The Soldier's Life

Stars and Stripes is about halfway through an illuminating series on troop morale in Iraq.

Comments

[Tim Cavanaugh]

Interesting mix of results. If any of you blowhards have had enough talk about liberating the much-loved Iraqi people and are itching to get over there yourselves, I have one recommendation: Go Air Force!

[Tim Cavanaugh]

I’m posting another one just for the sake of our own morale, with one observation: Our readers never tire of discussing the media bias against the campaign in Iraq, penchant for finding failure, predicting disasters, only reporting the violence, etc. But here’s a detailed series of articles running in a paper that’s hardly a fount of left-wing defeatism*, treating the only group most of us can honestly say we care anything about in this whole business-fellow Americans, and showing results that are susceptible to many different and interesting interpretations. Yet there are only two comments, and they’re both by me.

* It’s also not a fount of Pentagon propaganda. That S&S is actually a pretty decent paper is lost on most civilians.

[Glenn C]

Maybe the lack of commentary indicates agreement with Jesse’s post. It’s an illuminating series.
Personally, I wish the survey results had been broken out between Active and Reserve soldiers, since I believe that there are serious issues involved in the current force structure’s reliance on the Reserves for peacekeeping and occupation missions.
More generally on the issue of commentary, I would point out that certain Reason contributors manage to post on Iraq quite glibly, yet never manage to come up with an actual article for the print version of the magazine.

[Andy]

Sorry about the late one on this, but this deployment (based on the S&S survey) is going to wreak hell on retention – 49% were not likely or very unlikely to stay in (question #9). This is going to be bad news for future deployments of this sort…the experienced troops will be gone.

And as I type this, I wonder what the regular retention rate is. Maybe it’s not having an effect. (maybe S&S should do a survey of state side troops to see what the numbers look like?)