Army woes, cont.

Two data points for the US Army. First, the New Republic:

Combat-readiness worldwide has deteriorated due to the increased stress on the Army's and the Marines' equipment. The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions. The total Army--active and reserve--now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall. To ensure that the troops in Iraq have the equipment they need, the services have been compelled to send over equipment from their nondeployed and reserve units, such as National Guard units in Louisiana and Mississippi. Without equipment, it's extremely difficult for nondeployed units to train for combat. Thus, one of the hidden effects of the Iraq war is that even the troops not currently committed to Iraq are weakened because of it.

The Marine Corps, America's emergency expeditionary force, is also under unprecedented strain. The Marines have compensated for equipment shortfalls in Iraq by drawing down their pre-positioned reserve equipment stocks in the Pacific and Europe by up to 70 percent. These stocks include things like tanks and armored vehicles that enable the Marines to respond rapidly to crises around the world without the logistical delay associated with major long-range equipment transport. The Marines are also running out of helicopters, including the essential heavy-lift CH-53E Super Stallion. They are down to 150 CH-53Es from the required 160 and will continue to lose these helicopters due to their heavy use in Iraq. With the replacement for this aging helicopter still more than a decade off, this is a problem that will be hamper Marine readiness for years to come.

But the decline in equipment readiness is nothing compared with the growing manpower crisis. The Army is trying to keep the dam from breaking, but it is running out of fingers and toes. After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January--only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June. Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.

So on the one hand, Iraq is chewing up American equipment and personnel faster than is sustainable. The next piece is from TomDispatch, and is too long to summarize fairly. Needless to say, the US Army is so depserate for recruits that they've eliminated any reasonable quality control just to keep numbers up.

Bush and Rumsfeld either know this and are neglecting it, or they've made it clear they don't want to know. Either way, these wars are destroying America's ability to wage a ground war with any reasonable assurance of success. This is insane.

At the end of Vietnam, America was fortunate enough to be given time to recover because the Soviet Union was getting itself deep in the Afghanistan mess. This time, America's rivals aren't distracted, and if you're a China Hawk you could simply note that China's economy is growing, it's defense spending is growing, and it's forces are modernizing - the opposite was true of the Soviet Union after Vietnam. If it hadn't been for George W. Bush, I think it's reasonable to conclude that China would have a very, very hard time approaching US power in the world. Now... I'm not so sure.