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

[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.