“There will be no timeout from the Global War on Terror.” An editorial from the Washington Times:
Two of the five new Army brigades that will be involved in the Baghdad surge were so quickly deployed to Iraq that they did not engage in crucial training at Fort Irwin, Calif. “These soldiers, aren’t getting the benefit of participating in war games on the wide Mojave Desert, where gun-jamming sand and faux insurgents closely resemble conditions in Iraq,” Time magazine reported in a weekend cover story, “Why Our Army Is At the Breaking Point.” In an April 7 article, “For the Army: Code Yellow,” the National Journal reported: “The high demand for fresh troops has led the Army to reduce basic training from 14 weeks to nine, and drill instructors have lessened the physical demands so that injuries won’t disqualify valuable recruits.”
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Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who served in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, told the National Journal: “[T]here is a sense of denial of the problem in the Pentagon that I find utterly beyond belief. 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. Only this time we won’t have 10 years to fix it again. There will be no timeout from the Global War on Terror.”