It's not a matter of "breaking" the military

[Bucky]

In the past year, military analysts have been looking at the surge proposals and warning of dire consequences to the military in terms of lives, morale, psychological fitness, and fighting ability should the increased workload be kept up too long. Most estimates say that sometime in the next few months the fatigue on the Army and Marines will become too much for them to bear without loss of combat capability. The more dire warnings spoke of the surge "breaking" the military.

The truth is less dramatic and whole lot uglier than that. The problems will show themselves not as us suddenly running out of troops or the troops all fainting in their unarmored Humvees or even just one day not being able to control some town in Iraq. An army doesn't break all at once. The problem is one of being over extended, of being operated beyond their specs.

It doesn't require a crystal ball to see what the "break down" of our military will look like. In part because that process had already started on a smaller scale many months before the surge began. Units don't just up and "go rogue" one day. What happens is that discipline and self control break down. You know what you're like when you're stressed and you don't get enough sleep for a week. Now imagine not getting enough sleep for fifteen months and try driving a tank around a village full of people who hate you, most of whom themselves are armed.

So the rogue happens not in bailing out from regular duties, but in cutting too many procedural corners in their excursions into dangerous territory. The few cases we've had of troops killing Iraqi civilians, of the massacre in Haditha, of the gang-rape of a 14-year-old girl and the murder of her and her family, of the indiscriminate killings in Falluhah horrify us. But they're unusual, if still far too many. For an army of occupation, there've been surprisingly few--admirably few--incidents of this nature. When troops start feeling too much pressure, when the army doesn't follow its own guidelines in letting the troops rest up, they cease to function at optimal levels.

Like any engine pushed beyond its specs, the military is going to increasingly show wear and fatigue. Maybe they'll shell the wrong target one day--that sort of thing probably won't get reported. Maybe another unit soon will lose patience with the corrupt and subversive-ridden Iraqi police force they're paired with and a fire fight may break out. Things will go wrong in unpredictable ways and how newsworthy it all is will be measured in death tallies. Many of the incidents will never be reported. A drunk soldier on leave could simply cause a car wreck. A Marine on duty could just be too tired to check adequately for hidden explosives on the wrong day. The full cost will never be measured.

Simply put, the troops' ability to do the job right in Iraq will slowly degrade as stress, PTSD, apathy, and even a devaluation of the lives of the civilians they're sent there to protect become the side effects of war.

Put this in perspective--our neocon friends love their World War Two comparisons. We had something close to seven million troops in uniform in WW2. Few troops were in combat situations more than 2-4 of months at a stretch. Then they got R&Rs, trips home, less intensive duties, chances to spend time living like ordinary soldiers without being shot at. Island hopping in the Pacific was intense, but only the worst of the battles lasted more than a couple of months; then it was back to camp and refitting for the next island months into the future. The worst sustained combat were the Italian campaign of 43-44 and the French-German campaign that ran from June '44 to the following April. It was bad, but the men in the thick of battle shared their duties with millions of fellow Americans for only a two year period.

Of course Russian troops saw much longer periods of sustained combat. But then, Soviet troops visited mass atrocities measured in millions of rapes and murders against civilian populations, including against allies like Poland and Czechoslovakia. I don't think even the hardest neocon wants to apply that comparison.

And yet that's the situation they've created. American troops in Iraq now have 15 month tours of duty in heavy combat zones virtually nonstop--at least three times the stretch their grandfathers pulled in WW2. The fighting end of the war has run now twice as long as the heavy combat phase of WW2. The burden is being shouldered not by seven million men out of population of 130 million, but by half a million people out of a country of 300 million.

The current troop strength in-country of 150-160,000 is being drawn from a pool of about 400,000 combat effectives in the Army and Marines (when you calculate out Pentagon staffers, stateside specialists, and other personnel who won't ever face an Iraq deployment). Given those numbers, it's easy to see why the Pentagon had to throw out its own former standards of six months deployment to a hot spot, followed by 12 months recuperation and reoutfitting. They reduced the downtime cycle at the same time they increased the tour of duty time to 15 months. This is a recipe for exactly the types of atrocities we've seen in several courts martial in the past two years.

That we aren't seeing far more American troops just running wild through the Baghdad streets and breaking down all at once is a testament to human fortitude and the professionalism of our troops--humans can take a lot of abuse if it's for a cause they believe in. While there have been atrocities--many more than have been reported no doubt--the typical soldiers and Marines over there represent our culture and our people well. They don't loot; they wave to the local kids; they only shoot at the people they're supposed to shoot at.

Which means they don't represent our government at all. Most perform their duties honorably and admirably under unimagineable duress even while the Bushies slowly screw them with increasingly heavy burdens and expanding performance requirements without full training. A citizen soldiery and Marine Corps carries the values of the people they're drawn from. All them want to conduct their jobs in the spirit of basic human decency. To leave them hanging there, overdrawn, overextended, and undersupported--as the now extended "temporary" surge proposes to do--to try and squeeze yet a little more blood from the same people, is beyond immoral. It is criminal.

The surge, when it was proposed in December, was sold as a six-month expedient. The troop levels began increasing in February--although as late as June Republicans were still talking about "just now getting up to speed." As predicted the effect of the surge did drive many insurgents underground. So the statistics from the surge show a change in terror tactics by the worse of the insurgents. There were fewer attacks, but more deaths from violence. The number of murders by shooting went down; but the number of murders by bombs increased dramatically. Sectarian militias who once set up rogue check points to murder their own country men for believing the wrong flavor of Islam now stay home and build bombs with cell phones and a bunch of explosives some idiot left lying around.

Of course surge proponents will also point to the dramatic improvement in the Anbar province. But the real reason Anbar turned around was that our side cut a deal with the Sunni militias that ran the insurgency there and turned them against Islamic militants like the oversold al-Qaeda in Iraq group--think of those old 40s movies where American mobsters help the FBI run Nazi sympathizers out of the waterfront district. The tragedy is that this kind of deal could have been cut nationwide in the summer of 2003, which would have saved about 3000 American and unmeasurable thousands of Iraq lives.

So now Mr Bush and Mr Cheney stick their hands up the sock puppet named Petraeus and declare the surge is working, full speed ahead. Their contempt for history and common sense is well established. But at least in the past they used to take their jobs of spinning half-facts into partisan nonsense seriously. They're not even trying to con us anymore, just brow beat the timorous Democrats in Congress into ignoring, once more, the human and PR costs of the war.

Yet report after report shows the same basic truth: while the surge worked temporarily in limited areas because the troops on the ground served beyond our ability to fathom, while the citizen soldiers and Marines performed beyond their specs, the political objectives simply did not and cannot work. It's time to give them a break. They've done more than we asked of them. They done more than we equipped them to do. Some under the stress our country put on them snapped and took lives, made life altering errors in judgment. The surge and all its planned sequels will only accomplish more death.

It's time to start ending this tragedy. It's time to bring them home.

[TahitiNut]

1. People just don't comprehend how much more hostile fire the troops face.

In a single year in Viet Nam, a typical support troop at a military installation in Viet Nam came under fire more often than an average grunt in WW2 did in 3 years. It has only gotten more intense.

[Bucky]

2. Well, in WW2 we were fighting armies. It's different.

In Vietnam and Iraq we're fighting the people. We never had to really conquer Germany or Japan. We conquered Italy, but only after the people had turned against the Axis.

I'll bet DVDs of "Red Dawn" is a hot seller in Iraq.

[pansypoo53219]

3. of course i am sure we would be ok

if we were invaded by north korea. right? RIGHT?!?

russia is acting up. course georgie now wants to attack iWan.

[Sparkly]

4. It's also the wear and 'breakage' of equipment. nt

[Demeter]

5. Modern Day Governmental Slavery

Like chain gangs. It's disgusting.

[Disturbed]

6. Excellent essay. Send it to News Papers.

It is shameful how this Regime has treated the soldiers.

[unhappycamper]

7. Here's how we stopped this shit in the '60s.

http://sirnosir.com/

In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War has been the subject of hundreds of films, both fiction and non-fiction, but this story–the story of the rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war–has never been told in film.This is certainly not for lack of evidence. By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.

Yet few today know of these history-changing events.

Sir! No Sir! will change all that. The film does four things: 1) Brings to life the history of the GI movement through the stories of those who were part of it; 2) Reveals the explosion of defiance that the movement gave birth to with never-before-seen archival material; 3) Explores the profound impact that movement had on the military and the war itself; and 4) The feature, 90 minute version, also tells the story of how and why the GI Movement has been erased from the public memory.

I was part of that movement during the 60’s, and have an intimate connection with it. For two years I worked as a civilian at the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas–one of dozens of coffeehouses that were opened near military bases to support the efforts of antiwar soldiers. I helped organize demonstrations of over 1,000 soldiers against the war and the military; I worked with guys from small towns and urban ghettos who had joined the military and gone to Vietnam out of a deep sense of duty and now risked their lives and futures to end the war; and I helped defend them when they were jailed for their antiwar activities. My deep connection with the GI movement has given me unprecedented access to those involved, along with a tremendous amount of archival material including photographs, underground papers, local news coverage and personal 8mm footage.

Sir! No Sir! reveals how, thirty years later, the poem by Bertolt Brecht that became an anthem of the GI Movement still resonates:

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think.

[eridani]

8. That coffeehouse work was probably more important than even the biggest demonstrations

There were also the small radical print shops and people with mimeograph machines that helped by providing safe off-base space to print all those newsletters.

[lonestarnot]

9. And how bout that budget, is it broken yet?

The deficit is looking real good. :applause: