Mr Bu$h’s ”surge” escalation, publicly stated to involve pouring more troops into Baghdad in order to create a series of small-unit posts manned by paired US and Iraqi units, looks suspiciously like the de Lattre line, a tactic used by the French in their attempts to pacify the Viet Minh. While the French produced great slaughter among the Viets initially, history has shown us that defensive positions generally don’t create victories.

See "Maginot Line" in any good encyclopeda.

Used as bases from which to patrol, search and clear, they might be of some tactical benefit. However the nature of insurgency warfare is such that clear and hold operations are expensive; each time you “clear” an area you must occupy it or ensure the insurgents don’t reoccupy the area once you’ve moved on. The brutal fluidity of urban combat means you have to leave a desert behind you or your opponent will find a way to move back into previously held strongpoints.

Despite the fact that the stated intention is to produce a cleaned-out Sadr City, the Army’s policy calls for intensive desert training before deployment. Unless the goal is public appearances for domestic consumption, rather than true effectiveness, which is a trait we’ve seen before with Bu$hCo:

Rushed by President Bush’s decision to reinforce Baghdad with thousands more U.S. troops, two Army combat brigades are skipping their usual session at the Army’s premier training range in California and instead are making final preparations at their home bases. Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to question the switch, wondering whether it means the Army is cutting corners in preparing soldiers for combat, since they are forgoing training in a desert setting that was designed specially to prepare them for the challenges of Iraq. Army officials say the two brigades will be as ready as any others that deploy to Iraq, even though they will not have the benefit of training in counterinsurgency tactics at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., which has been outfitted to simulate conditions in Iraq for units that are heading there on yearlong tours. “You would like everybody to go through” the training center, but in this case it is not possible, Brig. Gen. Tom Maffey, director of Army training, told a news conference at the Pentagon on Tuesday. He said the soldiers are losing very little by not going to Fort Irwin. “The effect is marginal, at most,” Maffey said.

If the effect on non-training is marginal, why not just send troops as soon as they know which end of the rifle is the dangerous one? We’re currently accepting large numbers of volunteers that would never have passed muster six or seen years ago.

To keep filling the ranks in Iraq, the U.S. Army has had to keep lowering its expectations. Diluting educational, aptitude and medical standards has not been enough. Nor have larger enlistment bonuses plugged the gap. So the Army has found itself recklessly expanding the granting of "moral waivers," which let people convicted of serious misdemeanors and even some felonies enlist in its ranks. Last year, such waivers were granted to 8,129 men and women — or more than one out of every 10 new recruits. That number is up 65 percent since 2003, the year President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. In the last three years, more than 125,000 moral waivers have been granted by America's four military services. Most of last year's Army waivers were for serious misdemeanors, like aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and vehicular homicide. But about 900 — double the number in 2003 — were for felonies. Worse, the Army does no systematic tracking of recruits with waivers once it signs them up, and it does not always pay enough attention to any adjustment problems. Without adequate monitoring and counseling, handing out guns to people who have already committed crimes poses a danger to the other soldiers they serve with and to the innocent civilians they are supposed to protect.

I suspect a large number of these criminals – that’s what “felons” are, after all, already know how to pull a trigger, so why not just teach them weapon maintenance, kit them up in ACU’s and ship them out? If the real goal of the Bu$h malAdministration is to look like they’re doing something then why spend that money on expensive things like learning facing movements and marching? According to BG Maffey’s equivocation, wouldn’t the effect of such negligence be ”minimal”?