#10 The problem of shortages of personnel, whether in absolute numbers or within MOSs, has came up repeatedly in my readings about US military disasters in Iraq. The fiasco at Abu Ghraib was due in part to a lack of enough MPs and senior soldiers to keep an eye on things, the horrible rape of an Iraqi 14 year old girl and the brutal murder of her whole family was lead by a bastard who got into the Army despite having a criminal record because the Army was short of enlistments (There is a book out reviewing the situation of the unit this bastard and his accomplices belonged to, it reports the unit had too few troops for the mission it was assigned, so they were over worked and there were leadership issues. This lead to low morale and discipline problems.), and now it comes out that Manning went to Iraq despite being unstable because there was a shortage of intelligence analysts.
So many of our problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan arose because Rumsfeld and company, plus many generals in the Pentagon and CENTCOM believed the US could not only conguer these nations but also reform their societies with a relatively small number of troops on the ground. They convinced Pres. Bush, and themselves, of this, and it is a seductive argument, its big selling point was that fewer troops on the ground was supposed to mean fewer dead soldiers. What it nearly meant was mission failure.
On a personal note, my two tours in Iraq, Fall 2003 to Fall 2004, and all of 2005 were examples of the shortage of people in general and Intel Analysts in particular. I changed MOSs when I went from the Regular Army to the Texas Army National Guard, from 11M to (then)96B. My first trip to Iraq was because the Division Rear of the 82nd Airborne did not have enough S-2 (Intelligence) folks. The 82nd had control of the Al Anbar area at the time. When I went back in 2005 (I volunteered) with another Texas Guard unit the Battalion I was assigned to had the FOB security mission as well as some VIP escort duty. The S-2 section at the FOB was one Intel trained LT , one intel analyst qualified soon to be E-5 sergeant (me), one enlisted trained on ground radar, and a cook. The cook was put in the S-2 section because she was a super fast typist. Fortunately both of the other enlisted had good heads on their shoulders so we did okay. We did 24/7 operations in the BN TOC with 2 shifts of 12 hours, two people on day shift and one on night shift. Every few months we rotated people between day and night shifts. Therefore, at times, one of these enlisted, the female cook for example, was virtually unsupervised for months on end while having complete access to the Secret Internet Network – just like Manning. Again, fortunately, both of those soldiers were not traitors.
Rifle308 |
WASHINGTON — Investigators have concluded that Army commanders ignored advice not to send to Iraq an Army private who's now accused of downloading hundreds of thousands of sensitive reports and diplomatic cables that ended up on the WikiLeaks website in the largest single security breach in American history, McClatchy has learned.