Expanding the armed forces

First the correction. In the post below, Lex miscalculated the population of the city in which he lives by about 100,000 or nearly a 100% error. Ft. Wayne’s population is between 205 and 219K not 110 as stated below. Then he misidentified a high school as a middle school. As a result of these egregious errors, I’ve sacked the fact checker and fined the editor of that post an exorbitant sum. I cannot accept such garbage as, “I it got from the Internet” as an excuse. As a result of violating the trust of our plethora of readers, heads have rolled here at Lex E. Libertas and I humbly apologize.

Now the real story –

Oh my gosh, the military is overburdened. Let’s see, a two front no kidding shooting & dying war – a world war on Islamo-terror-fascists actually but the MSM and the American people don’t want to hear that – Korea, China, Iran, Darfur, 10 years later we’re still engaged in our one year peace keeping mission in Bosnia, our own southern border, South American hot headed dictators on the rise…again, African terrorists, a Europe where leaders are content to let demographics do the work of creating Muslim states so suicide bombers don’t have to, etc. etc. Yeah the world’s a mess and the military is stressed. But hey, my 401K is up 15% so let’s not rock the boat. OK.

So what to do with our military? First, every military man since the beginning of time, when asked to accomplish a mission - any mission, always asks for about 300% of the men and material required to do the job. He’d be negligent if he didn’t. Men’s lives are at stake and you don’t want to start off with too few assets. Don Rumsfeld comes under attack for going into Iraq too light; that’s inaccurate in my view. The force that went into Iraq was about right; the results of assault bear that out. Also, remember that the 4th ID was planned to come south from Turkey; that didn’t happen. What we didn’t do, again in my opinion, was to stay heavy. We should have rolled the 4th ID in and occupied the Syrian and Iranian borders. That certainly could have escalated the war in one or both directions, but what the heck it turns out we’re going to have fight them both anyway.

So what to do about our military force under stress? We have plans to grow the size of our armed forces by 92,000 so that the schedualed deployments can be spaced further apart. In addition to that measure, we should consider redeploying (to use a favorite Defeatocrat word) some of our forces stationed around the world. The United States still has about 75,000 soldiers in Germany, protecting that country from – what? Cut that number by ¾ and bring ‘em home. Then there are ~13,000 in Italy, ~12,000 in the United Kingdom – why? Are we protecting NATO from an intramural firefight? We have another ~ 40,000 in Japan and ~ 35,000 in Korea. Given the distance and the volatility of this region this makes sense, but there is a list of more than a hundred countries with US troop deployments. In addition we keep about 26,000 sailors and Marines deployed afloat on any given day.

Come on, we can bring a good many of these forward “deployed” forces home. Keeping heavy equipment in key regions under the management of smaller cadres, then rapidly deploy the forces to fall in on the pre-positioned equipment. The carriers and even some of the Marines afloat can operate in the same manner. We now have these things called airplanes. They can fly much faster than a ship can steam. Why can’t the ships deploy with fewer forces and fly then the additional forces in if needed?

Last, don’t sacrifice quality for numbers. If we are having problem recruiting top quality people to boost the force by 92K, the first thing that ought to be done is to increase the pay of enlistees. I can hear Shameless Chucky Schumer, Fat Teddy, Jack the ass and the rest of usual suspects, squealing like stuck pigs now. The same people that want a “living wage” for illegal aliens that cut grass, clean houses, raise our children and do the other work that “Americans just won’t do”, will deny a wage commensurate with those willing to die for their country.