It's yet another grand attempt at spreading F.U.D. amongst the Sheep of America.
Posted on 01/25/2006 6:24:59 PM PST by SandRat
WASHINGTON, Jan. 25, 2006 – The Army is making revolutionary changes in its transformation process and is becoming a more capable and effective force, not a strained institution in danger of breaking, as recent criticism has suggested, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said here today. Two reports released today that characterize the Army as extremely strained and in danger of facing recruiting crises misunderstand the situation and do not take into account the accomplishments of the past five years, Rumsfeld said.
"The world saw the United States military go halfway around the world and in a matter of weeks throw the al Qaeda and Taliban out of Afghanistan, in a landlocked country thousands and thousands of miles away," he said. "They saw what the United States military did in Iraq, and the message from that is not that this armed force is broken, but that this armed force is enormously capable."
People need to understand that the U.S. is at war and the role of the military is therefore different from what it is in peacetime, Rumsfeld said. The Army is under greater demand, he said, but it has performed well and proven its capability.
"It is a force that has been deployed, functioned effectively and is, as I say, battle-hardened," he said.
Work still needs to be done in rebalancing the active, National Guard and Reserve components of the Army, but solid progress is being made, Rumsfeld said. At the end of the transformation process, 75 percent of the Army will always be ready to respond to a crisis, he said.
Retention is high, and the Army has met its recruiting goals for the past seven months, Rumsfeld said. More recruiters and higher financial incentives have been added to ensure the numbers stay up, he said.
The Army is also transferring many institutional jobs from military to civilian to increase the warfighting capability of the force, Rumsfeld said. The effectiveness of this transition and the entire transformation process will need to be analyzed before any decisions about total Army end strength can be made, he said.
The Army is already starting to draw down its forces in Iraq as the conditions permit, Rumsfeld said. The percentage of National Guard and Reserve forces deployed has gone down and Iraqi security forces are becoming more effective, he said.
"We're transferring bases, we're transferring real estate, we're transferring responsibilities, and we're training people to handle the combat support and the combat-service support," he said.
As always, the reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq will be determined by conditions on the ground and not by a perceived need to reduce strain on the Army, Rumsfeld said.
Words from the SecDef that the Army is not, I REPEAT, NOT ready to collapse.
Gee! That's not what I heard from Brian Williams tonight. Dear me! Who am I to believe?
AHH! The fresh smell of sanity....
http://www.neoperspectives.com/rumsfeld.htm
The Best of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
Thats great news. It's good to hear that now we can end the stop loss on certain MOS's.
The Pentagon was sure stupid to hire the ill-informed and negative Andrew Krepinevich to do a report on the army. Clearly they didn't need his input.
Not only do we have the best technology and (mostly) superior numbers, but we've had almost all of our systems and personnel put to the test of battle recently.
Nobody else has that. We're 2X nastier than we were 5 years ago.
The Army met their goals by increasing the minimum age and lowering the academic standards for enlistment. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because the military has experience in adjusting training and doctrine for this possiblility. I was in the Army post Vietnam, when it became a voluntary force. We lost the ability to pick the cream of the crop of the population and we adjusted to handle what was coming in from the street. Today is not as bad as the 1970's. The Republic will survive. Rumsfeld is right in one respect, wars allow our troops to gain experience that cannot be obtained in peacetime. This is critical for the future because the privates and lieutenants will become the future NCO's and company/battalion commanders. Having experienced soldiers at the helm makes a big difference. Hopefully some of these veterans will go into politics and provide some real life insight to the a$$holes in Congress and bureacracy. Boy do we need them.
BTTT
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