Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
The Congressional Budget Office finds that, given current troop commitments and intended terms of deployment, the number of U.S. troops in and around Iraq will have to fall by possibly more than half by March to between 67,000 and 106,000 with costs ranging from 14 to 19 billions dollars per year.
There are several possible responses to this. The number of troops could just be reduced, although given the current climate and level of instability in the country that appears unlikely. Military personal could stay in Iraq longer than planned, which seems most likely to me even though there is a political cost involved. Finally, and this would most likely go along with one of the two other options, the U.S. could decide to attempt to boost the number of personal that it has. This could be done through increased recruitment (which would probably be difficult to achieve), keeping people in the service longer, instituting some kind of a draft (a politically unpopular but hardly out of the question idea) and/or getting additional support from other countries. Even if one or more of these methods were successful, I'm not sure if they could have the necessary impact by March and if they were going to, implementation would have to start soon.
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A Congressional Budget Office report from last month, "The Army's Bandwidth Bottleneck," finds that the Army's plans for providing digitalized information flows are not sufficient to meet the projected bandwidth demands. posted by micah holmquist at 9/03/2003 02:21:00 PM
