Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - The Army is looking for a lot more than just a few good men, and it needs them in a hurry. Army manpower people are now looking at scraping everything out of the barrel to send to Iraq, because the Army is stretched thin and stressed to the max.
For the first time in recent history, a brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division (Mechanized) is being pulled out of South Korea and shipped off on a one-year rotation to combat duty. It will leave the division with just one combat brigade facing the Demilitarized Zone that divides South Korea from North Korea and Kim Jong Il's million-man army.
The soldiers who were six or eight months into their Korean tour, itself classed a one-year unaccompanied hardship tour, are looking at 12 more months, this time under fire in Iraq.
"It reflects the fact that we are at war," a Pentagon briefer who can only be identified as a "senior military official" told reporters at a briefing. He added that the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry would be taking some of its M1A2 Abrams tanks and its Bradley fighting vehicles to Iraq, as well.
When the Korea brigade moves out, all 10 of the active-duty Army's 10 divisions will be involved in Iraq or Afghanistan. They're either there now or have recently returned and are preparing to go back.
Those who believed that the Iraq war was a spike, not a plateau, and that by now the American forces would be dropping to 110,000 were wrong. The force is going to remain at 135,000 to 138,000 for at least the next 18 months, according to the Department of Defense.
If things get worse - always a real possibility in Iraq today - then that force may need to be further reinforced and expanded.
Now the Pentagon must find enough troops to take over for those stalwart soldiers of the 1st Armored Division who had finished their year in hell and were on the way to the airport and a ride home when they were turned around and told they'd have to do an additional 90 days.
In addition to the 3,600 troops being pulled out of Korea, Pentagon officials say they've pulled the files of 17,000 Individual Ready Reserve soldiers and are sifting and screening them for those who have critical specialties. Under present authorization, the Army could be telling as many as 6,500 folks who thought they were home free - finished with their enlistments and back on civvy street - that they aren't.
Everyone who signs up for military service owes Uncle Sam a total of eight years. After a four-year, active-duty enlistment, he or she still owes four years on the Ready Reserve list. No pay, no drills or meetings, a civilian more or less. But these people can be called if they're needed. Some 7,000 of them have already been called since Sept. 11, 2001.
Even more surprising is word out of the Pentagon that there's a plan afoot to shut down the Army's prized National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., and to shuffle its vaunted Opposition Force (OpFors), the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, off to real combat.
America's stunning victory in the first Gulf War was born in the Mojave Desert around Fort Irwin, where the Army's heavy-tank divisions fought realistic war games against the 11th ACR. It's never been shut down since it was founded in the early 1980s.
Those who skinned the Army back from 12 divisions to 10 in the 1990s, and those who've refused to consider any significant increase in manpower despite the current crisis, bear equal responsibility for the burden they've placed on our soldiers and their families.
The civilians in the Pentagon, the same ones who were so eager to invade Iraq, don't want to restore those two Army divisions, in part because that's what their political nemesis, Secretary of State Colin Powell, recommended as the Army's base force.
We'll say it again: An Army is a fragile institution. It can be broken by overwork and a lack of manpower, just as surely as it can be broken by a lack of money and the right equipment. And once broken, it takes a decade to repair and restore an Army to greatness.
