April 23, 2004

Expanding the Army Responsibly

From Strategy Page:


U.S. Army should be expanded! It takes several years to recruit new troops, train them and organize them into new units. By then, the army leadership feels they won’t be needed. But the army will still have to pay for them. This will mean less money for training and new weapons and equipment. To the army leadership, that strategy will get more soldiers killed in combat in the long run. The basic problem is that you cannot expand the army quickly and still have the same highly effective professional troops.

This is part of a long list of Iraq myths. But one of the things that could be done would be to add skeleton units for W. Europe and other spots that are not likely to see combat, staff them with people that you're now refusing to let reenlist, fill them out with new soldiers and deploy the freed up units to hotter spots. Let's face it, there's still a bunch of places that the US military has forces that aren't likely to see combat anytime soon. Letting the soldiers who man those posts be understaffed skeleton crews you pull from the pool of people who normally wouldn't be permitted to reenlist. Add your new, less well trained recruits there, two track the army so that more of the well-trained soldiers are on the pointy end of the spear and the support functions that absolutely demand soldiers are more recent entrants and marginal performers. After you've bulked up, you can back fill your training and bring the new units up to snuff.

You can't be firing already trained soldiers and simultaneously complain that you can't train new soldiers fast enough to do any good.

Posted by TMLutas at April 23, 2004 02:28 PM