Yesterday Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld debunked Democrat's recent attacks, backed by a Pentagon report, on military readiness:
On the question of a "broken" Army:
The force is not broken. The implication in what you said is also, I think, almost backwards in this sense: the world saw the United States military go halfway around the world and in a matter of weeks throw the al Qaeda and Taliban out of Afghanistan, in a landlocked country thousands and thousands of miles away. They saw what the United States military did in Iraq, and the message from that is not that this armed force is broken, but that this armed force is enormously capable.
Second, I would say that it is not only capable of functioning in a very effective way and therefore ought to increase the deterrent rather than weaken it; in addition, it's battle-hardened and it is not a peacetime force that has been in barracks or garrisons.
On the Pentagon report by Andrew Krepinevich of a "stretched" military:
We have over, you know, 1.4 million active, over 2 million total, counting the Guard and Reserve. And we've got 138,000 people in Iraq... The changes that are taking place in the Army are revolutionary. They're going to -- I mean, you just don't go from 33 combat brigades to 42 -- whatever the number is we're heading towards -- and not increase your warfighting capability.
On the number of navy ships needed:
And a naval ship today, in terms of lethality -- first of all, the deployable days are not any different today with a Navy of just under 300 ships than they were when the Navy was 4(00) or 500 because we've increased their deployable days. And the lethality of those ships has gone up many fold.
And my favorite quote:
We used to talk about number of aircraft -- number of sorties per target. Today, we're talking about number of targets per sortie, and the precision weapons make an enormous difference.
And finally on the Dems report led by former Defense Secretary Perry:
I haven't read the report. I'll have to do that. Yeah, I mean, these are the people, basically -- who did that report -- who were here in the '90s. And what we're doing is trying to adjust what was left us to fit the 21st century.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2006/tr20060125-12368.html
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