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March 19th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

‘Army Broken’ BS Exposed!

in: Global War on Terrorism, Liberal MSM Bias, News, Opinion

For a couple of years now we’ve heard the cry from the lefties, “the Army is broken”. Why is it to the left everything is broken? Because they need election year rhetoric that says something needs fixing and only they can fix it.

Supposedly the Army is broken right? Well not according to the Army.

From FoxNews.com:

One year ago, as President Bush decided to send more troops to Iraq, the conventional wisdom in Washington among opponents of the war was that the U.S. Army was on the verge of breaking.

In December 2006 former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell warned, “The active Army is about broken.”

Ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, in a much-cited memo to West Point colleagues, wrote: “My bottom line is that the Army is unraveling, and if we don’t expend significant national energy to reverse that trend, sometime in the next two years we will break the Army just like we did during Vietnam.”

Army Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, the former head of the Army War College, agreed. He wrote in an editorial in the Washington Times on March 30:

“If you haven’t heard the news, I’m afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long. …

That was a year ago. Now look what’s being reported.

Also from FoxNews.com:

But now, one year later, Scales has done an about-face. He says that he was wrong. Despite all the predictions of imminent collapse, the U.S. Army and the combat brigades have proven to be surprisingly resilient.

According to Army statistics obtained exclusively by FOX News, 70 percent of soldiers eligible to re-enlist in 2006 did so — a re-enlistment rate higher than before Sept. 11, 2001. For the past 10 years, the enlisted retention rates of the Army have exceeded 100 percent. As of last Nov. 13, Army re-enlistment was 137 percent of its stated goal.

The key words in the analysis from a year ago is anecdotal evidence. “Today, anecdotal evidence of collapse is all around,” Scales said but 70% of eligible soldiers re-enlisted. That is staggering.

Again from FoxNews.com:

Scales, a FOX News contributor, said he based his assessment last year “on the statistics that showed a high attrition among enlisted soldiers, officers who were leaving the service early, and a decline in the quality of enlistments,” a reference to the rising number of waivers given for “moral defects” such as drug use and lowered educational requirements.

“In fact, what we’ve seen over the last year is that the Army retention rates are pretty high, that re-enlistments, for instance, particularly re-enlistments in Iraq and Afghanistan, remain very high,” Scales said. He noted that re-enlistments were high even among troops who have served multiple tours.

A year ago, some military experts were comparing the Army of 2007 with the army of a generation ago, at the end of the Vietnam War, when it was considered “broken” due to morale problems and an exodus of the “best and the brightest” soldiers from service.

Scales said he didn’t take into account that, unlike Vietnam, this Army is sending soldiers to fight as a unit — not as individuals. He also neglected the “Band of Brothers” phenomenon — the feeling of responsibility to fellow soldiers that prompts members of service to re-enlist.

“The soldiers go back to the theater of war as units,” Scales said. “They are bonded together, they know each other, they don’t have to fight as an army of strangers.

“I was wrong a year ago when I forecast the imminent collapse of the Army. I relied a little bit too much on the data and not enough on the intangibles.”

Like the pollsters, these military analysts have all gotten it wrong. The Army is NOT broken.

Back when I was still serving, there was an effort to move soldiers from Basic Combat Training, to Advanced Individual Training, to their first Permanent Party assignment together as a unit. This is what they called Cohort at the time. It works. So the Army continues to use it.

No longer do troops get scattered to the 4 winds after BCT and AIT. No longer do soldiers lose the trust build during training. Instead, by the time their enlistment is up, they are in positions of authority and are given soldiers (as a unit) out of BCT and AIT to lead. Why it took the military so long to recognize the benefits of Cohort is beyond me but it is leading to higher retention and a stronger Army.

So no Virginia, the Army is not broken as you might have previously heard.

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