A Chilling Thought
Up to two-thirds of the Army's combat brigades are not ready for wartime missions, largely because they are hampered by equipment shortfalls, Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday, citing unclassified documents.In a letter to President Bush, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said that "nearly every non-deployed combat brigade in the active Army is reporting that they are not ready" for combat. The figures, he said, represent an unacceptable risk to the nation.
At a news conference, other leading Democrats said that those strategic reserve forces are critically short of personnel and equipment.
"They're the units that could be called upon or would be called upon to go to war in North Korea, Iran, or any other country or region," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine who has called for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
The Congress and the American people have been warned time and time again that our military strength is being systematically hollowed out by the administration's cannibalizing the home-front units in order to keep the forces going in Iraq.
Now, dear reader: think the unthinkable and imagine that from the standpoint of the Bush administration things are going just as planned and that its intent is to hollow out our regular armed forces and render them impotent. Let us imagine further: if the right-wingers in Washington, D.C. wanted to toss the Constitution overboard and establish some kind of authoritarian corporate state, the U.S. military as it stands now would be the biggest obstacle to a takeover; our soldiers swear to uphold the Constitution, not the president or the Congress. But ship all the weapons and ordinance overseas and destroy the morale of the domestic troops, and a well-managed paramilitary force formed from private "security" services and militarized police forces could become a Praetorian Guard in fact, if not in name.
New Orleans after Katrina is a chilling example. It was swarming with heavily-armed paramilitaries hired by by the rich and powerful, ostensibly to keep order, but in fact terrorizing the people that stayed, even in neighborhoods that had not been flooded. The National Guard is supposed to keep order in the event of natural disasters, but Louisiana's National Guard had been stripped by the Bush administration of the personnel and equipment it needed to do the job. So instead, New Orleans got soldiers of fortune with no loyalty to anyone but their paymasters. There are names for this method of keeping order, and none of them are good.
Lebanon was nearly destroyed by private armies within memory.
So be concerned, very concerned, but don't be afraid. They want you to be afraid so that you trade your freedom for a little security. It's the eternal con game; fools and cowards are the marks, as usual.