... Connecting the Dots...

A couple of seemingly disparate thoughts came to me today and I wondered why they all seemed to come at the same time.

Let me lay them out for you and see if we come to the same conclusions.

1. Rumsfeld wants a smaller, leaner "more lethal" military
2. General Shinseki is publicly chastised for saying that we will need fore than 400,000 soldiers for an Iraq invasion
3. Rumsfeld says you go to war with the army you have (oops. didn't mention that we were the ones who were determining the time and place of the war.)
4. Troubles with military and veterans medical care

That's it! Classic Republican small government thinking!

A smaller, supposedly more lethal force by definition results in a smaller military which means smaller expenditures for military and veterans' medical care! (Starve the Beast! Cut the budget and the government will shrink! Damned entitlements!) So let's go to war with the army we have and use a small force because the overall costs will be smaller!

The problem with this Republican thinking is that it displays a serious misunderstanding of what war is all about. At its brutal heart war was, is and always will be about two guys with rocks in their hands trying to brain each other. The only things that have changed are the number of guys involved and that the rocks work from a lot further away. An elegant, electronic lethal force will have to fix its elegant electronic lethal weapons when they break down, and when those weapons break down, it means all the fancy electronics become nothing more than fancy rocks or clubs. It always boils down to the individual soldier with his simple weapon. Irrespective of your feelings about the war itself, in Iraq, we didn't have enough of those guys to do the job properly. It was the cost-cutter's war, the Republicans way of war.

You can't ever have too many boots on the ground