NYT editorial: After Rumsfeld's departure -- "The Army We Need"

[DeepModem Mom]

The Army We Need
Published: November 19, 2006

One welcome dividend of Donald Rumsfeld’s departure from the Pentagon is that the United States will now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down.

Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like the lessons the Army drew from Vietnam — that politicians should not send American troops to fight a war of choice unless they went in with overwhelming force, a clearly defined purpose and strong domestic backing. He didn’t like the Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.

And when circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq called for just the things Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like, he refused to adapt, letting the Army, and American interests, pay the price for his arrogance.

So one of the first challenges for the next defense secretary and the next Congress is to repair, rebuild and reshape the nation’s ground forces. They need to renew the morale and confidence of America’s serving men and women and restore the appeal of career military service for the brightest young officers.

That will require building a force large enough to end more than three years of unsustainably rapid rotations of units back into battle, misuse of the National Guard, overuse of the Reserves and conscription of veterans back into active service.

Congress also needs to work harder at rebuilding the links between the battlefront and the home front that a healthy democracy needs. That does not require reinstating the draft — a bad idea for military as well as political reasons. It requires a Congress willing to resume its proper constitutional role in debating and deciding essential questions of war and peace. If Congress continues to shirk that role, expanding the ground forces would invite some future administration to commit American forces recklessly to dubious wars of choice....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/opinion/19sun1.html

[Monkeyman]

1. Amen K&R

[Kagemusha]

2. Just so people realize, this is calling for a bigger army

an army more capable of fighting Iraq-style wars, an army better suited to prolonged foreign intervention...

[orpupilofnature57]

4. We could call them Iraqis ,and foreign intervention could go home.

[ixion]

3. and then there's that pesky matter of war crimes

which should be dealt with, if we are ever to be respected in the international community again.