"Where is the outrage?" Bush has mismanaged the military.

From The New Republic:

Bush has mismanaged the military.
Tapped Out
by Lawrence Korb, Max Bergmann & Peter Ogden

Six years ago, George W. Bush and the congressional leadership repeatedly attacked the Clinton administration for both underfunding and overusing U.S. ground forces in places like Bosnia and Haiti. While such charges conveniently overlooked the fact that Bill Clinton's defense budgets were in fact $2 billion more than the final George H.W. Bush defense plan for 1994-1999, they achieved their purpose nevertheless. Bush's oft-repeated campaign promise that "help is on the way" for the men and women in uniform elevated his standing in military circles. A slew of retired generals and admirals publicly endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket, with some hinting that the Clinton administration had jeopardized our national security through neglect of the Armed Forces. The new Bush administration, they believed, would restore the military's cold war prowess.

Yet, rather than providing help, the Bush administration's strategic miscalculations and gross mismanagement of resources have pushed the all-volunteer force perilously close to its breaking point. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has refused to reconsider his pre-September 11 commitment to transform the Army into a smaller and more agile fighting force, even though one clear lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has been that the Army is suffering more from manpower deficiencies than from the absence of high-tech weaponry. Pentagon officials have lately sought to emphasize the positive--the Army is currently meeting its 2006 recruiting and retention goals, and the readiness levels for forces in combat in Iraq remain stable--but this neglects the underlying reality. The responsibility of Bush and the Republican Congress is to ensure that, even during war, the all-volunteer military is ready for future combat. They are currently failing to do so.

[...]

In the words of Bob Dole, "Where is the outrage?" It doesn't take much imagination to picture what Republicans would be saying if the Armed Forces were suffering from such neglect in a Kerry administration. They would be howling mercilessly--joined no doubt by former generals and admirals--that Democrats had compromised national security through mismanagement and neglect. And they would be right. Unfortunately, the current state of the Army and the Marines has yet to become the rallying cry this election season. It should.

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