When the Military Gets Combat Fatigue
http://www.truthout.org/article/weakened-warriors-when-military-gets-combat-fatigue
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/exit-strategy-weakened-warriors.html
Friday 12 September 2008
by: Bruce Falconer, Mother Jones
September/October 2008 Issue
Has the Bush administration maxed out the military?
That the Bush presidency has placed an enormous strain on the
nation's armed forces is hardly news. (The "active army is about
broken," Colin Powell told CBS's Face the Nation as far back as
2006.) Less frequently noted are the long-term consequences of Iraq
and Afghanistan for the military - consequences that could last, many
experts now say, for a generation or more. Five signs of a military in trouble:
Operation Overload
"We've got too much war and too few warriors," says Andrew
Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam vet who is now a
professor of international relations at Boston University. "The
contingencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are consuming the Army and Marine Corps."
Indeed, Army combat units now spend 15 months in theater for
every 12 months at home, while the Marines, a far smaller force,
deploy at the brisker pace of seven months in, seven months out.
(Soldiers would ideally spend a minimum of two months at home for
every one in the field, according to Pentagon planners.) And the same
personnel are deployed over and over again to Iraq and Afghanistan -
sometimes against their will, thanks to "stop loss" orders that
extend their tours. Or, says T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel
and Iraq War veteran, "A guy can deploy with a brigade, spend 15
months in Iraq, then come home and 6 months later be transferred to
another unit that is deploying to Iraq for 12 to 15 months." About 80
percent of National Guard and Reserve troops have been deployed to
Iraq and Afghanistan at least once; Lt. General Steven Blum, chief of
the National Guard, has said his force is "in an even more dire
situation than the active military."
The Army has even sought "sandbox sailors" from the Navy, one of
whom told a reporter, "I was trained for 22 years to go to war on a
ship. But they gave me a rifle and a pair of boots and said, 'Go to the sand.'"
Spare a Tank, Brother?
The approximately 30,000 combat vehicles and 500 helicopters the
Army and Marine Corps have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are
operating at between three and six times their peacetime tempo,
reports the Congressional Budget Office, and the harsh desert heat
and blown sand further increase the wear and tear. Stateside units,
meanwhile, are scrambling for vital gear - a particular problem for
National Guard and Reserve forces. Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius
cited shortages of Humvees and trucks as an impediment to the
recovery effort after a tornado leveled the town of Greensburg in May
2007. "We're missing all kinds of equipment that could help us
respond to this kind of emergency."
The Congressional Research Service has noted that the shortage
also forces soldiers to train with different gear than they use in
the field. "If somebody says, 'Why don't you guys drive around on
trucks and pretend they're tanks?' one could still gain some value
from using substitute equipment," says Bacevich. "But you lose
something if you're not on the real stuff, doing the real deal."
O Captain!
To meet current operational demands, the Army intends to expand
by 65,000 troops in the next several years - growth that will require
commissioning new junior officers, whose retention serves as a
barometer of the overall health of the military. "We are very
concerned about one subset of the population, and that is the young
captains, of whom we've asked a great deal," General David Petraeus
acknowledged to a congressional panel in April. Among junior
officers, the attrition rate stood at just 5.7 percent in 2003. By
2005, it reached a high of 8.5 percent before trailing off slightly,
thanks in part to new cash and educational incentives. Still,
Pentagon planners say, the Army has roughly half the number of senior
captains it requires, and at current levels of recruitment and
retention, expects to be short about 3,000 captains and majors until
at least 2013. To fill the void, it has accelerated the rate at which
lieutenants can make captain, and competition for senior officer
posts has slackened. Today, almost all captains are promoted to major
as soon as they become eligible. As one disgruntled officer told the
Washington Monthly, "If you breathe, you make lieutenant colonel these days."
A Few Mediocre Men
As the military has lowered its promotion standards, it has
taken a similar approach toward recruiting. Desperate for manpower,
the services have increasingly accepted recruits with criminal
records. Since 2004, the number of "moral waivers" granted to
enlistees - excusing a range of criminal misconduct, from breaking
and entering to aggravated assault - has more than doubled.
Recruiters are even "knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white
supremacists to join the armed forces," a Pentagon investigator told
the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2006.
The Army has also lowered its academic standards: According to a
2008 study by the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit,
nonpartisan research group that tracks federal spending, the
percentage of recruits with high school diplomas has fallen for three
consecutive years, and the number of recruits scoring in the upper
half of the Armed Forces Qualification Test, those described by the
Pentagon as "high quality," has dropped nearly 25 percent since 2004.
Head Wounds
By last spring, post-traumatic stress disorder had become so
prevalent among troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan that
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon was considering
listing it as a "qualifying wound" for the Purple Heart. One in five
returning soldiers has reported ptsd symptoms, according to a recent
study by the Rand Corporation, but fewer than half of them received
treatment. (See "Kill and Tell") Long term, caring for Iraq and
Afghanistan vets (including disability payments) will cost nearly
$400 billion, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes predict in their
recent book, The Three Trillion Dollar War.
Things are bound to get worse as pressure on soldiers keeps
rising: One in five troops in Iraq and Afghanistan exhibits symptoms
of depression, anxiety, or acute stress, according to a 2006 Pentagon
study, and soldier suicides have risen 72 percent since 2004 to 115
last year, an all-time record. Nonetheless, in 2006, the Pentagon
determined ptsd to be a "treatable" disorder, enabling the brass to
deploy sufferers back to the front lines. According to the Hartford
Courant, one of them, after being declared unfit for duty and placed
on suicide watch in Walter Reed's psych ward, was redeployed to the
Middle East, where he wrote in an email to his family, "I ask myself
what the F*** am I doing here?"
--
Bruce Falconer is a reporter at the Mother Jones Washington, DC, Bureau.
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