http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/opinion/30krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fPaul%20Krugman&oref=login
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 30, 2005
The truth, of course, is that there aren't nearly enough troops.
"Basically, we've got all the toys, but not enough boys," a Marine
major in Anbar Province told The Los Angeles Times.
Yet it's also true, in a different sense, that we have too many troops
in Iraq.
Back in September 2003 a report by the Congressional Budget Office
concluded that the size of the U.S. force in Iraq would have to start
shrinking rapidly in the spring of 2004 if the Army wanted to "maintain
training and readiness levels, limit family separation and involuntary
mobilization, and retain high-quality personnel."
Let me put that in plainer English: our all-volunteer military is based
on an implicit promise that those who serve their country in times of
danger will also be able to get on with their lives. Full-time soldiers
expect to spend enough time at home base to keep their marriages alive
and see their children growing up. Reservists expect to be called up
infrequently enough, and for short enough tours of duty, that they can
hold on to their civilian jobs.
To keep that promise, the Army has learned that it needs to follow
certain rules, such as not deploying more than a third of the full-time
forces overseas except during emergencies. The budget office analysis
was based on those rules.
But the Bush administration, which was ready neither to look for a way
out of Iraq nor to admit that staying there would require a much bigger
army, simply threw out the rulebook. Regular soldiers are spending a
lot more than a third of their time overseas, and many reservists are
finding their civilian lives destroyed by repeated, long-term call-ups.
Two things make the burden of repeated deployments even harder to bear.
One is the intensity of the conflict. In Slate, Phillip Carter and Owen
West, who adjusted casualty figures to take account of force size and
improvements in battlefield medicine (which allow more of the severely
wounded to survive), concluded that "infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004
comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966."
The other is the way in which the administration cuts corners when it
comes to supporting the troops. From their foot-dragging on armoring
Humvees to their apparent policy of denying long-term disability
payments to as many of the wounded as possible, officials seem almost
pathologically determined to nickel-and-dime those who put their lives
on the line for their country.
Now, predictably, the supply of volunteers is drying up.
Most reporting has focused on the problems of recruiting, which has
fallen far short of goals over the past few months. Serious as it is,
however, the recruiting shortfall could be only a temporary problem. If
and when we get out of Iraq - I know, a big if and a big when - it
shouldn't be too hard to find enough volunteers to maintain the Army's
manpower.
Much more serious, because it would be irreversible, would be a mass
exodus of mid-career military professionals. "That's essentially how we
broke the professional Army we took into Vietnam," one officer told the
National Journal. "At some point, people decided they could no longer
weather the back-to-back deployments."
And we're already seeing stories about how young officers, facing the
prospect of repeated harrowing tours of duty in a war whose end is hard
to imagine, are reconsidering whether they really want to stay in the
military.
For a generation Americans have depended on a superb volunteer Army to
keep us safe - both from our enemies, and from the prospect of a draft.
What will we do once that Army is broken?
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