Word: combatant
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...always a closed case, at least not scientifically. In the 1960s, Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger Jr. set out to prove just that. In a pioneering study that tracked exercise and health, Paffenbarger and colleagues found that vigorous exercise could indeed lengthen life expectancy and combat chronic disease. Paffenbarger would also conclude that the benefits of exercise could be had even when starting late in life. The researcher practiced what he preached: at age 45, the once sedentary Paffenbarger, who died at 84, became a long-distance runner and eventually ran 22 marathons in Boston alone...
...reality is that it's difficult to get out fast. It took the Soviets nine months to pull 120,000 troops out of Afghanistan. They were simply going next door, and they still lost more than 500 men on the way out. Pulling out 10 combat brigades - roughly 30,000 troops, along with their gear and support personnel - would take at least 10 months, Pentagon officials say. And that's only part of the picture. There are civilians who would probably want to head for the exit when GIs started packing. They include some 50,000 U.S. contractors and tens...
...Slowing things down further is the sheer volume of stuff that we would have to take with us - or destroy if we couldn't. Military officials recently told Congress that 45,000 ground-combat vehicles - a good portion of the entire U.S. inventory of tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, trucks and humvees - are now in Iraq. They are spread across 15 bases, 38 supply depots, 18 fuel-supply centers and 10 ammo dumps. These items have to be taken back home or destroyed, lest they fall into the hands of one faction or another. Pentagon officials will try to bring...
...FATE OF THE IRAQIS A reduction in the U.S. combat presence would probably produce one clear benefit: a lower U.S. casualty rate. But a chilling truth is that as the U.S. death toll declined, the Iraqi one would almost surely soar. Just how many Iraqis would die if the U.S. withdrew is anyone's guess, but almost everyone who has studied it believes the current rate of more than a thousand a month would spike dramatically. It might not resemble Rwanda, where more than half a million people were slaughtered in six months in 1994. But Iraq could bleed like...
...some size will still be needed - not so much to referee a civil war, as U.S. forces are doing now, but to try to keep it from expanding. McCaffrey and others argue for cutting U.S. forces by no more than half for now. "If you end up with 10 combat brigades in Iraq at the end of this President's term" - down from 20 today - "you'd still have enough combat power" to deter outside actors from further stoking the fire...