Our military is broken.

[flamin lib]

Our military is broken. We spend more than the rest of the world combined on “defense” and our military is broken. How can that be? How can we spend half a trillion dollars on “defense” every year plus $1.5 billion a year on Iraq alone and not have enough money or time to train our soldiers?

In February members of the Third Infantry Division were deployed to Iraq with nothing more than basic training. The unit didn’t have time to get the usual desert training and missed the advanced Iraq war training because they were needed for Bush’s “surge”. Pvt. Matthew Zeimer, 18 years old from Glendive Montana was one of them. Within two hours of arriving in Iraq Pvt. Zeimer was dead. One hundred and twenty minutes.

At the time White House spokesman Tony Snow was asked about sending troops to Iraq without advanced training and he answered, "Well, but, they can get desert training elsewhere, like in Iraq." I guess you have to learn fast. That’s why they’re called FNGs and nobody wants to get to know them; they don’t live long and it just makes you feel bad when they die.

Ironically the soldier Zeimer was to replace, Spc. Alan McPeek who had only 14 days left in country, took Zeimer under his wing violating the FNG rule. They both died at the same time, McPeek trying to give Zeimer the training he didn’t get before being deployed. If that isn’t enough, it now appears that both were killed by friendly fire. Friendly fire, how sick is that? There’s a much better word: Fratricide; killing your brother. Trust me, there’s nothing friendly about live ammunition.

Bush is going to veto the Iraq funding bill because it calls for a time table for withdrawal. Congress should send the same bill back to him until he accepts that we need to withdraw from Iraq in an orderly fashion. He shouldn’t push congress to do what they did in 1974 and simply cut all funding. He should let our soldiers come home in a reasonable and safe redeployment.

But he won’t. He’s never had the taste of war up close and personal. His daddy fixed that for him.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003567503

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TSFp2mAherP7M81YPylhPDxW0wI-?cq=1&p=241