Haiti Turns Out To Be The "Something Else" For Over-Strained Military

By Steve Hynd

For a while now - and especially since Obama announced his second surge of troops to Afghanistan - some experts have been warning that the ground-troop cupboard was bare. "The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is 'not realistic�'" and would leave the US with "no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea," Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Washington Independent back in November.

People had pointed to other possible flashpoints such as Korea, Iran, Yemen and Somalia as being the possible crisis that couldn't be adequately answqered. Instead, it seems it might be Haiti.

The Obama administration is sending a single battalion of the 82nd Airborne out of Camp Bragg and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit out of Camp LeJeune to Haiti. That amounts to a total of 3,100 troops - but it may be all America can find to send. The bulk of the 82nd is still in Afghanistan until June, where it has responsibility for 14 provinces in eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistan border. As for the 22nd MEU, it's just back from deployment.

The 22nd MEU returned Dec. 5 from a seven-month deployment to the U.S. Central Command area of operations. It sailed through U.S. European Command, serving as its theater reserve force and conducting training missions in Bulgaria and Greece. From there, the Marines transited through the Suez Canal to the 5th Fleet area of operations, serving as Centcom's theater reserve force. In addition to exercising with Middle Eastern partners, the MEU supported the Bright Star exercise in Egypt and delivered the first 10 Osprey helicopters into Afghanistan.

By the rules, the 22nd should have gotten what's known as "dwell time" back in the U.S. before being deployed again. Why would you send a just-returned unit? "It probably means you don't have anything else in reserve," one veteran officer told me.

[Update - I'm seeing several media reports saying the rest of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne will deploy swiftly to Haiti too.

By next Monday, as many as 5,500 U.S. infantry soldiers and Marines will be on the ground or on ships offshore, said Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman. Those include the first soldiers, from the 82nd Airborne Division, some of whom were due to arrive Thursday, and about 2,200 Marines.

I'm not sure whether earlier reports of 3,000 or so troops were accurate and now reporters and the DoD spokesman are getting confused, or whether this means an increase. But if the latter, then those soldiers from the 82nd have probably been pulled out of "dwell time" for this deployment too.]

Of course, there should be a humanitarian mission - I would never suggest anything else. And I'm certain that the marines of the 22nd and their airborne comrades will do an outstanding job. But that these particular units were detailled is a result of the Pentagon and administration's tunnel vision on Afghanistan and Iraq, which has now left the military's cupboard essentially bare of ground forces to meet any other crises.

Now maybe if USAid and State were properly funded and have their own contingents capable of putting purely civilian boots on the ground, instead of the military-industrial beast gobbling up all the money, we wouldn't have to be sending uniformed troops on humanitarian missions like this at all. Wouldn't that be nice for a change, not to mention COIN-savvy foreign policy?