Word: combatant
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When they were done, Rumsfeld and Franks invaded a nation 25 times the size of nearby Kuwait, with roughly half the troops used in 1991--a revolution in the way the U.S. fights wars. Baghdad fell in 21 days, and the U.S. suffered 103 combat fatalities. The plan, according to retired Marine Lieut. Colonel Jay Farrar, "proved to the Army that it can go in lighter and sustain itself longer than it ever imagined...
Drafted soldiers are far more likely to die in combat than long-service professionals. Military leaders know from painful experience that it takes years to produce a fully competent combat soldier. They also know that older soldiers live longer in combat. Drafting teenagers and committing them to combat within only a year of enlistment will create an Army of amateurs. Our Army in particular has a sad history of committing to battle men who are too young and inexperienced to have much hope of surviving against a hardened and skillful enemy...
...Combat snobbery" was a term used to define the British attitude; it also applied to America's new German allies when the Federal Republic joined NATO in 1955. The German veterans who had fought in the great tank battles against the Russians on the eastern front made it plain that they doubted the ability of America's postwar army to check a Soviet offensive if the cold war ever became hot. The Germans, like the British before them, pointed to American reliance on firepower and air cover, an expectation of overgenerous supply of materials, as reasons to question...
...latter stages of the war in Vietnam marked a low point in the American services' fortunes. Opposition to the war at home isolated the armed forces, and the antiwar mood was transmitted to the theater of combat. A key group of Vietnam veterans, among them Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and Tommy Franks, became reformers. They recognized that combat units had been drip-fed individual replacements, instead of being sent whole units, and the reserves had not been mobilized. As a result, all units had too many men who had only just arrived or alternatively were soon to leave...
...Beverly and Jenks are recovering from surgery in the intensive-care ward of the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. In a way, they seem as boyish as they did before the attack. While a DVD of Lord of the Rings plays on Beverly's laptop, Jenks laments that his PlayStation 2 console is on its way to Iraq just as he is being sent back to Germany. Both show visitors plastic cups that contain shrapnel fragments removed from their bodies. There is no bitterness or self-pity. Says Beverly: "You've always got to expect the worst...