My Response: Article that Army must cut combat tours.

The U.S. Army initially started with six month combat tours.

The U.S. Marine Corps has kept to it's six month rotation process, since the USMC is a smaller and more fluid body of personnel. They have a world-wide staffing schedule to maintain.

Army officials said at first the tours would be six months, then they were extended to nine months, twelve months, and eventually fifteen months.

This has really hurt families (I have my own ideas on why, too).

A percentage of service members, when their retirement or end of contract come up, are kept in the ranks, "Stop Loss."

A major reason for the problems? The military is running out of money.

When the Secretary of the Army told Congress the Army would run out of money by July, Congress responded with "Why not cut funding to other projects?"

The problem with that is the U.S. Army has people everywhere in the world working on various projects, some for weapons, some for infrastructure, some for simply guarding an installation.

The amount of money that flows through the working personnel greatly supports local communities. Moving those people will hurt the local economy. (This is true for the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Germany, Turkey, Italy, England, etc.)

To me, a big problem is the mentality that each military unit HAS to spend money so it will have the same amount of money the next year. This leads to purposeful waste.

I think if the U.S. military adopted "Green" strategies of purchasing and buying, that would save money, keep money in the local community, and help reduce waste (and that would generate more jobs, too).

And why is gasoline still so expensive?

Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat for Wisconsin, proposed a measure to cut funding to the Iraq War, which was expected to fail. He did this because of Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, helped him with another measure.

So, the big issue is service members are dying, money is getting tight, and Congress are playing games of "Scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours."

AND, anti-war groups, like www.MoveOn.Org , are ready to spend $20 million dollars on an anti-war campaign to influence voters.

Couldn't someone just write a book and go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and achieve the same result?

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• army
• cut
• combat
• tour
• money
• stop
• loss
• congress
• fund
• service
• member
• secretary
• senator
• economy
• green
• iraq

[guma163]

none bad meant, skyanimal...but it seems the sound in your videos is off sync. Just an observation

[CitizenJain666]

ps: you're hot.

[CitizenJain666]

your civilian leaders in washington started this war so that they could get rich by filtering massive funding to THEMSELVES thru no-bid civilian contracts. they don't give a damn about the soldiers. 3trillion allocated for the war so far, yet the actual military is going broke, and almost nothing has been rebuilt in Iraq. cheney rumsfeld bush should all be drawn and quartered. "why is gas still so expensive?" have you not noticed exxon posting recordbreaking profits every year since war began?

[inspiration0agent]

like the face u make at the end XD