A friend of mine posted a comment in one of my previous posts (We Have Failed Our Veterans) with a link to an interesting article on the troop strength and composition of our Army. It breaks down the percentages of combat troops versus support troops and the split between the active duty force and the reserves.

Can we sustain our force committments around the world with an all-volunteer military or is a draft inevitable? About a decade ago Congress moved certain logistical components from the active duty side of the Army to the Reserve side. The possible reasoning behind it was that if the President was to take the country to war he wouldn’t be able to do it without those logistics units and so he would have to activate the Reserves. Activating the reserve components also means messing with the civilian and corporate sectors by pulling out all of the weekend-warriors. When you do that you automatically create oversight by the American people and you had better have a good reason for going to war. That’s how it works in theory anyway, although these days it seems the President can pretty much deploy whatever forces he feels like whether that pulls on the Reserves or not.

So it works the same way with a draft. If you begin to drag all of the sons and daughters into the fight, the American people are going to have something to say about it. With an all-volunteer military, it’s mostly out-of-site out-of-mind for most busy American families.

Read the full article at The Slate - Who’s in the Army Now? - Why we can’t send more troops to Iraq. By Fred Kaplan

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