US 'must raise troop numbers' to fulfil commitments

US 'must raise troop numbers' to fulfil commitments
By Peter Spiegel in London

A Pentagon-appointed panel has found that the US military will not be able to maintain its current peacekeeping commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan without a significant increase in the size of the armed forces or scaling back the objectives of the stabilisation missions.

A report by the respected Defence Science Board was presented to Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, late last month. Mr Rumsfeld found the study compelling and ordered it to be presented earlier this month to all the uniformed chiefs of the four armed services as well as the military's combatant commanders, who oversee each of the Pentagon's six regional commands.

Although the report, first disclosed in the newsletter Inside the Pentagon, has not been made public, pages from the study reviewed by the Financial Times state that while some of the stresses on the US military could be mitigated by private contractors and improved technologies, such measures are unlikely to be sufficient.

"It is not clear that our new stabilisation capabilities will suffice if we maintain the current pace of stabilisation operations," the study says.

The report, entitled Transition to and from Hostilities, could re-ignite the debate over the size of the US military, particularly the army, which many analysts warn is becoming overworked and stretched thin by repeated rotations through Iraq and Afghanistan.

(more)

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4942f080-1004-11d9-ba62-00000e2511c8.html

They're not taking her while there's anything I can do to shout it down.

NO DRAFT!

Let the Bush daughters fight Bush's war!

The Bush brats should sign up or shut up!

No matter who wins.

The bowtie guy (forget his name - Hillary baked him a shoe cake) was interviewing some private security agency guy, who said that the only way to defeat the insurgency was to flood the country with troops. He said Iraqi National Guard personnel just want a job and paycheque (they don't want to "die for freedom") so they can't suppress the insurgency. He was in favor of the invasion (he said it showed the U.S. had resolve) but that he didn't think it had made the U.S. more secure - less secure in fact.

Interesting interview, full of conflicting signals.

A strange position indeed.

My calendar must be broken. This is surely 1984