THE PROUD, THE FEW

STRETCHED TO ITS LIMITS, OUR MILITARY NEEDS ONE MILLION MEN
By THOMAS DONNELLY and FREDERICK W. KAGAN

"In other words, let's not fix the problem. Let's give up."

May 25, 2008 -- For the American Left, there are many reasons to withdraw from Iraq: we're caught in the middle of a sectarian civil war, the Iraqi government is a perfidious ally, Iraq is a diversion from the real war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and so on. Some of these arguments are strategically shortsighted, others are based on false premises (such as the fact that the sectarian civil war is over in Iraq and bin Laden is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan), but at least they are more or less logically coherent. What makes almost no sense is the proposal that we turn success in Iraq into defeat so that we can "fix the military."Fixing the "broken" military is a reliable campaign talking point for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; the Democrats have embraced the idea that soldiers are a new constituency in their Coalition of the Victimized. Obama's victory speech after the South Carolina primary in January grouped soldiers and their families with "the mother who can't get Medicaid for her sick child," the "teacher who works another shift at Dunkin Donuts" and the "Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager for a $7-an-hour job at Walmart."

The fix-the-military argument was recently made at greater length by the New York Times. On May 18, the paper's editorialists noted that the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a serious toll on the Army and Marine Corps, wearing down not only people but equipment "at an unprecedented rate." Well, the loss rates would not have been surprising to the defenders of Bastogne, the armies at Antietam, or the servicemen and women in any other major war, but it is true that US land forces have been asked to do too much with too little for too long.

The question is how we should respond to this fact. The Times and its anti-war allies argue that the remedy is not to expand the force to meet the wartime mission, but to reduce the mission to what a small force can handle, consistent with a decent family life, defense budgets constrained to historic lows and peacetime recruitment and promotion "standards."

In other words, let's not fix the problem. Let's give up.


Thanks General Vallely