RE: I feel your pain....

I'll have to ask for more clarification in how having a smaller Army in itself will improve the number and quality of recruits. I would think that those who want to be in combat or combat support roles pretty much know it when they first sign up...?

You are out of your damn mind.

First, calling Blackwater a professional fighting force is an utter insult to the rest of us. Having not inspected their entire organization, I will say that I might not be entirely right. But as for the hoodlums they have running around Iraq that like to randomly discharge their weapons and spray 'n pray, well, I suppose they fill the same void that a Marine Special Forces company could fill. Gross generalization? Sure. But just because they were the cool guys that had the little birds flying around the Green Zone by our house back in 04 doesn't make them a professional fighting force.

Second, your perspective on the Army is skewed drastically into the negative for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is being rear-D commander and in the Worst Cavalry Division at the same time. There's good soldiers and there's bad soldiers, like there's good outfits and bad, but establishing your position based while you're in, arguably, the most miserable job in the Army is probably going to lead to a flawed opinion.

Third, shrinking the size of the Army would be a disaster for dozens of reasons outside the purview of this conversation. Consider, however, that the number of shooters in Iraq right now is somewhere over 80,000 (don't have a link, remember reading it though) and that is round about 50%, depending on the month and whether or not we are surging. 50% is phenomenal. We were lucky to get a 10-to-1 ratio in times passed. I will agree that the Support Battalions and PSBs that work 9-to-5 and take weekends off while in Iraq make me utterly nauseous, and that the thousands of KBR contractors skew the ratio some more. However, all things being considered, we're doing well. How small would you want to shrink? There's 80,000 we clearly need right there, and they need to rotate every 12 to 15 months, so thats 160,000. Then we need to train em and send em to schools, and they really need more of a break, so lets call it 240,000. Then, in all honesty, we should have twice the reserve standing by for another conflict, so now we're up to 400,000 in just shooters.

Of course the military looks like fraud, waste and abuse from the cynics viewpoint. It takes 8 gallons of JP8 to start an M1A2 tank, the tank burns 12 gallons an hour at idle, and is lucky to get a mile in 3 gallons. Bombers cost billions of dollars. All this is why its a state function. No private industry could possibly support this, even on a government contract. The reason Blackwater and, similarly, the tiny little Australian Army look so much better on the surface, is because they have so few moving pieces, constraints and complications to deal with. They have the luxury of not having to worry about all the problems you point out.

But I guess it goes back to what the mission is. To fight and win our nation's wars. It would be criminally negligent to assume that conflicts we need or choose to engage in could be won by the small cadre you describe. And, as much as I love our citizen-soldiers in the Guard and Reserves, lets remember where a lot of the problems have come from ... cough ... Abu Ghraib ... cough. You, of all people, remember what its like to deal with Guard units. I appreciate their sacrifice, but I'll be damned if I can, with clear conscience, let the security of this nation rest on their shoulders. We couldn't have done Afghanistan or Iraq with what you describe (the argument of whether or not we needed to is neither necessary nor welcome.) Can you accurately forecast what the next conflict we'll be in looks like? I can't. And old Donny Rumsfeld sure was adamant about the smaller quicker Army ... and he turned out to be wrong as two boys kissing in church on Sunday.