Article: Support Our Troops? Not with Troop Surges.

The U.S. military does not just have an extra 30,000 troops to send into Iraq. These "troop surges" only serve to accelerate deployment plans for units refitting from their last deployments.

What is happening here is a unit returns from its tour (be it in Iraq or Afghanistan) and they are not in the queue to deploy for "x" amount of time, maybe a year or more while they refit and repair and retrain. When our top officials decide on troop increases, the units spot in the queue just got bumped up OR units that aren't even in the queue, for whatever reason, just got thrown in.

We're only helping to increase the strain on our men and women in uniform and their families.

That aside, this is not going to help our situation in Iraq, anyway. A war that has been mismanaged from the start and with no visible strategy, throwing more troops into the mix is not going to change anything at this point.

What the military needs is an efficiency audit. I truly believe the U.S. military is the most inefficient business in the world. Don't believe me? Take one quick trip to Victory Base Camp in Iraq and count the number of brand new SUV's and pickup trucks driving around so people can avoid walking a quarter of a mile to their office. It's disgusting, and just one small example.

Another notable inefficiency is the under use of the assets already available to commanders on the ground.

Lets take a look at a "hypothetical" signal (communications) unit that is deployed to Iraq. They go over their with a Brigade that has three battalions within it. Roughly, they bring 1500 troops to the fight. Lets take one company out of one of the battalions. Their job is to work a computer help desk. Your e-mail not working? They're your guys. They have a company of 100 soldiers and their mission is to run four help desks for four very small FOB's. This job could be completed with less than half that.

This is just one example of the ridiculous inefficiency of the military. If I kept going, maybe noting some of our utterly useless and wasteful civilian contracts, I'd literally be writing a book.

More troops? How about better management of what is already on the ground? More oversight over eager commanders who pump up their missions to allow deploying way more personnel than is truly necessary to pad their personal performance reviews.

Support our troops. Get them out of Iraq.