We're not fighting this short war because we are tied up with the long war.
We're not fighting over there or giving Lebanon assistance because of the State department and because Bush is a multilateral compassionate conservative that is more beholden to form of legality than the spirit of legality.
If we support the Druze, can we save Lebanon, or will saving Lebanon require another long war?
The Druze may not get the support of 3 Divisions, but we can sure as hell provide them the logistics to hold back the tide.
Nearly 150 years ago Sir Richard Francis Burton said of the Druze that they were the only men in Lebanon worthy of the name. That's apparently still the case.
Another question is why President Bush hasn't called for increasing the size of our military given the increased commitments since 9/11? For the last seven years I've argued against those who claimed that President Bush has exploited 9/11 for domestic political purposes. That the size of the military wasn't immediately increased is the one bit of evidence I don't have a ready answer for.
While our military does still have the ability to deploy forces to yet another area, the years-long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have probably made the President a bit more wary about committing forces of an unknown size for an unknown duration in yet another perennial world troublespot where things are unlikely to be clear-cut. I consider this good, in many ways, even if I'd quite like to help the Druze.
And Dave, the end-strength of the military may not have been increased (though the Marine Corps has been authorized to expand roughly 20,000 personnel over the next several years), but the Army did change the way it organized itself, from a Division-centric force to a Brigade-centric force, and part of that change involved increasing the number of brigades without, I believe, increasing the end-strength of the Army, by outsourcing some previously uniformed jobs to civilians, and using the "savings" to staff the new units.
Part of the problem with simply upgrading the end-strength of the armed services is finding enough recruits. The Army struggled to make numbers necessary to retain its current force numbers for a some of the last five years; in that situation it would be practically impossible to have increased the overall force numbers. The Marines use different recruitment techniques, and their different culture attracts a different sort of individual, which might be why they never had as bad a recruitment shortfall as the Army, and are currently signing dramatically _more_ recruits than they required (something like 142% of quotas for April '0
.
Granted, the situation was much different in the last quarter of '01, and it might have been possible to increase the size of the armed forces then, but by the time it was obvious that we needed an enlarged military, it was already nearing over-extension, and the climate on the home front had reverted nearly to that of August '01.
This seems much like another case of hindsight being 20/20 to me.
Commenting by HaloScan
