The crisis is that there are not enough of them in today's army.
and why do Clinton and Lieberman want more troops you might ask? Well mainly to support Iraq, Afghanistan and the surge:
We believe that the current pace of troop deployments to Iraq requires too much of the men and women of our Army. Too many of them have been sent there too often and stayed too long and that has had an undesirable affect on their families, their communities, and the capacity of the Army to meet recruitment goals.We believe that greater Army end strength will give our war fighting commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq the capability they need to surge the number of troops on the ground there if facts on the ground require that.
We are concerned that if other crises occur elsewhere in the world in the years ahead we won't have the appropriately sized Army trained and ready to go there to deal with these other crises.
Unfortunately as Wa Po pointed out these new troops won't help Iraq, Afghanistan or the "surge" unless Clinton, Leiberman, and the others are planning on being in Iraq a long long time. So maybe its for some future wars that we just don't know about yet? Beats me. And frigtens me.
Obama wants more troops
And while Obama has recently been trying to distinquish himself on foreign policy in regards to Clinton, he isn't any better on this. In fact he's much more explicit in Foreign Affairs:
We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines.
But he never really says convincingly why. And interestingly enough the numbers are exactly the same as what Bush, Gates and their Pentagon proxies have been asking for. Obama must have faith in what the Pentagon is preaching - do you? He does say this in the preceeding paragraph:
We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future. We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests. But we must also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale.
But what does that mean given the fact that these troops are for a post-Iraq military? Why does rebuilding a breaking military have to equate to a troop increase? It doesn't make much sense and while he promises that the mission WILL be defined clearly:
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