Oh, those pesky reality-based facts. Despite the Republicans’ best efforts to hide the damage Bush’s war policies have done our military, sometimes the truth still manages to sneak its head above the the rising tide of GOP lies, like the one about how well they support the troops. Especially when The Army’s top General decides to tell it:
WASHINGTON // The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders in August after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, said current and former Pentagon officials. […]
The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 soldiers have completed at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have been stepping up their complaints about the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.
Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld’s office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2 billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years. […]
Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about the need to increase funding in war spending bills to pay for the hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles that need to be repaired after intense use in Iraq.
He has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next year for repairs, or nearly double this year’s appropriation – and more than four times what it cost two years ago. According to an Army budget document obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Army officials are also planning for repair requests of $13 billion in 2008 and $13.5 billion in 2009.
But in recent weeks, Schoomaker has become more emphatic in public on overall budget shortfalls, saying that current funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy drawn out in the Pentagon’s mission planning documents.
“There’s no sense in us submitting a budget that we can’t execute, a broken budget,” Schoomaker said at a recent address in Washington.
I guess General Schoomaker didn’t get the memo. The one which made it clear that as far as his Commander-in-Chief is concerned his troops are just the tail end of a comma in history. And we all know how worthless commas are. Why waste good money helping them stay alive in Iraq, when those funds could be put to better use by Paris Hilton and friends?
