Thursday, December 16, 2004

Can Someone Crunch These Numbers?

Okay, I am still confused about our military organization and numbers. The Old York Times had another hit piece today saying the national guard is 30% below it's expected recruitment. This is to be expected because the national guards appeal is for people who do not want to be deployed for more than 12 months at a time (the regular army expects at least 4 years, one being a hardship tour to South Korea if you do not see active duty).

In the article, they say that the reserves and National Guard make up 40% of the troops in Iraq. So out of 150,000 troops only 90,000 are regular army.

Our current full-time military personnel force is 1.2 million. Now if you divide that by four for the four services (this is being very generous to the Air Force, Navy and Marines) you have 300,000 full time Army personnel. 90,000 are in Iraq and 10,000 in Afghanistan.

Where are the other 200,000? And why is everyone claiming we are stretched too thin??

Remember, I am only talking about ARMY! And if you look closer, the standing National Guard is 350,000 as stated here. So that means that only 60,000 are in Iraq (less than one fifth)--so we have 290,000 National Guard folks in our force structure. In any war situation we would also have the Air Force and Navy and such. These numbers are just not adding up for me; I do not understand the claim that if we were attacked we would be up a creek without a paddle because "all our forces are in Iraq." Can someone who knows shed some light on this?

From my outlook, we have 200,000 full time army personnel and 290,000 national guard personnel NOT IN IRAQ. I said before that I don't believe we only have 150,000 people in Iraq...and so it could be the case that we have many more soldiers in Iraq that the military is not telling us.

But if I am wrong, then where are we getting this, "the army is stretched TOO THIN!" argument?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

mmmmmmm draft... but only for children of the democrats

Aaron Matthew Arnwine - LifelikePundits.com said...

Paul,

What are you smokin' dude? That was the most incoherent statement you've ever made. How did I demonstrate the point that all our forces are stretched to thin?

I've show that 60k people in iraq are reserve/national guard out of 350,000 total.

And that the army in iraq is 90,000 out of 300,000 total.

What the fuck is you're point?

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