Iraq V: The Breaking Point

Further evidence that U.S. forces are stretched to the breaking point because of Iraq: Army and Marine commanders have been stepping up their warnings that the pace of troop deployments is increasingly straining the military and threatening to cause long-term damage.

These officers warn that without a troop reduction in Iraq, the present schedule of combat tours would be difficult to sustain without an increase in the number of forces.

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LOTSA AIR POWER, NOT ENUF TROOPS

Carl Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation, says that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has been the architect of not one but two failing wars and offered a fatally flawed vision for how to apply American power.

Robichaud asks:

"How did things go so wrong so quickly? Certainly Rumsfeld and his team made tactical errors, but it's hard not to trace the mistakes to a more systemic problem: a dangerously naive notion of American power that was ascendant in Washington.

"The Rumsfeld doctrine, in military terms, stresses reliance on high technology and air power and downplays large ground forces. Its corollaries are that America operates best when unencumbered by international institutions, that state-building is a distraction, and that force can accomplish political objectives with few long-term repercussions."

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