Now He Tells Us.

So I was looking over Prof Reynold's site, mainly to see if he had any puppy tails sticking out of his smoothie glass and noticed a link to the latest Richard Cohen piece. The whole gist of the piece is that he is now wondering if Obama has the backbone for the job he has.

Um, y'all have to excuse me for being a pore dumb redneck but shouldn't the media have been asking these questions, oh, I don't know, during the Primaries? I think the mainstream media is starting to get really scared. They did not do their job of vetting the Candidate, he is making a fool of himself, which is okay, and he is making the United States look foolish. This is not okay.

I am unsure just how many lives depend of fear of the United States of America. The Democrats let the world stop fearing the United States back in the mid70s, the NVA came roaring out of North Viet Nam, we never did find out exactly how many died then, RVN soldiers, dying at one roadblock after another when the promised ammo and air support did not come, how many died in the Reeducation camps, how many boat people drowned or were murdered by pirates. We know that it was a lot closer to two million than one million Cambodians who died.

Does anyone know how many Afghanis died when the Soviets made their move? Not to mention how many Russian conscripts.

We mostly scated through the Clinton Administration on the military buildup of Reagan and Bush the elder. We do not have that cushion now, we've used our military hard and, all through Bush 43's Administration, we could not get Congress to replace the equipment fast enough, nor bulk up the military to keep it big enough to rest and refit the men and women.

We went into this fight with ten active duty Divisions in the whole US Army. A Division consists of nine battalions plus artillery, transport, etc. We also had, and have, a few Brigade Combat Teams and the Sneaky Petes. Now the whole idea of not growing the military was because they didn't want to have another two or three Divisions worth of troops for a few years and then have to downsize, right after a bunch of those new troopies reenlisted. This many troops, many would reenlist, then when the downsizing came, we'd have to let a bunch of ten and twelve year troops go. It wouldn't help much to just stop enlistments for a while and let junior NCOs back down in rank, lower ranking soldiering in a young man's game. Okay, now women, too. By the time a feller has been in for twelve years he's not going to have the knees to hump all that armor, plus a ruck. I don't think they could move that many infantry troops into the other Branches or Services, either.

Of course, here it is, over eight years past 9/11 and no end in sight. Had we raised, say, three more Army Divisions, with a like increase in the Marines, Air Force and Navy, we'd have far better rested troops. We'd have more Helos, which seem to be the sticking point in AfPak. and with the Iranians, causing trouble, not to mention the Philippines, Thailand, and this just off the top of my head, seems we could make use of more troops for long enough to recruit them, train them and keep them occupied until retirement.

We aren't going to do it, though. I wonder how many will die because we didn't?