Of Course It Isn't A Guarantee, It's From the Government!

My guess is that Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman is having a very busy afternoon. Contrary to what appears to have been a very clear policy decision made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on April 11th, "particularly guaranteeing that [troops] will be at home for a full 12 months" between deployments in Iraq, the Stars & Stripes reports Whitman as saying that this “is [not a guarantee but merely] a goal, to have units and individuals to have an appropriate amount of time for recovery and for stability purposes at home station and to be able to be with their families.” Apparently, Gates was caught short when told of a company being redeployed to Iraq some three months short of the 12 month "dwell time." Defense Secretaries just hate it when that sort of thing happens.

Well, maybe Whitman is, in fact, speaking for Gates. Nobody who knows the slightest thing about the military (and I just barely qualify by that criterion) believes that its senior leadership would honor its word in such matters if doing so seriously and genuinely jeopardized the mission. Soldiers understand that. But if Whitman is speaking for Gates, this is precisely the sort of thing that will undermine the new Secretary of Defense's efforts to rebuild trust and morale after the long overdue ouster of Donald Rumsfeld.

Oh, and all that happy horsesh*t about individual soldiers transferring from unit to unit making a guaranteed 12 month stationing outside Iraq for every soldier impossible? That's just so much Penta-babble. Of course, soldiers are rotating from unit to unit all the time and the “United States military is not a static organization." But that's irrelevant and Whitman knew it was irrelevant when he said it. And as the story is making the rounds of the blogosphere, so does everyone else.