Subject: More Guardsmen to go to war: Three of my battalion’s DIs left the service in the middle of my basic training when their enlistment ended. They all had been to Vietnam twice and weren’t willing to go back again. Strained, Army Looks to Guard For More Relief; By THOM SHANKER and MICHAEL R. GORDON; Strains on the Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so severe that Army officials say they may be forced to make greater use of the National Guard to provide enough troops for overseas deployments. While no decision has been made to mobilize more Guard forces, and may not need to be before midterm elections, the prospect presents the Bush administration with a politically vexing problem: how, without expanding the Army, to balance the pressing need for troops in the field against promises to limit overseas deployments for the Guard. The National Guard has a goal of allowing five years at home between foreign deployments so as not to disrupt the family life and careers of its citizen soldiers. But instead it has been sending units every three to four years, according to Guard officials. An internal Army document that was provided to The New York Times notes that the demand for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has greatly exceeded past projections that predicted earlier troop reductions… The Army had to offer generous new enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 to attract recruits into such dangerous jobs as operating convoys in Iraq. It was able to meet its active-duty enlistment goals this year with the addition of 1,000 new recruiters.“The continuing frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the U.S. Army so thin that there are few brigades ready to respond to crises elsewhere,” said Lynn Davis, a senior analyst in the Arroyo Center, a division of the RAND C orporation that does research for the Army. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the head of the Army’s Forces Command, which oversees training and mobilization for all Army forces in the continental United States, suggested that the service needed to make greater use of the National Guard if the United States was to pursue what the Bush administration has described as a “long war” against Islamic terrorists. “If we are going to prosecute this long war, we need relatively unencumbered access to the citizen soldier formations,” General McNeill said.

RESPONSE: They have repeatedly told us that things were getting better and they would be bringing troops home by the end of the year as the Iraqi soldiers become better trained. Well, we have been training them for four years now and not one American soldier (gross numbers) have come home. The most recent classified appraisal by all the intelligence agencies states that are actions in Iraq have created and increased the jihadism throughout the world aimed at America. The report states unequivocally that we are less safe today than we were on 9/11.