WHERE YA GONNA GET THE TROOPS?
There just aren’t enough troops in the current armed forces to fight all these wars, even if we’re just talking about Iraq and Afghanistan. The troop escalation ordered by Bush last year damn near broke the military, with National Guard and Reserve troops being called into action–leaving our nation undefended if another major crises were to have erupted worldwide–and those troops already deployed having their deployments extended, and those scheduled to ship out being sent early, before their training was complete. Our troops were shipping back out to war, sometimes twice in the course of one year. (My son returned from Iraq the first time in May 2005, and re-deployed to the war on January 1 of 2006, just months later.) In the army, other troops spend 15 months in Iraq, come home for maybe nine months, then get re-deployed for at least another year. We–meaning the military overall–can’t keep this up indefinitely. We’re barely holding on by our fingernails now. Troops sent for multi
