Rhymes with RAFT

Detroit Free Press:

Under Bush, the Army is quietly working to add 30,000 soldiers to its active-duty force of half a million. Kerry has proposed adding 40,000 troops. That's less than half what's needed, most experts agree: 100,000 new soldiers. And they are needed quickly....

A study by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory group, has concluded that even with another 30,000 troops, the current force cannot meet "our current and projected global stabilization commitments."

Within the Army, there is deep concern that the manpower demands of Iraq and Afghanistan have left the United States with no strategic reserve of ground forces, short of a total mobilization and deployment of all active-duty, reserve and National Guard troops....

And the Bush administration's strategy of aggressively promoting global democracy to prevent terrorists from building strongholds in failed nations will require significant new ground forces, said Thomas Donnelly, analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

"In the simplest terms, this requires the expansion of the active-duty component of the U.S. Army," Donnelly said....

The top U.S. commander for Iraq, Army Gen. John Abizaid, acknowledged last week that more troops are needed there than the 138,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines now deployed. But he said he hopes the additional manpower could come from allies and from the Iraqi security forces in training.

But efforts to train and equip new Iraqi security forces are lagging far behind schedule, U.S. military officers have said.

Allies? What allies? We're 90% of the troops in Iraq today and our "allies" - the remaining ones who don't yet hate us, or haven't yet pulled out of Iraq - are busy making million dollar deals with the terrorists. And as for the Iraq security forces, you mean the 220,000 of them, I mean 110,000, I mean 90,000, I mean 30,000, I mean 8000 of them we already have fully trained? The same security forces who apparently are now in cahoots with the insurgents? Right, and this is Bush's brilliant plan to avoid the draft.