Army Chief: Service A-OK, Drug Free

The Army is doing just fine. How do we know? Well, soldiers aren't getting high, all the time. They're not calling eachother the N-word. And they're not telling their officers to go to hell. That's what Army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker is saying, in response to Time's cover story on "America's Broken-Down Army."

Never mind that Schoomaker himself recently told Congress, "I am not satisfied with the readiness of our non-deployed forces... We are in a dangerous period."
Never mind that "virtually all of the U.S.-based Army combat brigades are rated as unready to deploy." Never mind that "roughly one-half of all Army units (deployed and non-deployed, active and reserves) received the lowest readiness rating any fully formed unit can receive." Never mind all those reservists and guardsmen being called back, again to again, to active duty. Never mind all those second-tier recruits.

Nope, Schoomaker is of "those in charge deny[ing] there's a crisis," Time says.

Schoomaker, the Army's top general, served in the Vietnam-era Army. "I know what an Army that's near broken smells like, what it looks like, how it acts," he said in
January. "Drug problems, race problems, insubordination—all kinds of things going on. We're nowhere near anything like that."

Now, you can agree or disagree that the Army is in trouble, institutionally. But drug and race problems? What is Schoomaker smoking? Are those really the yardsticks we want to use to measure the service's strength? That seems way, way off. Let's hope Schoomaker was misquoted or something.

UPDATE: In From the Cold argues that the military's current leadership can't really be faulted for the problems the Army faces.

As we've noted many times in the past, the seeds of the
Army's current problems were sown in the decade before the invasion of Iraq, and there's plenty of blame to go around...

The
U.S. Army once had a standing force structure of 16 combat divisions. Two were eliminated under the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and Bill
Clinton got rid of four more. The number of troop billets eliminated? About
160,000--enough 18 additional combat brigades, plus the required support formations.

Put another way: if someone in DoD had enough sense to keep thouse units, we'd have a standing Army of roughly 650,000--getting close to that optimum "700,000 level" cited by former Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan in an interview with Time**...**

Don Rumsfeld was right about one thing: you go to war with the Army you've got, and our leaders of 10 and 15
years ago committed us to smaller ground forces that were less-than-prepared for counter-insurgency operations.