Have American forces been strengthened or broken by the War on Terror campaigns?

The Small Wars Journal summarizes a Center for a New American Security and Foreign Policy survey of more than active service and retired 3,000 officers with the rank of major and above across the services, 2/3 of whom had combat experience. According to the survey's website "The nonscientific survey was administered online from December 7, 2007, to January 15, 2008."

Interestingly the biggest identified constraint in prosecuting the War on Terror isn't the size of the Armed Forces, though that is certainly one of the respondent's top priorities. It's getting good intelligence, a desire supported by the sizeable number of respondents who thought it was a good idea to "increase the number of troops with foreign language skills."

Perhaps the most significant piece of long-term strategic data was where the respondents thought the increase in strength was going to come from. From the response they had all but counted out expecting reinforcements from the national elites.

So Obama never actually spoke with the captain, which means he can reasonably claim the tale was garbled in transmission. It is possible that an American unit was ill-equipped for combat, these things happen in the fog of war, and they have happened with troubling frequency in this war as in every other. Which is not to diminish any failure on the part of the administration or the military leadership in providing U.S. forces with the equipment they need. But is this particular story true?

Our troops never rotate into theater before running through a series of inspections which ensure that they're properly equipped, and we've never heard a report of soldiers having to scrounge for ammo. If we did, we'd join the Senator in raising hell. In Obama's telling the blame lies with President Bush, but the story is perfectly vague and based on nothing but hearsay. We expect there will be a lot of folks that want to get to the bottom of this, whether the facts supports Obama's version or not.

The current findings show that the demo graphic characteristics of volunteers have contin ued to show signs of higher, not lower, quality. Quality is a difficult concept to apply to soldiers, or to human beings in any context, and it should be understood here in context. Regardless of the standards used to screen applicants, the average quality of the people accepted into any organization can be assessed only by using measurable criteria, which surely fail to account for intangible characteristics. In the military, it is especially questionable to claim that measurable characteristics accurately reflect what really matters: cour­age, honor, integrity, loyalty, and leadership.