This line was enough evidence of leftover Clinton Military Opinion of the situation "Troop rotations are in shambles and the all-volunteer force is starting to crumble as we extend combat tours and struggle to get enough boots on the ground."
Typical Washington Post, putting everything in the WORST POSSIBLE PERSPECTIVE.
"Iraq is accelerating the pace of change in the military -- the Army particularly," said retired Army Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, a defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "It is forcing them to look at a lot of things they had pushed off because they were hard to do."
In the Army, the biggest long-term changes may be in how it trains -- if the lessons learned in counterinsurgency stick.
Historically, the National Training Center, the Army's premier combat training facility, has focused on simulating combat between tank-heavy mechanized forces in open, high-desert terrain. But over the past year, it has added urban areas, hired some Iraqi Americans to work in them and interact with troops, and even put caves up in the hills where those playing opposing guerrilla forces can hide weapons and other supplies.
If Army soldiers treat the "locals" well in the urban areas, they learn more about those weapons caches. If they don't, they find out about the weapons the hard way. New training scenarios also require Army commanders to handle everything from combat operations to refugee relief simultaneously.
The Army also has added 8,000 slots to the normally 25,000 infantrymen it trains annually at Fort Benning, Ga. To handle the surge, and to replace drill sergeants deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to train locals there, it has mobilized about 100 reservists to drill the new soldiers.
Even mechanics and clerks now are given training in combat operations, such as defending a convoy or reacting to an ambush, said Bob Seger, acting deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. "This is introductory training for everybody, not just infantry or cavalry scouts," he said. "From initial entry training of soldiers all the way up to general officers, we are designing new courses and doing everything we can to get people ready to go."
Wallace, who is head of the Army's Combined Arms Center, said the changes in Army training are the most significant since the "training revolution" of the early 1980s, when the service came out of its post-Vietnam funk and based its training on realistic mock combat against a professional opposing force with trained observers.
The greatest long-term effect of the difficult environment in Iraq may be on the generation of younger officers and soldiers who have led platoons and companies there over the past year. "The complexity, unpredictability and ambiguity of postwar Iraq is producing a cohort of innovative, confident and adaptable junior officers," said retired Army Lt. Col. Leonard Wong, an expert in military personnel issues.
Wong has just completed for the Army War College a study for which he interviewed more than 50 lieutenants and captains serving in Iraq. His conclusion: "Our troops aren't just competent; Iraq also is teaching them capacity -- they can handle a lot more. With all the incredibly bad-news stories you hear out of Operation Iraqi Freedom, this is a good-news story -- if we leverage it correcetly."
According to his USNI byline, Byron retired in 1993, so if anything he's a Reagan-GHW Bush Administration military man. Don't be so quick to dismiss him. If you're going to throw around accusations like that, you really ought to take thirty seconds and use Google first.
Or perhaps everyone who served on active duty from 1992-2000 was guilty by association and should have been purged?