State of the Military?

Here are a couple of stories regarding the state of the military. They don't paint a particular bright picture of what is going on.

The first one is from a couple of weeks ago in USA Today. It involves the use of stop-loss by the military in this case the army. This means that a soldier can have his enlistment extended to increase army troop levels. From the article:

Soldiers affected by stop loss now serve, on average, an extra 6.6 months, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said. Key leaders at the small-unit level — sergeants through sergeants first class — make up 45% of those soldiers.

We're not talking a small amount of time here. Also the extension of duty often happens in a combat zone. It's not like they are shipped State side. "For the 3rd Infantry Division, which is responsible for a portion of Iraq south of Baghdad, about 1,500 of its 22,500 soldiers is serving under stop loss, according to Maj. Alayne Conway."

The reason for all this is of course the lack of proper planning by the Bush Administration on the way the war in Iraq would be played out.

The second story is also from USA Today. It's about the condition of army barracks that are soldiers are forced to live in. This all got started when a father of one of the solders video the conditions at Fort Bragg. This is where his son got to live after coming home from Afghanistan. You should follow the link in the story and watch the video. It will really make you angry.

Let's see peeling paint, missing ceiling tiles, water fountains that have been removed but the pipes to the fountain leak in sewer gas, a bathroom that backs up and we're talking about inches of yellow water on the floor (guess what that's from). The list goes on. There was a promise of new barracks for the soldiers at Fort Bragg but that never happened. Seems to me the least we can do for these brave men and women is give them a decent place to live before they go off and risks their lives again in Afghanistan or Iraq.

From the article:

The Pentagon says the proportion of recruits who remain in the service is 15% higher at bases with high-quality housing. That sentiment led Peter Singer, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, to wonder why it took one soldier's father to prompt the entire Army to action.

"It's sad that it took a YouTube video to cause the military to face what is a serious issue that affects morale and retention," Singer said. "That's not how the system is supposed to work."

But more and more that seems to be the way the system is working. Someone other then the military brings the issue out in the open. Then people are falling all over themselves to fix the problem. The mess at Walter Reed immediately comes to mind.

It is not entirely all the military's fault. The military is involved in two wars. For the average person Afghanistan and Iraq doesn't have any impact on them at all. Maybe, if there was a little more impact, people would be more concerned about how the soldiers in the military are being treated.