Surprise, surprise.

The Army Reserve, whose part-time soldiers serve in combat and support roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, is so hampered by misguided Army policies and practices that it is "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force," the Reserve's most senior general says.

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, wrote in an internal memorandum to the Army's top uniformed officer that the Reserve has reached the point of being unable to fulfill its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and to regenerate its forces for future missions.

And just like those armored Humvees, somebody's working on it, so we should all rest easy.

Whether you were for or against the invasion of Iraq, surely we can agree that this Administration has demonstrated a continued betrayal of the basic social contract between civilian and military. Doesn't really matter whether it's due to unending wishful thinking, cavalier disregard for "fungible" units, attachment to high-tech transformation models, unwillingness to confront unpalatable political truths in a four-year re-election campaign, or an entrenched bureaucracy more concerned about where their next budget's coming from.

We can and must do better than this. First and foremost, the denial game has to stop at the top. These problems have been visible to anyone with one eye for over a year, but have been dismissed and brushed aside as partisan sniping. The media have totally failed to push what has been plain to see. The military themselves know all this, but they have no way to hold the civilians to account.

The next thing is for some new priorities to be set, and Congress had better be part of that agenda-setting process. The Reserve and Guard are as much Congress' children as anything.

And then maybe some new managers to tackle those priorities?

Ok, the election is done with, I'm already tired of debating how the Democrats should be reaching out to disaffected red staters — though for what it's worth, I think elrod in the Tacitus diaries has a pretty good premise for that, together with Mark Schmitt (see his entry after that too). Best of luck to the party as it rights itself and all that but any hopes that I might personally make some contribution to bridging the red state-blue state divide is pretty well wiped out by the fact that I'm still an elitist godless secular-humanist liberal even when I'm back home in Indiana, so I don't help much with the emerging consensus that we need to do some work on our collective brand image. But that's all beside the point! The point is I want to blog about something else right now, that ended up getting shelved until after the election like so much else.

I took Praktike's recommendation from a week or so ago and watched Frontline's piece on Rumsfeld's War. It really was a fascinating program to watch, and a complex one too since a lot of different threads seem to be at work: the title is somewhat deceptive because there are actually quite a few conflicts surrounding the Secretary of Defense presented within the program, any single one of which could probably merit a whole program of its own.   more »