One Army or Two?

U.S. Army Sgt. William Penley looks over the Alaskan terrain from a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during Northern Edge over Fort Wainwright, Alaska, June 17, 2009. Penley is a crew chief assigned to Company B on Fort Wainwright. Northern Edge is a large-scale exercise hosted in Alaska to improve command, control and communications among the armed services. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Christopher Boitz

From DoD Buzz:

In spring 2005, while embedded with an infantry battalion in southwest Baghdad, I was hanging out late one night in the battalion command post bs’ing with the battle captains when radio traffic suddenly spiked with reports of a massive attack on the Abu Ghraib prison compound, located just west of Baghdad. Hundreds of insurgents attacked the compound with suicide car bombers, accurate mortar, small arms and RPG fire, and simultaneously tried to seal off the battlespace; the first American reinforcements that rushed to the scene ran into clusters of roadside bombs and ambushes.

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My Comment: The key phrase in this story is in the last paragraph:

“In a perfect world, our military forces would be robustly sized and we would build distinctive forces for discrete missions along the conflict spectrum… But we do not live in a perfect world, and we need to prepare and shape our forces with a greater degree of uncertainty and less resources.”

In short .... our military must function as best as it can with what it has.