The Breakdown
More Than Two-Thirds of Army Guard Units Not Ready for War, General Says
08-01-2006 6:15 PM
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON -- More than two-thirds of the Army National Guard's 34 brigades are not combat ready, mostly because of equipment shortages that will cost up to $21 billion to correct, the top National Guard general said Tuesday.Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum spoke to a group defense reporters after Army officials, analysts and members of Congress disclosed that two-thirds of the active Army's brigades are not ready for war.
The budget won't allow the military to complete the personnel training and equipment repairs and replacement that must be done when units return home after deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan, they say.
"I am further behind or in an even more dire situation than the active Army, but we both have the same symptoms, I just have a higher fever," Blum said.
One Army official acknowledged Tuesday that while all the active Army units serving in the war zone are "100 percent" ready, the situation is not the same for those at home.
"In the continental United States, there are plenty of units that are rated at significantly less than a C-1 rating," said Lt. Col. Carl S. Ey. "Backlogs at the depots, budget issues and the timeliness of receiving funds to conduct training are all critical to the Army's ability keep their force trained, ready and at the highest readiness level possible."
Once a taboo subject for the military, often buried deep in classified documents, readiness levels _ generally ranked from C-1 (the best) to C-4 (the worst) are now being used as weapons themselves to force money out of Congress and the administration.
And while Army officials still won't specify how many units are at which levels, they are being more open about the overall declining state of readiness.
A key element of the problem is that Army units returning from the war have either left tanks, trucks or other equipment behind or are bringing them home damaged. Once back, many soldiers either leave the Army or move to other posts, forcing leaders to train others to replace them. As a result, the unit's ratings drop, said Ey, an Army spokesman.
Last week several House Democrats said publicly that two-thirds of the Army brigades are rated not ready for combat, and Army officials have not disputed that figure. On Tuesday, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., also declined to be specific, but said the Army is "very much worse off" that it was in late 1999 when the military said two of the 10 Army divisions were ranked at the lowest readiness level, C-4. At the time, two divisions equaled six brigades.
I've been telling you for several years, this is not news to anyone but the MSM, Rummy broke the Army and it is going to take at least a decade to rebuild, provided someone competent shows up shortly. I don't see that happening.
National security conservatives, what, exactly, makes you feel good about the Bush administration?
Comments
This is just the very tip top of the iceberg. As, of course, Melanie is quite aware.
This is merely the piece that has an unmistakable paper trail right now.
We have never, repeat never, faced up to the fact that we had no real answer to distributed stateless war. We exited Vietnam, spent the next 15 years building a force that maybe could survive a very blizzard of Soviet armor, used the result to crush Saddam's army in desert conditions where there is no place for tanks to hide, and thought ourselves atop the world.
We never even re-examined, seriously, our off-and-on love affair with Douhet's exploded theories. Just how stupid is that??
So all of this has come back to haunt us. "Shock and Awe" failed as such egotism does. We had no doctrine adequate to the challenge of distributed stateless war after our so-called "victory". So now our project in Iraq is swirling into civil war we can neither predict nor check.
Meanwhile, the Army is recruiting Category 4s and dropouts and people with histories of psychological problems and gangbangers. So we get to watch, as does the entire world, while our soldiers rape and kill 14 year old girls. While gang colors start showing up on Army gear in Iraq.
The Pentagon? Spending big bux on Joint Strike Fighters intended for Soviet legions now only piles of rusty scrap iron.
Suppose we are the ones in Israel's shoes next time? From the look of things, Hizbullah has a few tricks that the Iraqis hadn't thought up. Like mixing a central organization and unified agenda with radical 4GW decentralization. If they can make this work over time, it will, to the best of my offhand recollection, be a first.
What are we going to counter with? Seriously? The latest greatest Captain Billy Whizbang Daddy Warbucks Billion-Dollar-a-Copy gadgetry?
We do that and we're going to lose. Just like Israel is losing now, in southern Lebanon.
It's going to be a decade and a half at least, more like two, before we can expect to have a working Army again.
Perhaps this is the point at which we should spend some serious quality time doing our homework (for a change!), and figuring out just what sort of Army it should be.
Posted by: Charles Roten | August 2, 2006 05:32 AM