Mark Danziger:

My adult son's independent decision about what he wants to do with his life has no bearing on me or on what I write. My views and words about the issues that have concerned me for five years or more are not one gram more significant nor my arguments one iota stronger or weaker because of the decision which he independently made. Judge me as a parent if you will, but please do not judge my positions as a writer based on this act by someone else.

Also, on the chutzpah of the surrenderistas at New York Times:

One of the main arguments supporting the claim that we should leave now is the obvious and real collapse of public support for the war - a collapse that is shocking, just shocking, given the years of media spin on the war - media spin that bloggers have been pointing out continually. There's something to say about the media and antiwar left beating on public opinion for four years, and then using that collapse of public opinion as an argument for their position.

Jules Crittendon has further thoughts on that subject.

As I have said over and over again, the mainstream media in general and particularly the NYT (along with 2-3 others) is for all intents and purposes a propaganda arm of the extreme left.
Given their picking and choosing of what they will report in order to advance their leftist agenda they have definitely contributed greatly to the public perception of the Iraq war, the WOT and the Bush administration in general.
With such a powerful propaganda machine operating against it, coupled with it's own inability to clearly defend and articulate it's positions, it is no wonder that the Bush administration has such abysmal ratings.

Blather from BOTH sides is irrelevant to these two simple truths;

(1) We cannot sustain a 20 brigade surge beyond next spring - NO MATTER WHO is calling the shots in Washington. A draw-down of US forces in unavoidable for purely military and logistical reasons.

(2) No mater who wins in November 2008 we will NOT cut-n-run from Iraq. Neither Obama or Hillary will get every last soldier out of Iraq before 2012 nor will they abandon a nation building counter insurgency strategy.

This "debate" is a lot like the marketing battle between Quisp versus Quake. Remember that?

> Neither Obama or Hillary will get every last soldier out of Iraq before 2012 nor will they abandon a nation building counter insurgency strategy.

They say otherwise, which leaves us two alternatives. Either they're lying or they're wrong. Which one is an argument for voting for them? Which one is argues that they'll do it better than than Bush?

Andy, I'll take "all of the above". Most of the current crop of democrats are usually both wrong AND lying.

Oh and Bill, Obama/Hillary don't have to get "every last soldier out of Iraq before 2012" in order to defeat their mission. They can do that by removing a third or half of them. It will still be seen as a victory by AQ and Iran.

By the way Bill, as I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago, Politico.com was right. Sen. Levin has proposed legislation that would require President Bush to begin pulling out troops within 120 days.

"We cannot sustain a 20 brigade surge beyond next spring - NO MATTER WHO is calling the shots in Washington. "

Oh, my. Golly.

Somehow we sustained a much larger "surge" on half the population base over sixty years ago.

Somehow we sustained a much larger "surge" on 2/3 the population less than 40 years ago.

The "sustainability" of a surge is based more on perceptions of success, than on limitations within the US Armed Services.

To the extent they shape perceptions of failure when it doesn't exist, the shapers have the blood of innocents on their hands.

The Webb amendment:

“Now in the fifth year of ground operations in Iraq, this deck of cards has come crashing down on the backs of soldiers and Marines who have been deployed again and again, while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise,” Webb said.

* * *

Senator Webb’s amendment sets a floor for minimum periods between deployments for both units and members. It states that if a unit or member of a regular component of the Armed Forces is deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, they will have the same time at home—“dwell time”—before being redeployed. Guard and Reserve units and members will have a minimum floor of three years dwell time prior to being redeployed.

Correction, its the Jim Webb-Chuck Hagel Readiness Amendment.

Crittenden.

Perhaps White will tell us whether he thinks that the "readiness" amendment is a good idea and why.

Let's start with an easy question - does it have any meaningful relationship to readiness or is it a ploy? If the former, let's see the relevant data. If the latter, perhaps we'll hear what the real goal is and why it can't be advocated openly.

I'm still waiting to hear whether the "we'll leave" dems are lying or wrong.

Somehow we sustained a much larger "surge" on half the population base over sixty years ago.

Somehow we sustained a much larger "surge" on 2/3 the population less than 40 years ago.

In both of those cases, the military was much larger than it is today. Some 16 million men served in the military during WWII. That took an unprecedented (and unlikely to be repeated) mobilization of the entire US economy to build and sustain. Even during the Vietnam era, the military was considerably larger than it is today - approximately twice the active duty strenth, IIRC. That (and WWII) took a draft to maintain. No one rational is talking about a draft today.

The military was reduced by approximately 30% during the 1990s, starting in 1992 during the Bush 41 administration (I was there). The original plan was to cut it by 25% but once the "peace dividend" crowd got going, the cuts just kept on coming. It sure would be nice to have that extra 5% today, wouldn't it.

Even if they decided to increase the active duty force strength, it takes time and considerable money to induct, train, equip thousands of men and women. You also would have to strip leaders from existing units to build up the new ones. Good NCOs take time to grow and are the backbone of the military, as are good officers. You can't have a unit composed of new inductees.

Larry J's comments regarding the difficulties of quickly expanding the military are very well taken, but ultimately they are beside the point. The existing military has more than sufficient troops available to sustain current (i.e. WITH the surge) deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan without destroying morale or readiness.

We deploy roughly 40,000 combat capable troops (i.e. roughly 150% of the surge increment) in Western Europe, doing very little other than acting as props for the economies of the areas around their bases. Similar numbers of troops are based in various parts of Asia (notably South Korea, where they are the source of a great deal of friction with the locals - ungrateful creeps that they are), as well as an equal (or greater) number of support personnel that provide infrastructure for these deployments. Leaving aside the manpower savings, the dollar costs in maintaining these deployments are not trivial, and would go quite a long way towards offsetting the costs of maintaining a large military presence in Iraq. Obviously we are not talking about ending all deployments (many of our overseas bases are quite valuable, and numerous military missions - notably in the Phillipines, the Horn of Africa, etc. provide excellent return on investment), but precisely what are combat-ready troops doing in Western Europe? Guarding the worlds latte supply, perhaps?

I find it somewhat amusing that the same geniuses who told us that nothing less than 300,000 troops would be necessary in Iraq now seem to be convinced that half that number is unsustainable. Webb is particularly loathesome as he knows better, his 'readiness' requirements are nothing more than a (slightly) tarted up version of Murtha's attempt to force withdrawal by regulation, rather than by policy. By virtually every measure that we have, morale in the military is quite high (take a look at reenlistments...combat troops are over twice as likely to reenlist as those who haven't been deployed to the Middle East, for example), and though clearly we need to replace/repair/rehabilitate a great deal of military hardware that is getting worn down in Iraq, I fail to see how simply letting it sit in Reserve and National Guard depots (where most of the equipment is coming from) represents an improvement to anyone other than anal-retentive bean counters of the sort that believe 'two is better than three' so we should simply keep everything in storage lest it get scratched.

There are definitely costs involved in keeping our troops deployed, but to suggest that these costs are even remotely comparable to the costs of withdrawing them (you want to see a morale collapse? try bugging out in Iraq, and see how the military takes it...) is ludicrous. The military can be expanded slowly (once again, Larry J is absolutely correct regarding the problems inherent in a too-fast expansion, but nobody is talking about more than a roughly 5-10% overall increase over about 3 - 5 years), and the substantial number of battle-tested veterans we are getting back from Iraq will provide ideal cadres for new units in the future.

What we can do, is comb out much of the waste and featherbedding that still remains, reorder some of our priorities a bit (particularly with regard to the way that the National Guard and Army Reserve units are used), and the resources can be found.

This does NOT suggest that debate on the war is out-of-bound (I support it, but others may differ), but rather that if such debate is going to take place, that we use real arguments with real consequences, and not simply attempt to slip policy results in through the back door with dishonest and disingenuous subterfuge.

I agree with Larry J's history (I was there, too), and his analysis of rapid force expansion. I also with Scott's analysis of the here and now.

Mr. White's "truth" is opinion. It may well be that we don't sustain 20 brigades beyond next spring. It may even be that GEN Petraeus has made that decision. Politicians may well get in front of that parade, to pretend to be leading it (SEN Domenici, for example).

None of that buttresses the claim that we CAN'T.

Scott is right on this. We need Army, Marine and Air Force people stationed in Germany and Iceland and Guam and Okinawa like we need another belly button.

Instead of a "surge" we need a friggin' invasion. If we can feed and supply troops all spread out, we can feed and supply them in one or two spots. During WWII we overwhelmed our enemies with technology and NUMBERS. That system will still work. We need enough troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to walk damn near arm in arm from one end of the country to the other. THAT is how we defeated Japan and Germany.

They were much tougher, more entrenched enemies than our present foes. I know it's a different kind of war, but if we kill more of them, they'll be dead, not dangerous.

Cutting off foreign aid to countries that allow or support terrorism would help too. Didn't we quit doing business with our enemies to help squeeze them to death?

If you look at an Army soldier in uniform, look at his right sleeve. If he's wearing a unit patch there, it means he (or she) has served in a combat zone. If he was in the infantry, you can also look for the CIB above his name tag. We have Fort Carson here in Colorado Springs. The percentage of soldiers with patches on their right sleeve is quite high and so are the numbers sporting a CIB. From what I've read, the percentage of soldiers serving in other locations (e.g. Korea, Germany) who have served in a combat zone is also quite high.

I agree that we don't need too many combat troops in Europe anymore. However, it's not so clearcut when it comes to Korea. Regardless, the tooth to tail ratio being what it is, for every additional combat soldier (or Marine), you end up needing other military personnel in support positions such as logistics, intelligence, etc. Without that, you'll have a bunch of unarmed and uninformed targets wandering around.

Those who called for 300,000 troops in Iraq never grasped the difference between Desert Storm (a sprint operation with the limited objective of liberating Kuwait) and what we're seeing today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those are marathon missions that span several years. In Desert Storm, the US sent somewhere around 500,000 personnel to the Gulf. They were almost all home in less than a year. You can't sustain a years long operation without a troop rotation. Even in WWII, they did their best to rotate combat soldiers off of the line when possible. The problem with the 90s cutbacks is that they left fewer troops to rotate in and out of the combat zone. That's why the force levels in Iraq have hovered around the 130,000 to 150,000 level for so long - that's the best we can sustain today. If we had more personnel in uniform, we could sustain higher deployed force levels. But we don't. It would've been better had they increased the size of the military substancially following 9/11. But they didn't. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, we've left with the personnel that we have. That's why so many soldiers and Marines have pulled multiple deployments. That's why many deployments and service obligations have been extended. That's why you have Air Force and Navy personnel driving convoys and doing combat related tasks in Iraq. They're having to make due with what they have and it isn't enough.

Once again, Larry makes an excellent point regarding the tooth to tail issue (i.e. when you deploy combat troops, you also end up deploy as man - or more - suppor troops with them), but the facts are fairly clear-cut. There are enough combat troops available (without cutting into other crucial deployments and reserve forces) to increase (and certainly to sustain) current deployed troop levels in Iraq. I agree with Larry tht troop rotation is vital, but nobody is suggesting doing away with such essential rotations.

There is no doubt that had we increased the size of the Army post-9/11 we would be in a better position than we are today (this is an area in which I strongly disagreed with Rumsfeld, though I do believe his overall position on force levels was sound), but it is also important to remember that had we not wasted 2 - 3 years listening to Casey and Abazaid (who felt that the 'footprint' of US forces should be kept as small as possible, which in turn led us to penning our deployed troops up in unproductive megabases) we wouldn't be in this position in the first place.

Larry is also correct that many of the forces deployed elsewhere are in fact combat veterans (hence the CIB), but given the Army's predelictions regarding unit deployment (a good policy, one that helps avoid the mess from Vietnam), what we have seen more often than not is several specific units (3rd Infantry, for instance, or various Marine units) deployed frequently while others have deployed not at all. The load has not been spread evenly as a result...

Regarding some of the overseas deployments, Korea is actually one that I think we could eliminate relatively quickly with very little difficulty. The ROK army is more than capable of defending the country (they are actually capable of invading the North, but for obvious reasons will not do so), and our presence there (part of a 'tripwire' strategy, a holdover from the 50s and 60s) is simply wasteful. The same can be said for Europe as a whole, though I can see some value in the retaining that some presence in Okinawa is worth the cost. With all of that said however, we are capable of returning troops to the CONUS, where they can enter the 'pool' of available forces for combat deployments.

If you look at an Army soldier in uniform, look at his right sleeve. If he's wearing a unit patch there, it means he (or she) has served in a combat zone.

We weren't allowed to at Fort Belvoir in the late '60s. Might have inflamed some civilians. There are few absolutes in the military.

From the NYT editorial:

It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor.

Sounds like a good idea actually. Bush's successor will have to deal with the mess no matter what Bush does. Commiting that successor to a strategy that may not benefit the US is rash.