Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, February 15, 2007 10:21:55 AM
Yesterday, The Politico had an
article on how the Democrats intend to pull us out of the war without taking the blame for doing so.
Essentially, they want to use existing readiness reports as a club to cut down the number of units available for the war. They also would limit the amount of time that units can spend in Iraq and how often they can be rotated back into Iraq.
Murtha, the powerful chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, will seek to attach a provision to an upcoming $93 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. It would restrict the deployment of troops to Iraq unless they meet certain levels adequate manpower, equipment and training to succeed in combat. That's a standard Murtha believes few of the units Bush intends to use for the surge would be able to meet.
In addition, Murtha, acting with the backing of the House Democratic leadership, will seek to limit the time and number of deployments by soldiers, Marines and National Guard units to Iraq, making it tougher for Pentagon officials to find the troops to replace units that are scheduled to rotate out of the country. Additional funding restrictions are also being considered by Murtha, such as prohibiting the creation of U.S. military bases inside Iraq, dismantling the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and closing the American detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
It has been 30 years since I was involved in readiness reporting, but I can't imagine the system has changed much. Each unit has a mission and is equipped and trained for that mission. Every three months, a classified readiness report is forwarded up the chain of command by the unit commanders assessing its equipment and personnel status.
For example, an Artillery unit would have a low level of readiness if it lacked the trucks to haul ammunition. It might lack those trucks because they were left in Iraq when the unit was deployed out to save transportation costs. The same artillery unit would have the same low level of readiness if its training were impacted by the time it takes to ship equipment back and forth to Iraq. Men can be loaded on airplanes, but equipment goes by rail and ship.
Readiness reporting is classified, but it doesn't take much knowledge of the system to guess that almost no unit in the military is fully ready to conduct its wartime mission. But what does that really mean? It means that our artillery unit probably isn't getting the training and equipment to be able to fight a
conventional land war. It would seem to be quite reasonable for a battalion commander of an artillery battalion to report his unit completely unready for (conventional) combat if it had just arrived back from Iraq.
The Democrat party is trying to exploit that situation by saying that if an artillery unit can't do its conventional mission, it shouldn't be sent to Iraq.
Iraq is a strange animal of a war. If that artillery unit is sent to Iraq, the odds are that it won't be employed as artillery, but as infantry, or possibly military police. An artillery unit that is unready to fight a conventional war can very likely be completely ready to fight in Iraq in short order.
There are several obvious ways to blunt the Democrat strategy, and rather than make this into a long essay, I will cover them later today.