> smells like desperation
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/middleeast/20CND-TURKEY.html
Indeed, I think this makes it official: we are desperate for troops.
One thing people haven't been factoring in yet is that, on top of the rotation problems, there will soon be recruitment problems. Young men in the "professional" army will quit when their tour of duty ceases, and nobody, not even poor men, will want to join when they know it means being sent to Iraq.
So if this force level is necessary in a couple of years, we'll be sunk. And until then, we'll be strapped, because we need a bigger force level there, which we can't spare, and we're short of men for anything else.
Especially now that it is beginning to dawn on people that victory must always be followed by occupation. And that the more lightening the blitzkrieg victory, the larger the required subsequent occupation (because there's no one to negotiate with). Where our assumption up until now was that the quicker the victory the smaller the requirements of occupation.
On the surface, this makes nonsense of Rumsfeld's entire doctrine of "military revolution."
Michael