Coalition of Willing falling apart

VTpaintballer wrote: ahhh who cares.... i hate politics and the time when i change my mind will be when i turn 18

The draft age is 17 if I'm not mistaken, so you may start caring a year sooner.

^^^^^^wait, wait, wait, don't get off track.  The thread is about the coalition of the willing.  Not John Kerry.  No tort reform, social security reform, God Almighty, values and morals, liberals, etc. etc. etc.  Just plain old facts about the coalition of the willing.  It appears to be dwindling. 

E-98 wrote: ^^you're right thank god kerry didn't get elected or we might have a draft n00b Normally I would let a few people make arses out of themselves before supplying the facts, but since I have to leave soon, I will simply state that Kerry wanted to increase active duty by 50,000 troops. Now...  he critiscized Bush for having a back door draft... and he wants to increase active duty by that much...  Any ideas on how he was going to do that? But I forgot... the election is over... I don't imagine a draft occuring...  Not at all...  With the reservists that we have, we should be fine for some time...  I love your biased sig.  : ) Oh...  I also heard something about how Kerry would increase the number of reservists... don't remember the exact increase though... edit: I'll search for a source confirming this later... it was said in one of those blasted debates between kerry and bush...

Stay on target, young Jedi. This is about you getting drafted because the coalition is dwindling, not about Bush/Kerry.

1. You don't understand the force make-up of our military. Active duty brigades and divisions go to war with their reserve support units, so there is not a huge reserve waiting to be called up. So, when half of the active army gets called up, so does half of the reserve forces. The national guard are only combat arms units, and all four infantry divisions of the guard are in Iraq now or getting there soon.

2. The first wave to go into Iraq were 18 of 35 active duty army brigades and their support troops. That left less than half to go in after them. So how did we fix that in year two? We held them over and called up 5,600 troops from the IRR. The troops on the ground have increased by 15-20k every year. What started with 115,000 has bloated into 155,000 right now. So after this rotation is over, the next rotation will be the troops who went in 2002, and some from 2003. Who can replace them in 2005, since that is about 60-70% of our forces? Answer: the national guard who are there right now.

3. With the coalition falling apart, enlistment and retention numbers dwindling, we will either have to mobilize all of our forces indefinitely with no rotations out of country (unlikely), or DRAFT (likely).

There, I saved you some time and did your research for you, O wizened one.