Hagel: Military is at breaking point
Don Walton, the Lincoln Journal Star (Nebraska)
U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan aren’t sustainable, Nebraska senator says.
Sen. Chuck Hagel said Tuesday that the Bush administration will “saddle (the) next president” with a damaged U.S. military force structure that will take a generation to repair.
“This administration is going to hold on, do whatever they have to do to just get out (and) hand it over to the next president,” Hagel said.
“We’re breaking our force structure,” the Republican senator said during his weekly telephone news conference from Washington, repeating a warning he has issued for a number of years.
“We’re in serious, serious trouble,” he said, and we are “not going to be able to sustain the force structure level we’re going to require.”
Faced with recruitment and retainment challenges, the military already has lowered its standards, Hagel said, no longer requiring a high school education and often waiving drug and criminal records.
In Iraq, Hagel said, the size of the U.S. military force will be larger in July than it was before what had been billed as a temporary surge of U.S. combat troops more than a year ago.
“That’s not what America was told,” he said.
Meanwhile, he said, Afghanistan is “in trouble because we took our eye off the ball” and transferred attention and resources from the battle against al-Qaida to the invasion of Iraq.
During a trip to Afghanistan last week, Hagel said, he was told by one general that the U.S. Army needs two more combat brigades in the country.
Hagel’s blunt assessment came in response to a question prompted by Army Chief of Staff George Casey’s warning Tuesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“The cumulative effects of the last six-plus years at war have left our Army out of balance, consumed by the current fight and unable to do the things we know we need to do to properly sustain our all-volunteer force and restore our flexibility for an uncertain future,” the general said.
Earlier in the week, Hagel told CNN that the United States will not “be able to sustain the policies that we have in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
During an interview on CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday, Hagel said it’s wrong to frame Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of U.S. victory or defeat.
“That’s never a win-or-lose thing. What will happen in Iraq, in Afghanistan, will be determined by the people, the Iraqi people, the Afghanistan people.”
As for election-year claims of U.S. success in Iraq, Hagel asked: “If we’ve had so much success, then why are our commanders concerned about pulling troops down and wanting to freeze them at at least the level that we had before the surge?”
Hagel dodged when he was asked whether he would support presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain in a contest with Barack Obama, the current Democratic front-runner.
“At the appropriate time, then I’ll have something to say about it,” Hagel said.
McCain supports the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. Obama has called for phased withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq.