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Sen. Joe Biden: Not Enough Troops
The ranking Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden of Delaware, told NBC "Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, Sunday, that "unless we fundamentally change the rotation dates and fundamentally change how many members of the National Guard we’re calling up, it’ll be virtually impossible to maintain 150,000 folks this year.” But the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, disagreed, saying that in conference with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, that top military leader opined: "That’s inaccurate, that assumption. We can do it. And we will do it.” According to Warner, Pace noted that even an option to increase the troop levels beyond 150,000 was doable. Biden qualified, however, "There’s not a single general, including Pace, who believes we can keep 150,000 troops in Iraq without extending tours three and four and five times and without further mobilizing the National Guard. We can keep 150,000 troops there. We could put 200,000 troops there. It would require a fundamental change, fundamental in the rotation schedules.” But Warner suggested that perhaps a fundamental change in the rotation schedules for already harried combat troops was not inevitable, noting that Pace said that there were contingency plans based on internal "cross-training, taking certain segments of the Army and retraining them in 30 to 60 days to perform the basic fighting we see against the insurgents, take elements of the Guard, which might take a little longer. You know, artillery men can become infantry men, artillery men can become policemen.”
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On the subject of progress with training-up the Iraqi forces to take over security duties, Biden argued that in order to draw down the number of U.S. boots on the ground, "you don’t not only train up these [Iraqi] battalions, which are 600 to 800 people, you have to train up a larger facility that deals with command and control.”
Biden also emphasized that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's claim of always giving the commanders what they need and want was false: "I don’t know what they tell Rumsfeld, but flag officers, guys wearing stars, not one single time, including the last one, Memorial Day, and I’m going again in 12 days, have I not been told by flag officers that they did not have enough forces.
"Give you a specific example. They said last time I was there on Memorial Day, ‘We cannot mount a counterinsurgency. We go out and clear out Anbar province. We blow these guys away. We don’t have enough troops to leave behind. We leave. They come back across the border. Senator, we don’t have enough troops.’” Biden also qualified his voting for the resolution that cleared the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq: "[R]emember what the resolution said, Tim, it didn’t say ‘go to war.’ It said, ‘Mr. President, if you can show these things, then you can use force.’” Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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