Word: pentagonal
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Even as the Iraq war has dragged on, offering no foreseeable end, top Pentagon officials have maintained that the nation's Army is fit enough and big enough to fight it. But last week the military's taut tendons--at the breaking point for better than a year--could be heard painfully snapping from the Pentagon to the Sunni triangle. First came a warning from the head of the Army Reserve that those troops are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force." Then Army officials, speaking privately, conceded that a long-standing policy limiting deployments of National Guard and Army Reserve...
...troubling indicators surfaced. The Defense chief has argued that retooling the Army--turning cooks and accountants into trigger pullers and hiring contractors to perform such civilian tasks, among other steps--should generate efficiencies that would ease the strain on the Army without having to boost its size. But other Pentagon officials doubt that such measures will suffice. "We're growing increasingly concerned about the health of the force," an Army personnel officer says. "These deployments are really beginning to take a toll...
Because of other commitments overseas, in Europe and Eastern Asia, and because the Pentagon is trying to limit Iraq tours to a year, the Army increasingly has had to rely on the National Guard and Army Reserve to help fill the roster of 150,000 troops in Iraq. Those part-time forces represent 40% of the current U.S. troop strength in Iraq and will grow to 50% in coming months. There were about 160,000 National Guard and Army reservists on active duty last week, including 60,000 inside Iraq. In a Dec. 20 memo published in the Baltimore...
...recall specifically how he felt about waterboarding, but he did generally support the thrust of the Justice Department's decision to severely constrict the definition of torture. Senator Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin elicited Gonzales' acknowledgment that the new Bush Administration policy on torture had "migrated" to the CIA and Pentagon and from there to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Not one of the Senators bothered to ask whether the President had been informed by his close aide Gonzales that the U.S. had changed its policy on torture. "Why ask?" said a staff aide. "He'd say he couldn't recall...
...Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on 16 additional measures for use at Gitmo, including stress positions, such as standing for long periods; isolation for up to a month; hooding during transportation and questioning; removal of clothing; and "exploiting individual phobias, e.g., dogs." A study led by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger reported last August that Rumsfeld's more aggressive methods were used on only two detainees, "gaining important and time-urgent information in the process...