Army Worried by Rising Stress of Return Tours to Iraq

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by mrbeast

Arrghhhhhh........Skybird beat me!

Indeed but its debatable what exactly the cause was, WMD's? Regime change? Oil? A Bush famly vendetta?

WMDs for sure, this is what they said before the war: that they knew oh so sure that there are nulcear WMDs, and that they knew for sure where they are.

Regime chnage came as part of the agenda.

The real intention was to gain a strategic foothold in the region to control the traffic patterns of the international oil flow.

the Halliburton-factor must not be explained, I assume. for theml, it was a planned profitable business, witht he US army acting as their bodyguards and private army.

IIRC quite a few people were predicting how the situation might develop and it wasn't the planning for the war that was faulty, it was the planning for the post war period that was lacking.

Well, I do recall that the military DID want more troops, and stupid arrogant Rumsfeld gloriously wiped it off the table and wanted his great Rumsfeld-for-victory strategy beeing used instead: using smaller, technologically superior, highly mobile forces instead. that gangster still has to learn a lot about what assymmetrical warfare means and how technological superiority provokes it and gets - to a wide degree - neutralized by it. Technological superiority by the one side is the reason why the other picks up tactics that are summarized as "asymmetrical warfare". It'S a cat-and-mouse game that never ends. Hsitor5ically, assymmetrcial wars almost never get solved militariloy, but have a strong tendency to become chronic and then last on for decades, chnaging their faces meanwhile, often becominging a mix of civil war and armed criminal organisations with private armies that behave like a Mafia and whose business i not the oroginal goal of the war anymore, but criminal enterprise. You can see many example of this in South Am erica, Africa, and SE Asia. Many of the terror and mafia groups there have started as often left oriented freedom fighters using assymmetrical warfare, and having ended as muderous criminals today.


Anyhow, this thread I started as a reference to strategic chnages inside the army of the future, and as a reference to the high price many soldiers pay even when returning physically unharmed. If you do some math on the numbers the article mentions, and do an estimation, you come to a number of at least 85000 troops returning from Iraq and having to deal with PSD. And PSD is a beast, we do not talk about some lightweight psychological minor problem. This is hefty stuff, with the potential to be of danger for the community and people dealing with veterans as well. It can ruin decdes of the vet's life, it can destroy all his life, his family, his marriage, his social skills, his ability to be occupied in a job - and the general feeling of being home in life. It can make him a paranoid, a srtalker, a predator, and a killer. It does not lead so far as a case of rule, but it happens - and then you read in the nation-wide newspapers about it. If you ask such people, many of them refer to themselves as ticking bombs, and feeling like that.

Roughly close to every fifth vet seems to be affected. That qualifies for a top priority problem for the army and for the community that send them into war as well. Call it a social responsibility, and a debt.

and increase the number of wounded from some 40.000 to around 120-130 thousand.