Thursday, February 15, 2007

The Home Front   [Mark Steyn]

Among the many disheartening aspects of this morning’s Portrait of a Political Class in Crack-Up in The Washington Post is this:

The Murtha plan, based on existing military guidelines, includes a stipulation that Army troops who have already served in Iraq must be granted two years at home before an additional deployment, Marines must be given 14 months at home, and any troops sent to Iraq must be those deemed fully trained and equipped under existing military standards. The idea is to slowly choke off the war by stopping the deployment of troops from units that have been badly degraded by four years of combat.

Everybody appreciates that overseas services is tough on troops’ families but what army has ever mandated "two years at home" between deployments in an ongoing war? There is a lively debate in military circles about whether the US system of large divisions in frequent rotations is the best way to fight small insurgencies whose principal advantage is that they know the turf and you don’t. To require that every American on the ground be a mere tourist in Iraq seems unlikely to help.

I understand that this is all politics now, and largely about the best way Congress can stick Bush with a "slow bleed" that denies him victory and absolves them of any responsibility for defeat. But one day Democrats and Hagelian Republicans might find themselves in a war even they want to win, and this kind of political management doesn’t seem to do the military any favors.

02/15 08:53 AMShare