Petraeus predicts September draw-down in Iraq

Of course he does! He is a political hack and a water-carrier for the republican warmongers and chickenhawks and never let anyone tell you otherwise!

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services committee this morning, he told the panel "My sense is that I will be able to make a recommendation at that time for some further reductions." Then he hastened to add that he didn't want to imply that he had anything specific in mind, no particular brigade or combat formation has been decided on. ''But I do believe there will be certain assets that, as we are already looking at the picture right now, we'll be able to recommend can be either redeployed or not deployed to the theater in the fall,'' he said, while repeating his past caution that conditions on the ground could change. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, responded: ''That's good news to most of us.''

(Yeah Carl - it's real good news that the four-star hack is quietly influencing this upcoming presidential election, just like he did the last one. Who can forget that editorial in the Washington Post that touted non-existent progress and success of aWol's pet war - six weeks before the election? The answer to that question, by the way, is "very few" because we won't let them!)

But the meddling doesn't stop with vague suggestions of possible troop withdrawals to commence six weeks before the election. The upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections are being pushed back to November from October.

You see, it simply wouldn't do to have all that effort to sway influence to McCain offset by Sadr's bloc waltzing to victory the following month, so the Iraqi elections have to be pushed back to after the U.S. presidential election.

So are you feeling manipulated yet? And if not, why not?

Massive Spending and Broken Branches (of the military)

As Congress takes up the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they are confronting the largest defense budget as percentage of all expenditures since World War II.

This massive spending increase comes at the same time top military commanders make grim predictions about manpower, materiel and readiness. In spite of all that additional spending, our military is strained nearly to the breaking point after five years of desert warfare, and four years of fighting on two fronts.

Army Gen. Bantz Craddock of the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) told a house committee last week that he is skeptical that the United States could mount a response to a new crisis in Europe "I'm skeptical that we have adequate forces available."

Troops who come back from Iraq get little or no down-time. They instead almost immediately start preparing for their next deployment. Readiness suffers because training is not happening. "We're not doing amphibious training, we're not doing mountain-warfare training, or other training that would be needed in another type of contingency," Gen. James Conway, the Marine commandant, testified in February before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Navy and the Air Force are voicing similar concerns, even though those branches have born less of the burden, troops-wise. "We are currently meeting our wartime requirements, but our future dominance is at risk," Air Force Gen. John Corley testified at the same hearing. Some of the Air Force’s C-130 cargo planes "can no longer deploy to combat because we have literally flown the wings off of them," he said. "The center wing boxes are cracked."

The Navy has dispatched thousands of Medics, Seabee units and detonation experts to support coalition ground forces in Iraq, and the top Navy brass worries that the sailors are being used up. (The highly-technical Navy and Air Force spend a lot more money training their enlisted personnel than the Army and Marines spend training infantry.) Admiral Robert Willard, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, told members of congress last week that the medical deployments have “stressed our ability to provide health care" to sailors at home.

It isn’t the dire prediction that retired General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell that “the Army is about broken.” – but then, Powell was not an active-duty flag-rank when he made his statements before congress.

Given that commanders always display an upbeat attitude about the state of their own service when they parade before congressional committees, open declarations of concern are more than a little noteworthy.

House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO-04) last week ordered two congressional investigations be undertaken; one on the effects of the war in Iraq on military equipment and the other on the recent reports that soldiers are being redeployed to combat zones after sustaining performance-impairing injuries.

I can not think of a more appropriate time to undertake those vital investigations ordered by Chairman Skelton than four years into a vanity war that is the root cause of the destruction tearing at our military – a professional force that took 35 years to create in the wake of Vietnam is now teetering on the brink of destruction after being used like toy soldiers pursuing the follies of a fool.

[Cross-Posted from Watching Those We Chose]