Listening to the Generals

The reason why there are not fewer troops there, but are more -- you're right, it's gone from 135,000 to about 147,000, I think, or 140,000 something troops is because George Casey felt he needed them to help the Iraqis achieve their objective.

And that's the way I will continue to conduct the war. I'll listen to generals. Maybe it's not the politically expedient thing to do, is to increase troops coming into an election, but we just can't -- you can't make decisions based upon politics about how to win a war.... And I'm going to tell you I've got great confidence in General John Abizaid and General George Casey. These are extraordinary men who understand the difficulties of the task, and understand there is a delicate relationship between self-sufficiency on the Iraqis' part, and U.S. presence.

-George W. Bush, September 15 2006

You know what's coming:

WASHINGTON — The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials....

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

One of the less-reported stories from 2000 (possibly because it doesn't fit in to the "media screwed over Gore" narrative that we love so much) is how how the military command deliberately portrayed the readiness of the Army as worse than it was. Bush said many times on the campaign trail that under Clinton the military had been over-used and underfunded, and that "help was on the way." Little noted was that it was a lie the Pentagon commanders deliberately pushed. Readiness, according to the Pentagon's long-standing formulation, meant that the military had to be ready to fight "two and a half wars" at once - two Persian Gulf-style wars, plus a small brushfire somewhere else. Not only is this ridiculous, it was deliberately used to smear Clinton and Gore.

More substantially, the US military has never been short of money, at least since Lincoln won the War Against Treason in Defence of Slavery. (Credit: Scott Lemieux.) If the Pentagon needed more training, more spare parts, new vehicles, etc. it simply needed to ask for, and insist on proper funding. But the Pentagon has been just as complicit as Congress in prioritizing big-budget defense appropriations like, say, the F-22 or the B-2 while letting body armor and new rifles fall by the wayside.