South Dakota National Guard Deployed to Iraq Again
Including Charlie Battery, based in my home town of Yankton.
It's quite easy to talk of victory and defeat when you're not a participant in the actual conflict so I will simply say this - the fact that we're still calling on National Guardsmen to fight in Iraq in year 5 of the unfortunate invasion is an indictment to our lack of strategic preparation and a tell-tale sign of how thin our forces are stretched.
So then, you're advocating a massive military buildup? Because that's what it would take in order to ensure that we always have a standing army in times of need. The trouble is, the regular army is almost always pared down in times of peace.
The National Guard isn't being utilized in a way that it hasn't been previously. My grandfathers and great uncles crawled across Europe during the 1940s and almost all of them were National Guard.
Posted by Matt Hittle on October 07, 2008 at 06:29 PM CDT #
All I am saying, Matt, is that it's a damn shame that we never had an adequate plan to win the peace in Iraq and now we're paying for it when we see our neighbors and friends get sent to a foreign country to fight a war few Americans support.
Posted by Xiao Xi on October 07, 2008 at 11:26 PM CDT #