Concerns about “backdoor draft”
By James Landrith
Contributing Writer,
All Gulf Vets Magazine, Inc.
The issue of “stop-loss” is soaking up serious ink in the national media these days. As a method of ensuring adequate staffing levels for an over-extended and over-worked military, many men and women are being held on active duty long past their active duty obligations. Further still, many reservists are being called back on active duty from inactive ready reserve (IRR) status after completing their active duty obligations in an honorable fashion. Of course, in today’s multiple deployment environments, many of those extended or called back have already been deployed to dangerous places like Afghanistan or Iraq. Some may have even served with me in the first Gulf War. To the casual observer, these stop-loss schemes might look like an unfortunate, but necessary solution to handling America’s military and defense needs. In reality, they are nothing more than the equivalent of putting a bandage on a gunshot wound. We keep bleeding, but we don’t know why. Stop-loss is bad medicine that treats the symptom, not the disease.
No, a better prescription would involve a more judicious use of American military power. For starters, we could try to stop bombing and invading one nation (i.e., Iraq) for the crimes of another (i.e., Saudi Arabia) and spilling American blood.
But, of course, to those who don’t honor their Guard requirements this is a non-issue. They lack the capacity to comprehend the seriousness of this situation they’ve created. It is morale, retention, military professionalism and troop readiness that will pay the ultimate price for what these geniuses have wrought. But who cares – salute the flag and support the troops – by extending them on active duty. But hey, we can do even better than that. We can disrupt the lives and families of veterans who’ve already served honorably and transitioned back to civilian status by calling them back to active duty to serve on more deployments. That definitely shouldn’t cause any problems for military career planners.
Further preventive medicine might require conservatives in both parties to actually live up to their word (read: stop lying) with regard to no longer committing this nation to more big government interventionist wars that cost precious American lives and steal money from American taxpayers. That would, unfortunately, require integrity, backbone and consistency – three traits sorely lacking in the upper echelons of the Republicat-Demopublican Big Government Party of Doom.
In the end, stop-loss and IRR recalls are nothing more than a scam to cover up the fact that wishful thinking and the politics of revenge have over-extended our military and cost the taxpayers billions. Folks, manpower divisions at the Department of Defense are seriously ill, but this treatment is worse than the disease. The longer we allow our men and women in uniform to be ritually extended and called back into uniform after completion of honorable service, the less incentives there will be for those in power to deal with the true cause of this problem.
James Landrith is a former Marine, Gulf War veteran, and the editor and publisher of The Multiracial Activist and The Abolitionist Examiner.
Originally published at: http://www.allgulfvets.com/articles/feat/special-2.html