My wife received this from a soldier in Iraq, supposedly:

Hey everybody,
Please help me get home someday. This has been a foregone conclusion in my eyes for a while now, but now the pace is accelerating. I will be back here within two years of leaving, and even if my contract was over I couldn't leave the Army. (Another soldier) was supposed to get out in January. Now he's leaving next May, unless they don't let him.) I have no problem with deploying, I signed the paper. I just don't want to spend every second or third year here. General Eric Shinseki told the White House that we would need several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq for years, and they so didn't want to hear that that Rumsfeld snubbed him by skipping his retirement ceremony. Shinseki was right. Bush is a moron, please vote against him.
Thank you

She, then, asked these questions:
1) Will voting Bush out of office really bring you home faster or longer?
2) -- or change the (supposed?) need of stoploss?
3) Is Bush a moron? or in my naive mind thinking he's trying to do the best he can with what's going on AND protecting our interests?
4) -- but in the SAME #3 willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of soldiers and dollars on a ....

Let's address question 1 & 3 first. Which is, basically, is Bush more of a moron (worse choice) than the alternative that we have in front of us? Or which one will bring the troops home quicker? And is that a good thing

Well, first thing, let's consider the third-party candidates as a group. Frankly, none of them have a real clue as to what to do with national security issues, especially given the situation they would walk into if, by some miracle, one of them got elected.

Now let's look at Bush, in contrast/comparison to Kerry:
You have two white, Yale educated males. One served in combat, the other didn't. The one that served might or might not have thrown his or someone else's medals away in a gesture of protest. The other might or might not have shown up to fulfill his duty in place of deploying. One says that if he had won an election that he didn't run in, knowing things that it was impossible for him to know at the time, that he would have done things different than his opponent. The other stands by, and takes credit and blame for what he decided to do. After consulting the best advisors they can muster on what to do from here on the War in Iraq and the War on Terror, they come up with the same answers

Questions can be asked: Did Bush fulfill his National Guard obligation or, like those who went to Canada, did he, in effect, desert? Did Kerry throw away his medals? Was the way he chose to protest a betrayal as bad, if not worse, than anything Jane Fonda did? Is any of the above, that all happened when they were much younger, and before I even started school, still relevant? Would Kerry really have done anything different than Bush if he had run and won the Presidency in 2000? If he had done something different, would the end result be any better than what we have now?

I don't have answers to those questions. I do know this: given what they have said, and shown, the only thing that will be different between the two will be the accent with which they deliver what will be tough news on the War on Terror on national TV. Neither one has different answers, just different accents. So, the real question is: What sounds more Presidential to you, a Boston or a Texas accent?

Next!

Let's get a feeling for the scope of what we are talking about here, in terms of military personnel. I am going to throw out some numbers and places for reference. When I cite the population of a town, it is going to be according to the last census numbers I saw. That means the population of that city, men, women and children, not just registered voters or whatever.

The Active Army is approximately 500,000 people, or roughly the size of El Paso, TX. Right now, in Iraq, there are approximately 135,000 servicemen and women. That would be the equivalent of an Abilene, TX, or Lawton OK, plus 10 Eldon, MO's, or, approximately, 1/4^th of El Paso. This is the second set to be here. Both sets together is about 1 Abilene, 1 Lawton, and a Jefferson City, MO, total. And we are going to do this again, once the current set leaves. This does not count the support personnel in Kuwait, or the Air Force personnel at the base in Turkey. To bring the personal in perspective, I am the assistant manager of the facility that houses the gym, theater, club, library, primary source for phone and internet, as well as other activities for a base that has a population slightly larger than Eldon, MO.

The Army has 10 active divisions. Each is about 14,000-17,000 strong, or about a Savannah, TN, a piece. Second Infantry Division, in Korea, as a group, is not leaving there. Part of it might come here, but all of it won't. So, that leaves 9 divisions to pull from. Don't forget that the missions in Kosovo, and Afghanistan aren't going away. Those missions tie up the better part of a division, each, at a time. We have a small contingent, still, on a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai. Then, the Army has a large number of personnel tied up in training, and other duties that are necessary to sustain the forces we have in the field.

Which leads to situations like the Major that I inprocessed Germany with. He left his unit in Iraq, and was put on leave to transfer to Germany. He went back to the States, where he outprocessed his old unit, on his leave, something that is normally done before the leave starts. He arrived in Germany, gets his family settled, cuts inprocessing Germany short, because the unit he is going to ships out to Iraq before his inprocessing would finish.

Or the SGT I see on a regular basis here. He is a sniper. Since we went into Afghanistan, he has been in Afghanistan, and he is on his second tour in Iraq.

Or the 3^rd Infantry Division soldiers that came home from Iraq barely in time for Christmas, and received word in January that they would be going back before the end of this year.

These kinds of stories are common. But, the experts say we don't need a larger Army ...Â… as they issue orders that prevent soldiers from getting out to fulfill the need for bodies for deployment. The Army met it's retention goals for last year ... after adjusting the goal down Â… twice to about half of what it was. The main reason cited for soldiers getting out was not: disparity of pay with the civilian world, lack of benefits, or whatever. It was high operations tempo. In plain English, too many back to back deployments without time to recover between. Most of that is explained as "family reasons". This is not the 'join the Army or go to Jail'Â… or the draft Army. The Army has been all-volunteer since 1976. Over 70% of the active (not Reserve or National Guard) force is married, many with children. The population of Warner Barracks, the post in Germany that I am from, counting deployed soldiers, is over 50% children below school age. But, the experts say we don't need a larger Army.

Since October 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, we have deployed more soldiers to more places in harm's way than were deployed during the entire 41 years of the Cold War. Yet, during that same time the Army alone, has dropped strength numbers from almost 800,000 to less than 500,000. In the time that I have been in the Army, the following divisions have been inactivated: 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, and 24^th Infantry Divisions, 2^nd and 3^rd Armored Divisions (the Second has been inactivated twice since I have been in, actually. I guess it didn't take the first time.). It was a "peace dividend". The "experts" said we didn't need that big of an Army, because with the Cold War over, we wouldn't need it as much, supposedly. And still, the experts say we don't need a larger Army.

As part of the "peace dividend" at the end of the Viet Nam war, many active duty Army career fields that are necessary in times of war, but not peacetime, were moved almost entirely into the Reserves and National Guard. Meaning that now, and during Desert Storm, the levels of Reserve component soldiers called up to duty and kept on duty have been higher than at any time since the end of WWII. But, the experts say we don"t need a larger Army.

A number of those jobs are not being covered by active or reserve forces, but by civilian contractors. I am sure you have read about Kellog, Brown, and Root, and some of the scandals surrounding them. Do I need to get into how much better it is to have a civilian making $60,000+ a year of your tax dollars doing a job than a private that makes less than $15,000 can do just as well? Do I need to get into how the money they have been accused of ripping off is your tax money that is meant to benefit soldiers? Or, how sometimes they refuse to drive places with those frivolous supplies for soldiers like food, water, and mail, because, imagine this, driving through a combat zone might be dangerous. Never mind, that because they are contractors, they aren't allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves. They can have military vehicles, with weapons, interspersed in the convoy, but the civilians driving the trucks can’t have them. Where if the entire convoy was military ...transport vehicles, and vehicles for security, everyone would have a weapon. But, the military doesn't have enough people in those jobs, or vehicles for them to drive if we had the people. (Cargo trucks/planes/helicopters/ships aren't near as cool to okay the funding for as tanks, attack helicopters, nuclear submarines, or fighter planes. Not that we would have the people to drive them, if we had them.) But, the experts say we don't need a larger Army.

The fact that the upper echelons of military structure (uniformed and civilian) and Congress barely discussed activating the laws that prohibit soldiers from moving from one unit to another, or getting out of the Army almost as soon as they are notified of deployment, they just did it, should tell you something. But, these same experts say we don't need a larger Army.

Yes, they are right in that it would take some time to train and equip a larger force. But as long as the nation keeps tasking the military with the types of missions that they have given us, the need for more troops is not going to go away soon. Pulling out of Iraq anytime in the near term (less than 12 months) is just going to insure that whatever government we set up collapses, and extreme strife, if not civil war breaks out. If that happens, the world community will blame us ... Even though these same people say we ought to pull out now, and we will be right back, only longer, and we will have to, basically, re-invade, re-occupy and do it all over again. Just delaying the inevitable result. Meaning we need that larger force for even longer than if we did the job right the first time.

My questions are: who are these experts, and what color is the sky in their world? When are they going to get a clue? AND When they do, are they going to keep the military all-volunteer, or are they going to wait until the point that they have backed themselves into the corner of having to reinitiate the draft?

Keep in mind that registration for Selective Service has been the law since I was in high school. So, getting a draft up and running again won't take that much. ....But the experts say we don't need a draft.

They can't be wrong. They are the experts. Right?