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by Chris Floyd

Army cuts time spent on training (Boston Globe):

The US Army, struggling to cope with stepped-up operations and extended deployments of its soldiers to Iraq, has shortened the duration of several of its bedrock training courses so that troops can return to fighting units on the front lines more quickly, according to senior training officials. One training course that is considered the "first step" in educating newly minted sergeants — the noncommissioned officers considered the backbone of Army units — has been cut in half to 15 days. Meanwhile, an intensive program designed to prepare young officers for advanced leadership has been compressed from eight months to less than five months so that the Army can fill positions in constant demand from commanders in the Middle East...

""The whole intent is to get the soldier into the unit where he can be used faster," [said Colonel Joe Gallagher, chief of plans for the US Army Training and Doctrine Command]. "Time will tell if something is missing."

No, Colonel Gallagher, time will not tell if something is missing — death will tell: the death of an undertrained soldier, or of a soldier led by an undertrained officer, or the death of a civilian, or many civilians, killed by an undertrained soldier or officer. That is the "metric" by which the new "compression" of training will be measured. But full marks to the colonel for candor: the intent of the Bush Regime is most assuredly to "use" the troops as fast as they can — then throw them aside just as quickly when they're used up.

The striking animus that the leaders of the Bush Faction exhibit toward America's soldiery grows more pronounced all the time. Indeed, their pathological hatred of the actual human beings in the armed forces seems to increase in proportion to their increasingly frenzied rhetoric about supporting the abstract entity known as "the troops."

Perhaps this is a result of unconscious envy on the part of Bush and Cheney, gung-ho militarists who cowardly avoided a war they were happy to see other people fight. Or perhaps it is simply the deliberate, knowing disdain of pampered elites for all those below their exalted station – especially the riff-raff who do their dirty work, such as the soldiers sent to kill and die to increase the elite's powers, privileges and pleasures. Most likely, it is a combination of both causes – with the latter element predominant. Quote this article on your site