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March 23, 2005

First support the citizen-soldiers we've got!
Posted by Derek Chollet

Suzanne, I'm all for creating more avenues for public service, but I don't agree with the premise that the mission you mention -- stability operations -- is one that the military has proven "ill suited" to do or hasn't done well.  Ask the military men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan what they think.  I bet they'd say that they know how to do this kind of mission, that they have done it well, and that they can do it best, thank you very much.  They are overburdened, to be sure, but this is because of failures made by elected officials and civilian policymakers.  I think they're right.  Moreover, many of the skill sets that we want to attract (engineers, cops, health care specialists, educators, etc) we already have -- in the National Guard and Reserves, over 80,000 from the Army alone are in Iraq today.  Some argue that because of the skills they have developed in civilian life, the Guard and Reserve soldiers are better suited for many aspects of stability ops than their active duty counterparts.

Yet the question is how, given the stress on the force, we continue to recruit and retain these citizen-soldiers.  Just this week the Army Guard raised its enlistment age eligibility to 40 (from 34).   It is playing with different incentives to keep soldiers in the force.  This is one of the biggest issues we will confront in the coming years.  The modern military is being reshaped as we speak, and if progressives want to have any relevance to our future national security, they have to be a part of it.  Before we start to build new structures, let's fix the ones we've got.

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