The Wrong Army? (original email is below, followed by my response)
http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/THEWRONGARMY.HTML

Author Jeff Edwards

This article was written by retired Chief Petty Officer and award winning novelist, Jeff Edwards.

America's military can win wars. We've done it in the past, and I have absolute confidence that we'll continue to do it in the future. We've won fights in which we possessed overwhelming technological superiority (Desert Storm)

as well as conflicts in which we were the technical underdogs (the American Revolution)

We've crossed swords with numerically superior foes, and with militaries a fraction of the size of our own. We've battled on our own soil (Civil War)

and on the soil of foreign lands(Iwo Jima)

On the sea
Under the sea
And in the skies

We've even engaged in a bit of cyber-combat, way out there on the electronic frontier.

At one time or another, we've done battle under just about every circumstance imaginable, armed with everything from muskets

to cruise missiles.

And, somehow, we've managed to do it all with the wrong Army.

That's right, America has the wrong Army. I don't know how it happened, but it did. We have the wrong Army. It's too small; it's not deployed properly; it's inadequately trained, and it doesn't have the right sort of logistical support. It's a shambles. I have no idea how those guys even manage to fight.


Now, before my brothers and sisters of the OD green persuasion get their fur up, I have another revelation for you We also have the wrong Navy.


And if you want to get down to brass tacks, we've got the wrong Air Force

The wrong Marine Corps


And the wrong Coast Guard

Don't believe me? Pick up a newspaper or turn on your television.


In the past week, I've watched or read at least a dozen commentaries on the strength, size, and deployment of our military forces. All of our uniform services get called on the carpet for different reasons, but our critics unanimously agree that we're doing pretty much everything wrong

Ramsey Clark--George Clooney--Richard Gere

I think it's sort of a game. The critics won't tell you what the game is called, so I've taken the liberty of naming it myself. I call it the 'No Right Answer' game. It's easy to play, and it must be a lot of fun because politicos and journalists can't stop playing it.

I'll teach you the rules.

No matter how the U.S. military is organized, it's the wrong force. Actually, that's the only rule in this game. We don't really need any other rules, because that one applies in all possible situations. Allow me to demonstrate...


Desert Storm Jet Fighter Plane

If the Air Force's fighter jets are showing their age, critics will tell us that Air Force leaders are mismanaging their assets, and endangering the safety of their personnel.


If the Air Force attempts to procure new fighter jets, they are shopping for toys and that money could be spent better elsewhere.

Are you getting the hang of the game yet? It's easy; keeping old planes is the wrong answer, but getting new planes is also the wrong answer. There is no right answer, not ever.

Isn't that fun?It works everywhere.

When the Army is small, it's TOO small. Then we start to hear phrases like 'over-extended' or 'spread too thin,' and the integrity of our national defense is called into question.

When the Army is large, it's TOO large, and it's an unnecessary drain on our economy. Terms like 'dead weight,' and 'dead wood' get thrown around.

I know what you're thinking. We could build a medium-sized Army, and everyone would be happy Think again!!! A medium-sized Army is too small to deal with large-scale conflicts, and too large to keep military spending properly muzzled. The nay sayers will attack any middle of the road solution anyway, on the grounds that it lacks a coherent strategy.

SO SMALL IS WRONG

LARGE IS WRONG

AND MEDIUM SIZE IS WRONG

Now you're starting to understand the game. Is this fun, or what? No branch of the military is exempt

When the Navy builds aircraft carriers, we are told that we really need small, fast multipurpose ships.


When the Navy builds small, fast multi-mission ships (AKA the Arleigh Burke class), we're told that blue water ships are poorly suited for littoral combat, and we really need brown water combat ships.


The Navy's answer, the Littoral Combat, isn't even off the drawing boards yet, and the critics are already calling it pork barrel politics and questioning the need.

The fun never stops when we play the 'No Right Answer' game. If we centralize our military infrastructure, the experts tell us that we are vulnerable to attack. We're inviting another Pearl Harbor.


If we decentralize our infrastructure, we're sloppy and overbuilt, and the BRAC experts break out the calculators and start dismantling what they call our excess physical capacity.

If we leave our infrastructure unchanged, we are accused of becoming stagnant in a dynamic world environment.

Even the lessons of history are not sacrosanct. When we learn from the mistakes we made in past wars, we are accused of failing to adapt to emerging realities. When we shift our eyes toward the future, the critics quickly tell us that we've forgotten our history and we are therefore doomed to repeat it.

If we somehow manage to assimilate both past lessons and emerging threats, we're informed that we lack focus.

Where does it come from: This default assumption that we are doing the wrong thing, no matter what we happen to be doing? How did our military wind up in a zero-sum game?

We can prevail on the field of battle, but we can't win a war of words where the overriding assumption is that we are always in the wrong.

I can't think of a single point in history where our forces were of the correct size, the correct composition, correctly deployed, and appropriately trained all at the same time.

Pick a war, any war. (For that matter, pick any period of peace.) Then dig up as many official and unofficial historical documents, reports, reconstruction's, and commentaries as you can. For every unbiased account you uncover, you'll find three commentaries by revisionist historians who cannot wait to tell you how badly the U.S. military bungled things.

Revisionist Historians

To hear them tell it we could take lessons in organization and leadership from the Keystone Cops.

We really only have one defense against this sort of mudslinging. Success. When we fight, we win, and that's got to count for something. When asked to comment on Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. Army's Lieutenant General Tom Kelly reportedly said, "Iraq went from the fourth-largest army in the world, to the second-largest army in Iraq in 100 hours."

-------------------- my response ----------------------

Whhhaaaaaa! The poor military. Such victims. Poor little babies. I'm so sick of hearing all this crap about how the military isn't appreciated enough. First of all, EVERY public institution has its detractors and critics. It's doesn't matter whether you're the miliary, congress, corporations, the ACLU, the NRA--even fairly innocuous groups like the AARP. If you form a public institution, you have to expect criticism.

I thought these military guys were so tough. Why are they so thin-skinned when it comes to criticism? I'm not sure I want such pansies protecting us. I'm sorry, but if you WILLINGLY (there's no draft) join an organization that has such a terrible and dishonorable history of hurting and killing so many innocent people, don't come crying when people call you out on it.

Go on the ACLU's website. Do you see them whining about how some people don't like what they're doing? No, they just quietly go about the work of dismantling George Bush's fascist America piece by piece. I respect what they do.

I don't respect needless killers. Why should I say "thank you" to a soldier? What the fuck are they doing that's so great? They're in a country that did NOTHING to us. They're not defending America, or freedom or any other "noble cause." All they are is a cheap security force for the corporations like Halliburton that are bilking us taxpayers.

And last time I checked, military personnel get basically free college and tens of thousands of dollars in sign-up bonus money. Unlike military people, there are a lot of us in the world that are ACTUALLY DOING THINGS THAT HELP PEOPLE instead of killing them. But we don't get applause, parades and thank-yous. We don't get free college and a $60,000 bonus for deciding to be a child care worker, social worker or a counselor (instead of killing innocent people like they're doing).

Also, last time I checked, the military gets most of our budget. Way more than the all of the worthwhile programs (health, education, social services, anti-poverty, nutrition, immunization and other child health, day care, Head Start, etc.) COMBINED!!! Did you know that our tax money pays for a military that costs more than all of the other countries' militaries COMBINED? Protecting us from who?!?!? Who the hell would be stupid enough to attack the U.S. with a military (terrorism is a different story)?

So, you're in an organization that spends about 20 times more than it should, engages in massive fraud, kills innocent people--and you want to be spared from criticism? Is this guy nuts?!?!The military today is a perversion of what if once was. The original purpose was to stop invading armies. When was the last time a U.S. civilian got injured or killed by a foreign army on U.S. soil? I think it was the Mexican-American War in the 1840s!!! If the only objective was protecting U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, we could cut our military to 10% of what it is now and still do that job.

Americans aren't in any danger of losing their freedom from the OUTSIDE WORLD. George Bush is doing that to us. If the military really cared about the freedoms and civil liberties of Americans, they would storm the White House and set up war crime tribunals. Obviously, since the Spanish-American War, the purpose of the military switched from protecting our citizen within our borders, to implementing horrific foreign policy goals that only help U.S. corporate and political interests. The military has become a pawn of sick bastards who already have tons of power and money and are so greedy that they're willing to have our soldiers die so that they can get more of it.