It may be AFU...

...but the situation is anything but normal. Maybe I pay more attention to what's happening to our soldiers than the average citizen since, unlike most of the architects of our current war, I've been one. I understand that "supporting the troops" means a lot more than yellow ribbons, flowery rhetoric and flag-waving rallies. And failure to support the troops in more meaningful ways (little things like adequate equipment, decent chow, predictable deployments, accurate payrolls and all the other ways the Rumsfeld DoD has been failing them) can destroy any fighting force, no how dedicated its individual members may be. The fact is, our Army is damn near destroyed, and there seems to be new evidence every day.

For instance, stop loss orders, inactive reserve mobilizations, mobilization of the National Guard, deployment of training commands and tour extenstions haven't been enough to make up for Donald Rumsfeld's dramatically inadequate battle plan for Iraq, so now they're looking for troops willing to violate the GI's prime directive, "Never Volunteer."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Army is asking some National Guard troops serving in Iraq to volunteer to stay on active duty beyond a statutory two-year limit for such service, officials said on Wednesday, in a fresh sign of the strain on the U.S. military amid operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "we don't plan at the moment" to extend such reserve troops involuntarily beyond the two-year limit, but added "one should never say never."

...so when Rummy opines that "the two-year limit is an interesting question," someone should remind him that it's not a question at all. It's the law. A law about which every campaigning Congresscritter should be quizzed.

Because it's about to get even worse.

WASHINGTON, July 21 - In what critics say is another sign of increasing stress on the military, the Army has been forced to bring more new recruits immediately into the ranks to meet recruiting goals for 2004, instead of allowing them to defer entry until the next accounting year, which starts in October.

As a result, recruiters will enter the new year without the usual cushion of incoming soldiers, making it that much harder to make their quotas for 2005. Instead of knowing the names of nearly half the coming year's expected arrivals in October, as the Army did last year, or even the names of around one in three, as is the normal goal, this October the recruiting command will have identified only about one of five of the boot camp class of 2005 in advance.

****

Army officials disclosed Wednesday that none of the Army's five recruiting brigades met their missions between March and July, forcing the service to tap into its bank of recruits to make up the difference.

I hate a lot of things about the Bush administration, but I may hate what they've done to my Army most of all.