I am generally not one to post a great deal of personal information on my blog. Generally that is because my life is rather normal and usually pretty mundane. But yesterday I had a conversation with my mother, obstensibly about how my father's luekemia treatment will progress (he is not in any particular danger right now--although he is worried that he will lose his beard in the chemotherapy treatment--he is unusually proud of his beard--but that is a different story). Toward the end of the conversation, I asked about my brother, a sergeant in the Army getting ready to deploy for his third tour in Iraq. Since my brother has been somewhat bad about returning my phone calls (for other reasons), I was hoping my mother had some news.
My brother should be deploying sometime in the next 2-4 weeks, and while he should be safe since he is a helicopter mechanic and not, as he called it, a "door-kicker," as regular Army his deployment will be at least 15 months, possibly 18 months and his orders actually read "until mission is complete." My mother made the comment that his mission will likely be deemed over around January of 2009.
She maybe right, but I noted that probably somehwere around 2011, if my brother is still in teh Army, he might be headed back to the middle east.
But aside from my snide remarks about the prospects of having to return to Iraq, my brother's deployment left me with a thought, that there is a dichotomy between how we as a nation fought wars in our past and how we fight them now.
I pride myself on being a student of World War II, particularly the war in the Pacific. For years now, the Right has tried to insist that the war on terror is akin to World War II, a battle for the survival of of the American way of life and the liberal democracy. While I believe that proposition to be largely true, there are a few significant differences between the moral imperatives of the war on terror and WWII. But what is more important on a practical level is the manner in which we are fighting this war in Iraq. The manner in which we are handling our material and manpower has more in common with Vietnam than with WWII, not a particularly flattering comparison.
The Vietnam war was different from the outset, of course, both in terms of how it started and how the U.S. got involved. But the military differences between Vietnam and World War II and Korea are striking. First, in Vietnam, soldiers were posted in country for one year and then rotated back home. In World War II, you were sent to war and stayed there until either the mission was complete or the soldiers were wounded beyond service. Sure, units "rotated off the line" but they generally did not come home.
For the past five years, the War in Iraq and in Afghanistan has been fought on the one year rotation. In an effort to please certain segments of our society, in part because the large reliance on reserve and National Guard units, soldiers are deployed for a year and then come home. The problem with such a concept is two fold. First, soldiers become pre-occupied with their time. This is not to say that the soldiers have lost focus on their mission, for I don't think that the case, but rather they naturally and without blame look at the calendar all the time.
Second, when you are looking to pacify a region and get the locals to help you, having new faces and new liasions every year leads to mistrust and that leads to more danger for our troops. In an insurgent environment, the United States needs to get the Iraqi population to not only appreciate us, but to trust us, to be consistent in our appearance, in our mission and in our posture toward the civilian population. In this way, we gain their trust and we break down the connection between the civilian population and the insurgents. The civilians are willing to point us in the direction of insurgents because they have come to trust the U.S. military in the presence. Having new faces arrive every year or so does not engender the same kind of trust.
This is not to say that I want my brother to be deployed in Iraq for 18 months or two years. I would much rather have him home taking care of his kids. But at the same time, he and I are both aware of the need to take care of business in Iraq and that means completing our mission. And completing the mission in Iraq is very similar to the mission in World War II, that is ending the threat to Iraq's fledgling Democracy and the threat to America. That may take two years or more and the United States has to be prepared for the longer struggle and not imposing artificial deadlines on withdrawal or artificial deadlines on service time.
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