Bush Disrespects Living Soldiers, Too

How badly did the Bush Pentagon bungle the planning for post-war Iraq? The gyrations they are putting the military through right now to begin addressing the problems in Iraq give some clues.

From this morning's Wall Street Journal:

With security in Iraq deteriorating, the U.S. military is laying plans to increase by about 10% the number of National Guard forces moving into Iraq this fall as part of the next rotation of troops at the same time it retrains more than 100,000 soldiers so it doesn't run out of troops in more than a half-dozen critical specialties.

[snip]

If soldiers volunteer to stay on active duty longer, they can. To cover the gaps in key specialties, the Army Reserve will begin this week asking for volunteers to begin active-duty tours for two years. "We're going to be establishing provisional active-duty units with the volunteers," said Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve. Gen. Helmly said it is unclear how many volunteers among the Reserve's 211,000 soldiers will step forward.

[snip]

Most of the looming shortages will be covered by retraining soldiers. To address the shortage of infantry soldiers, for example, the army is reducing the number of heavy-armored-tank brigades and retraining many of those soldiers as infantry troops, which are more effective in peacekeeping operations.

Some of these ideas may sound relatively benign to non-military people; but believe me they are an incredible departure from "normal."

Retraining troops into new specialties (MOS - Military Operational Specialties) is no mean feat. Each MOS has its own training structure and schools; each has its own personnel management system. And all of that is basically doubled because there is one system for enlisted and non-commissioned officers and one for commissioned officers. So while "retraining [tank brigade]...soldiers as infantry troops" sounds easy, while "establishing provisional active-duty units" sounds like a mere paperwork exercise, they are unbelievably complex and disruptive.

The pressure to do these things quickly and - like every thing BushCo. has done in Iraq - cheaply, will mean that they will be more dangerous than necessary and will likely not work as planned. These "provisional units" will more than likely be made up of a mix of experienced and retrained soldiers, but with experienced units and soldiers needed for actual operations, we can expect that these units will wind up with a deficit of experience and - until they are better established - to have higher accident and fatality rates in battle.

This is a bad idea all around.