counter-insurgency unit that the Army has.
Civilian deaths in Iraq have steadily increased but not spiked, and have been concentrated in Baghdad for some time now. (In the link note that this is a severe undercount based on media reports and that the 1000+ deaths from a stampede during a religious pilgrimage in August 2005 really ought not to be included.) It's somewhat unclear why the violence in Baghdad should be suddenly viewed as a temporary problem, or why a temporary increase in troop levels should result in anything but a surge in violence when the increased troops finally leave.
Frederick Kagan has a good article on this subject in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs*...what it boils down to is that the US armed forces have decided to invest more money in equipment than in personnel. A variety of decisions in the late '80s and the '90s made it more expensive to retain troops, while at the same time making serving a less attractive career choice (for example, the policy that once you're passed over for promotion once, you won't be promoted again - that's driven a lot of well trained career guys to retire early). At the same time these ill-thought-out personnel policies were being implemented, the well know shift towards high-tech weaponry was being instigated, further deprecating the need for actual troops in many of the eyes of many in the upper ranks. Unfortunately, as we've seen, the biggest challenges to the US army are currently low-tech, manpower intensive police actions - not the sort of thing a $40 million airplane will help you with.
*Sorry, it's subscription only.
This is the reason Mahmoud Ahmadinejad feels he's got such a long leash. He's right. Militarily, we couldn't do much to Iran but send missiles and bombs without instituting a draft.
Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on. The country cannot afford amateur hour in the White House.
Anyone care to guess (without googling, natch) to whom this quote is attributed?
I worked on proof of concept software to enable easier recall of IRR troops 4 years ago. The regular watercooler discussion was where we were going to invade first, with strong expectations that we would invade the rest of the Axis of Evil as manpower permitted.
