{"id":193696,"date":"2008-11-23T06:35:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-23T11:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/23\/george-w-bush-broke-our-army\/"},"modified":"2008-11-23T06:35:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-23T11:35:00","slug":"george-w-bush-broke-our-army","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/23\/george-w-bush-broke-our-army\/","title":{"rendered":"George W. Bush Broke Our Army"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s, or at the least the conclusion that the US Army is broken, is the conclusion of well respected army analyst Andrew Krepinevich in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dodbuzz.com\/2008\/11\/20\/csba-army-in-crisis\/\">Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments report<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>His basic points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The quality of enlisted men and officers is decreasing despite significant pay hikes.<\/li>\n<li>Physical, educational, and &#8220;moral&#8221; (i.e. criminal conviction) standards have been lowered for recruits.<\/li>\n<li>NCO quality is suffering, because enlisted men ill suited to leadership are being promoted to NCO status.<\/li>\n<li>Falling reenlistment numbers.<\/li>\n<li>Increased use of stop loss to maintain staffing levels.<\/li>\n<li>The Army is attempting to create units that are simultaneously configured for both conventional and counterinsurgency warfare, and thus under performing at both.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He does not explicitly finger Bush, but Iraq is clearly mentioned as a part of the problem.<\/p>\n<p>His recommendations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Make 15 Army BCTs dediucated to counter-insurgency\/peacekeeping.<\/li>\n<li>Delay expanding the army until personnel quality issues are resolved.<\/li>\n<li>Cancel the FCS, which has dubious utility in a counter-insurgency scenario, and is sucking up too much budget.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It is likely that the ill effects of Iraq will weigh on the army for more than a decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s, or at the least the conclusion that the US Army is broken, is the conclusion of well respected army analyst Andrew Krepinevich in a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments report. His basic points: The quality of enlisted men and officers is decreasing despite significant pay hikes. Physical, educational, and &#8220;moral&#8221; (i.e. criminal conviction) &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,975,1266,1006],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-employment","category-future-combat-systems","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193696"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}