Military drained, Democrats warn
By Drew Brown
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
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WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become such a drain on the Army and the Marines that it has seriously damaged the U.S. military's ability to respond if other crises arise, two Democratic congressmen said yesterday.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Reps. John Murtha, D-Pa., and Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i, warned that because funding for the military has been siphoned off to pay for the war, the Army and Marines are running dangerously short of the necessary troops, equipment and training to stay combat-ready.
"This makes deployments impossible unless we are prepared to put our troops at risk," said Abercrombie, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "It also makes conducting homeland security or disaster response missions more difficult, if not unacceptable, in terms of public confidence."
They said combat readiness for the Army especially had dropped to levels not seen since the end of the Vietnam War and would continue to deteriorate for as long as U.S. forces remained in Iraq. Because most of the active-duty U.S. ground forces are committed to the war, they said, the U.S. military lacks a strategic reserve to respond to other crises.
"We don't have a combat unit that is really trained to the point where it can be deployed," said Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. "We don't have a strategic reserve unless you say the Navy and Air Force are strategic reserves."
Abercrombie listed several concerns:
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, responding to the assertions, pointed to an Aug. 2 statement by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"The truth is, as anyone in the Army leadership will tell you, is that the Army today is vastly better than it was two, four, six or eight years ago," Rumsfeld said. "It has much more equipment, much better equipment, and it's better trained and more experienced, and it is a better Army."
But last month Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, refused to submit a budget after being told that he'd have to come up with a spending plan of $114 billion for fiscal 2008, a $2 billion cut from 2007.
Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, took issue with the assertions about Marine Corps readiness. "Every unit that is going to Iraq is combat-ready," she said. "The Marine Corps is not taking any shortcuts."
