Iraq

[den]

There is something I don't understand about the US troops in Iraq. They all appear to be reservists. Why are reserves in a battle zone? Does the US Army have any regulars over there? If not, why?

All the Australian troops in Iraq are Regs; Army, Navy and Airforce. Their job is full-time Armed Services. The Reservists are part-timers; two weeks training a year and they hold down jobs and support their families.They're called up when the Regs are in trouble, not INSTEAD of the Regs.

Can anyone explain this to me?

Comments

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

They aren't all reservists, although a lot of them are. The US generally uses its reservists far more readily than most countries do, though

The short answer is that the regulars are overextended as it is. The Pentagon's had to dip into the inactive reserves in the past few months, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[boreal.livejournal.com]

Because Bush is a bastard moron. He committed us to a war for NO reason besides his greed, the troops are exhausted and spread too thin, and our young men and women die daily. I'm sure you heard about the recent convoy who refused to drive fuel trucks and are now fully under arrest? One mom gave the media the recording her daughter left her, calling from jail, and the daughter said that the fuel was contaminated, the trucks broken and breaking down, and they didn't have vehicles with body armor and it was a 'suicide' mission that they wouldn't do because the fuel was contaminated with water anyhow. (And that is HIGHLY dangerous, especially if it was plane or helicopter fuel.)

So they were all arrested. Not only that, the men and women whose national guard contracts expired are being FORCED to renew them and continue under penalty of arrest. There's no choice to leave, they are forcing them to stay even though the contracts have expired.

As you mention, the NG don't have the training to be there and shouldn't be there. And yet they are. And yet they are being forced to continue, losing their jobs they previously held and families under financial crisis.

Pray that Bush is not reelected. Pray for us. Meditate, chant, whatever, we need all the help you can possibly send... :(

Michael Moore has put together a book with letters that soldiers have sent him, telling the truth of what is happening there. Something like 3000 letters, he just published them, some are on his website.

Its all bullshit. I hope Bush's soul burns forever in eternal damnation.

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

We keep running out of warm bodies, what with all the cold ones coming back. The redefinition of a reservist's responsibility is necessary to be able to say "No, we wouldn't need to reinstate the draft to continue doing exactly what we've been doing exactly the way we've been doing it; we've been able to do the job with volunteers so far, therefore we always will be!" (The Republicans have recently decided that they can sue people who say a draft could be on the horizon just because it's that "ludicrous.")

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I find that hard to believe. I was under the impression that the US Army was one of the largest in the world, this is what puzzled me about sending the reserves.

[makovette.livejournal.com]

It is the largest in NATO. China and the PDRNK are larger.

We're fighting a police action on two fronts whith minimal head count from European forces. A large chunk of the US forces are still in Korea for obvious reasons.

CYa!
mako

[skipai.livejournal.com]

Hey, we can only afford on what we can spend. We've ended up giving the US money in loans to keep the country running as it is.

May be more problem though as the UK is pondering pulling it's troups out. We've done what we went to do, that's the call here now here. Pull our troops out completely.

[boreal.livejournal.com]

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/korea-orbat.htm

Page for anyone who is interested in this thread...

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, globalsecurity is one of those things on my list of Highly Useful Sites.

[kayshapero]

It's not as big as it was before, and until we started fighting wars all over the place it didn't need to be. The current situation sux.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

"all the cold ones coming back" is rather less than one percent.

There are reservists serving, as well as regular military. We have about twice the force deployed now as we did during the original conflict last year, as many are rebuilding infrastructure.

Fortunately, you cannot sue someone for being mistaken about sueing someone. And the draft business is a creation of the radical opposition party in the States, so that the could blame it on the other guys. A chuckle, really, except for how many have bought into this. Including, apparently, some on your list here. ];-)

===|==============/ Level Head

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

The US military is one of the largest in the world, once you factor in the navy (which is absolutely tremendous by anyone's standards), and the air force. The army proper is something in the vicinity of 200,000 to 300,000 soldiers; I don't recall the exact number (someone else might be able to help out here).

Of those, about 100-140,000 are in Iraq, something like 30,000 are in Korea, I think 10,000 are in Afghanistan, and there's significant deployments in Japan in the range of several thousand as well. Right there you've got something like 150,000 to 190-200,000 of the soldiers, most of those being regular army.

If we assume a higher figure for the total - say, 250-300K for the army, that still means there's plenty left over, right? Well, it does on paper. Most of that remainder is either out on smaller deployments - Balkans, token UN ops around the world in dribs and drabs, etc - or just having returned from those or larger deployments. After a major deployment, like a tour in Iraq or, in the past, something like WWII or Vietnam, usually the soldier does one or so tours abroad. (They can do more, but it's usually by choice or extraordinary things.) After that they're usually cycled back home, doing US Army stuff stateside - either internal security, helping to train the next batch of soldiers, or just being paid off since they're near the end of their active term.

If you keep using only the regular army for that sort of thing, sooner or later you're going to burn out your soldiers, and the quality overall is going to drop. Rather than running the regular army into the ground, folks have decided to start using the reservists. This preserves the regulars by taking some of the pressure off them, and lets the reservists get more experience - which is good in a military sense, after all.

I think they should've been careful about having deployments get so high that this needed to be considered, but the reasoning makes sense even if it's a result of bad planning.

[boreal.livejournal.com]

Here's how the Bush admin take care of their military...

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/IraqCoverage/story?id=163109&page=1

[makovette.livejournal.com]

It's not any adminstration's fault, it's the Congress who is responsible for the mal-treatment of US Vets (I'm a vet myself). Congress has always refused to setup oversite on the military paper pushers (many of whom are civilians) who commit these travesties.

How about this for a hard example from over 70 years ago under a where Vet's were killed by their own government:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

It's trivial to Google for similar screw the vets BS from WWII (Democratic president), Korea (Republican), Vietnam (Democratic) ad nauseum. Keep in mind that the current .mil laws, rules and bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Clinton era. Please put your lighting in the correct orifice - your Congressman and Senator's, not which ever weenie happens to be in the Oval Office at any given time.

CYa!
Mako

[boreal.livejournal.com]

The buck stops with Bush.

That goes for the prison fiasco, that goes for who he puts in charge, that goes for him following up, etc. You don't get to fly in and say 'mission accomplished' on an aircraft carrier, and then get to blame the fact that you're extending contracts with no legal rebuttle, that the military doesn't have the equipment to do their job, etc., on the congress.

Bush single handedly and knowingly took us into a war that didn't need to happen and shouldn't have happened. Period. He is therefore responsible, period. They/his admin wanted to 'get' iraq before 9/11 and they succeeded in lining their pockets at the expense of a lot of american and iraqi blood and accomplished their mission all right. The president knowingly provided poor and false intelligence about Iraq to the congress and should be held responsible for it. I hope someday he is.

We weren't in debt at the beginning of this fiasco. And now we're what, how many hundred BILLION in debt are we? I could go on. This is just my view, its pretty clear how Bush has 'steered' the ship here, right into a reef. :P

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

We're badly overextended, is what. A fair chunk of troops were deployed overseas doin' standard military stuff before anything happened. Then we sent a bunch to Afghanistan. Then we sent a bunch to Iraq--but not nearly enough, as a number of people tried to warn the administration. However, their call for more troops was discarded in favor of "shock and awe," because the administration was really big about getting into a fight and had no clue what happened after that point. The problem, of course, is that no matter how many BFGs you have, you still need meat on the ground to guard ammo dumps, and we just don't have it.

The actual body count is not all that tactically significant, however morally reprehensible it may be--we've had 6,000+ killed or wounded--but you just can't leave even healthy troops on the ground indefinitely. If we learned anything from Vietnam, it's that people who don't get a break go nuts. So they HAVE to rotate them out of combat eventually, and when most of your army is already in the field, who can you rotate in? They're going through reservists, they've instituted the backdoor draft to stop losses, but the simple fact is that we're runnin' out of guys.

I do think a draft is unlikely--it's such bad publicity, and it takes too long for a drafted soldier to become useful--but if it happens, I'm gonna gloat until the smugness centers of my brain overload, at the final sign of how badly Bush screwed up.