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| The US Military - A Tactical & Strategic Crisis - Andijan: Why We Must Look Beyond Double-Standards |
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There are also three other negative trends which impact on the capabilities of the US military. Firstly, according to US planners, not only is recruitment falling short but divorce rates are sky rocketing having tripled among Army officers from 2002 to last year. The 6% divorce rate for Army officers was far higher than the figure for officers in other military services in 2004 - 1.5% for the Air Force, 1.7% for the Marines and 2.5% for the Navy. The current situation is unprecedented in the all-volunteer military, according to Mady Segal, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has studied military families for three decades. 'This is the first time during the years of the all-volunteer force that we have had such repeated and long deployments to combat areas', Segal said. 'Obviously, some families are not able to live with this.' As deployments increase, more soldiers will feel they need to find their own exit strategy from the military to protect their marriages.
Secondly, a Department of Veterans'-Affairs analysis of nearly 50,000 American troops, published in March 2005 in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that up to 17% of US forces have been diagnosed with major depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. It also estimated that overall, as many as 26% have some mental disorder caused by wartime service. According to The Pentagon, about 1 million U.S. troops have been deployed for the war on terror. If the study's rates are accurate for all military members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, it would mean that approximately 250,000 suffer some mental illness. In addition to mental illness there are the thousands who have been evacuated because of physical illnesses. In addition to troops getting treatment in military hospitals, nearly 50,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, including those discharged for wounds or injuries, are now out of the military and getting medical treatment from the Department of Veterans' Affairs, according to V.A. data. Further, calls to the GI Rights Hotline, set up by non-profit groups for soldiers to get information on military discharges, have nearly tripled since the year 2000. The hotline got 32,200 calls last year from soldiers who don't want to go to Iraq - or don't want to go back. 'The majority of the calls are people who are trying to get out', said the hotline's manager, Steve Morse, GI rights program coordinator for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors in Oakland, California. Most of the calls are from AWOL soldiers who are looking for help, or are interested in becoming conscientious objectors or getting some sort of discharge. A February Harper's article said 5,500 troops have gone AWOL since the invasion of Iraq.
Finally is the chronic loss of support amongst the US public for not just the war in Iraq but the overall military fight. Americans may claim to love the troops but they increasingly don't want their sons and daughters joining the US military. In a recent poll more than half of those polled said they would discourage a son from enlisting in the military, while two-thirds said they would discourage a daughter from joining. Declining support for the Iraq war coupled with a reluctance of the US public from making the necessary sacrifices themselves is a bad sign for America's War on Terror only four years in. Many soldiers fighting what seems to be an endless war will inevitably question, why all the sacrifices should be confined to themselves while the population in mainland America is spared from any of the horrors of war or why private sector contractors doing less are receiving five times more in remuneration. The US's inability to recruit a voluntary force allied with a more sceptical public at home has therefore profound implications for the United State and its future ability to project power.
Yet despite these problems the more serious issue lies in the US military's capability to fight the new war that has now emerged under the shifting paradigms of warfare. Ever since the end of the cold war, US military doctrine has been to shift from large armies of soldiers to smaller armies with qualitatively better technology, a doctrine commonly referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). US planners believed that the post cold war epoch would be characterised by smaller campaigns conducted less frequently involving in the majority of cases the use of special forces rather than mechanised infantry divisions. Having a thick military footprint all over the globe would be replaced by more flexible thinner footprints or lily pads in more strategic places like the Middle East and Central Asia rather than in the post Cold war hotspots of Germany and the Korean peninsula. Donald Rumsfeld understood that the US military designed to take on the Soviets was too slow at getting to the theatre in a post cold war world, therefore there needed to be major transformation with the air force and special operation units providing the flexibility and adaptability when crises occurred in crucial hotspots. Transformation was the name given to a new concept of warfare, based on lighter, faster, more agile forces; smart bombs, aided by unmanned drones, and vast intelligence-and-communications networks that would coordinate all the elements of combat - land, sea, and air - under a single, joint command. However what Rumsfeld et al have not factored in, is that to defeat an asymmetric enemy requires the full combination of force ranging from air, to ground, to special forces. The post cold war cuts of heavy infantry pursued first by Clinton and now by Bush was always justified on the basis that some of the savings could be better invested in transformational technology, intelligence and equipment with the remainder being enjoyed as a peace dividend. What is fast becoming clear in Iraq is that technology and intelligence at the heart of the RMA on their own cannot occupy a large country or defeat a determined adversary. Though asymmetric warfare is not a new concept, having been championed by Sun Tzu and John Boyd, it is now more in vogue as the US seeks to defeat and occupy more countries it considers a security threat.
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