Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Buone notizie

From The Washington Post, 3/19/07:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/AR2007031801
534.html
Military Is Ill-Prepared For Other Conflicts
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 19, 2007; Page A01
Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for
U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the
United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that
would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S.
military and government officials acknowledge.
More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the
Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately
have called a "death spiral," in which the ever more rapid pace of
war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear,
wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than
the insurgencies now at hand.
The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn,
because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of
ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential
foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict
with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula.
Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry,
artillery and other land forces, they said.
An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks
for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop
increases in Iraq, they said.
"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to
execute it," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified
before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
The Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard A. Cody, described as
"stark" the level of readiness of Army units in the United States,
which would be called on if another war breaks out.
"The readiness continues to decline of our next-to-deploy forces,"
Cody told the House Armed Services Committee's readiness panel last
week.
"And those forces, by the way, are . . . also your strategic reserve."
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked last
month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the
preparedness of Army units in the United States.
He stated simply:
"No . . . I am not comfortable."
"You take a lap around the globe -- you could start any place:
Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan,
Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea,
back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There's no
dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces," Pace warned in
his testimony.
He said the nation faces increased risk because of shortfalls in
troops, equipment and training.
In earlier House testimony, Pace said the military, using the Navy,
Air Force and reserves, could handle one of three major contingencies,
involving North Korea or -- although he did not name them -- Iran or
China.
But, he said, "It will not be as precise as we would like, nor will it
be on the timelines that we would prefer, because we would then, while
engaged in one fight, have to reallocate resources and remobilize the
Guard and reserves."
Pace said the unexpected demand for more troops in Iraq -- from the 10
brigades that commanders projected last year they would need by the
end of 2006, to the 20 brigades scheduled to be there by June --
prompted him to recommend permanently adding 92,000 troops to the Army
and Marine Corps, saying it would "make a large difference in our
ability to be prepared for unforeseen contingencies."
Indeed, the recent increase of more than 32,000 U.S. troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan has pushed already severe readiness problems to what
some officials and lawmakers consider a crisis point.
Schoomaker said last week that sustaining the troop increase in Iraq
beyond August would be "a challenge."
The Marines' commandant, Gen. James T. Conway, expressed concern to
defense reporters last week that it would bring the Marine Corps
"right on the margin" of breaking the minimum time at home for Marines
between combat tours.
U.S. commanders in Iraq say they may need to keep troop levels
elevated into early 2008.
The troop increase has also created an acute shortfall in the Army's
equipment stored overseas -- known as "pre-positioned stock" -- which
would be critical to outfit U.S. combat forces quickly should another
conflict erupt, officials said.
The Army should have five full combat brigades' worth of such
equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard
ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean.
But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop
increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units to
rotate in and out of the country.
Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, according to military
and government officials.
"Without the pre-positioned stocks, we would not have been able to
meet the surge requirement," Schoomaker said.
"It will take us two years to rebuild those stocks. That's part of my
concern about our strategic depth."
"The status of our Army prepositioned stock . . . is bothersome," Cody
said last week.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers who received classified briefings
last week on the stocks and overall Army readiness voiced alarm.
"I'm deeply concerned," said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, who last week asked the Congressional
Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office to investigate
the stocks "as a matter of vital importance to national defense."
Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz (D-Texas), chairman of the committee's readiness
panel, said:
"I have seen the classified-only readiness reports. And based on those
reports, I believe that we as a nation are at risk of major failure,
should our Army be called to deploy to an emerging threat."
Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), who attended the briefing, said, "We
are at a crisis point across the board."
And Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), said, "This nation has got to
replenish and fix what is soon going to be broken."
Equipment is also lacking among Army units in the United States, the
vast majority of which are rated "not ready" by the Army, based on
measures of available gear, training and personnel, according to
senior military officers and government officials.
Active-duty Army combat brigades in the United States face shortages
of heavy, medium and light tactical vehicles such as Humvees; radios;
night-vision goggles; and some weapons, Cody said.
The shortages have deepened as scarce equipment and personnel are
funneled to those units next in line to deploy overseas, creating ever
bigger holes in the units that will leave later.
"It's like a hurricane drawing everything into the center of the eye,"
said a senior Army officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
"For the National Guard, those shortages are even more," Cody said.
Army National Guard figures show that 88 percent of its units are "not
ready."
Yet National Guard combat brigades -- four of which have been notified
already -- will be increasingly called upon next year to relieve the
active-duty troops in Iraq, with the Army Guard and Reserve expected
to grow from 20 percent of the force to 30 percent, officials said.
And unlike before the Iraq war, the Army does not currently have a
brigade ready to deploy within hours to an overseas hot spot,
officials say.
The increasingly rapid tempo of rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan is
also constraining the length and focus of training as active-duty Army
combat brigades and Marine combat battalions spend at least as much
time in the war zone as at home.
As a result, all the training is geared toward counterinsurgencies,
while skills important for other major combat operations atrophy.
The Marine Corps is not training for amphibious, mountain or jungle
warfare, nor conducting large-scale live-fire maneuvers, Conway said.
"We've got a little bit of a blindside there," he said.
The Marine Corps and Army both lack sufficient manpower to give troops
a break from the combat zone long enough to complete their full
spectrum of training, senior officials said.
"We're only able to train them . . . for counterinsurgency
operations," Cody told the House panel last week.
"They're not trained to full-spectrum operations."
Under current Army and Marine Corps plans, it will take two to three
years after the Iraq war ends and about $17 billion a year to restore
their equipment levels.
It will take five years and at least $75 billion for the Army to
increase its active-duty ranks to 547,000 soldiers, up from the
current 509,000, and for the Marine Corps to increase its numbers to
202,000, up from 180,000.
"Boots on the ground matter," the senior Army officer said.
"If they are tied down, your ability to terminate a conflict on your
terms, earlier, may not be there."

 534.html
se ho capito bene l'articolo dice che Iraq e Afghanistan bastano e
avanzano per l'esercito più forte della terra e che quindi una terza
guerra sarebbe difficilmente gestibile....
questo succede quando si regalano migliaia di miliardi all' ex azienda
del vice presidente e pur di continuare a farlo Bush minaccia il veto
su eventuali tagli alle spese militari...
per cui la notizia è buona se l'eventuale terzo conflitto ci sarà con
Bush e Cheney fuori dalle scatole, perchè con loro presenti
l'eventualità di usare il nucleare pur di continuare ad regalare
milardi al complesso militare-industriale è tutt'altro che remota
"Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large
arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence
-- economic, political, even spiritual --is felt in every city, every
Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the
imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to
comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood
are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced
power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should
take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry
can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that
security and liberty may prosper together."
Dwight Eisenhower, un uomo che conoscendo la guerra meglio di ogni
altro negli USA sapeva cosa voleva dire dare troppo potere a chi fa
della guerra fonte di profitto. Ma i repubblicani di una volta non si
facevano imboscare da paparino nella Guardia Nazionale per non fare la
guerra del Vietnam....