If its broke do you fix it or quit

Brian Bresnahan:

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In this year’s political cycle, the biggest use of the military was to claim that it’s “broken.” Specifically, the claim was that our military has been broken by that part of the war on terror we’re fighting in Iraq. So we need to pull out of Iraq for the good of the military.

I often wonder, probably because I don’t think much of the average politician, whether they say those things for political posturing or out of sincere concern for the military. Only God knows their true intentions. I’ll just say that I’m skeptical of them.

Claims of the military being broken, for those reasons, for those purposes, misses the big picture and the biggest concern for our national security.

The war in Iraq and the rest of the war on terror should serve as a wake-up call to our nation that our overall plan for the military is broken. The military is not broken because of Iraq. Iraq has simply made unmistakably clear the fact our military lacks the manpower and funding for sustained combat.

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But the fact is, the down-sizing of the military started under George H. W. Bush and went full speed ahead under Bill Clinton, who obviously took the military down too far. No surprise knowing the Clintonian contempt for the military.

The events of 9/11 then committed the Pentagon to fighting the war on terror while neglecting the fact we had become incapable of performing sustained combat operations under the previous administration. Regardless of what Donald Rumsfeld might have claimed over the years about changes to our military capabilities, technologies, and restructuring, it’s obvious we simply don’t have the personnel or assets to sustain combat on one front, let alone two. He didn’t start with the assets to do so, but he didn’t fix the problem either.

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But instead of using this predicament as political fodder, after all the elections are over now, those in Washington need to act to correct this situation on a long term basis. Immediate pull out of Iraq would not fix the problem. It would only put a political band-aid on it. The fact would remain, as Iraq has proven, that we are not able to sustain combat operations given the current size and composition of the military.

Gen. Pace has indicated that should war break out on the Korean Peninsula it would lack the precision of more recent wars because many of the assets that bring that precision tot he battlefield are tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think he is talking about drones among other things. Even in a war where your equipment is not being destroyed it still suffers from attrition by use, just has your car does. Our infrastructure of war is going to have to be replaced with hopefully better more efficient equipment. As for manpower, the Clinton cuts were a huge mistake that those complaining about a broken military will not acknowledge. Nor are they interested in increased manpower now. They are just interested in using the difficulty as an excuse to achieve their policy objective of losing. That is what makes a debate over the issue unlikely to resolve the current problem.