Remember the scene in Enemy At The Gates when the new soldiers who had survived a three day train ride in cattle cars and the strafing of the shuttle boats on the Volga were being pressed into service to immediately attack a fortified German position in the meat grinder that was Stalingrad? Every other man was handed a rifle and told "When one man falls, pick up his rifle and move forward."
No briefing, no onsite training, hmmmm, sounds familiar...
UPDATE 4:55 PM CST 5 APR 07:
Time's cover story this week has more:
Even Colin Powell—a retired Army general, onetime Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Bush's first Secretary of State—acknowledges that after spending nearly six years fighting a small war in Afghanistan and four years waging a medium-size war in Iraq, the service whose uniform he wore for 35 years is on the ropes. "The active Army," Powell said in December, "is about broken."
Army equipment is wearing out even faster than Army troops. Gear and weapons are usually left in the war zone to be used by newly arriving troops. That grinds the equipment into scrap up to 10 times as fast as in peacetime. The lack of guns and armor back home has a boomerang effect: many of the troops training in the U.S. are not familiar with what they'll have to depend on once they arrive in Iraq.
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