The army is hard enough up for troops in Iraq that they are reportedly planning to send over OPFOR, the units that serve as opposition for American troops in traning exercises -- units which have not seen sustained combat deployment since World War II.
Does anybody feel a draft?
Meanwhile, in unexpected good news, American forces in Najaf have reportedly accepted a Fallujah-style deal strikingly similar to what Muqtada al-Sadr was offering a week and a half ago, which doesn't undo the damage from the action since, but at least cuts our losses...
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In case anyone's wondering whether they were hallucinating, I corrected a monumentally stupid typo in the small print above which was lying around for a few hours. Sigh...
The OPFOR may not have been deployed in the past 60 years, but they have seen a steady OPTEMPO, in a high stress environment.
When one realises the US Army doesn't have a regimental system (wherein one joins a unit and stays with it for a career), and that people, not units, have combat/deployment experience, this isn't, quite, as bad as it might appear on first blush.
As for a draft, we've been engaging in a slow burn draft for the past year and half, almost two, with the fiddles and foibles of the stop-loss, which while supposed to allow a stop-lossed soldier, save in a declared war, when all enlistements are converted to, "The Duration" to leave after a year of involuntary extension have been gamed so that there are troops who've been in almost two-years past when they wanted to get out.
Combine that with a heavy op-tempo, an massive misuse and mismanagement of the Guard, and Reserves, and we may see an actual need for a draft, just to fill the ranks of the present army, which won't fix the fact that where we are losing people isn't the lower enlisted, it's the middle ranks, of both the NCOs and the officers.
Terry Karney
terry.karney@us.army.mil
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pecunium/
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