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Well, I’ll be … After reporting ont he Army’s perpetual problem with breakage (see Scales’ Lament, below), it seems that Fox News is reporting we were wrong. The Army is just fine.

U.S. Army Isn’t Broken After All, Military Experts Say

I may refrain from jumping on the band wagon just yet. By the way, I had suggested in this blog and several other venues that the so-called surge, which was supposed to help the army reduce casualties, among other fabulous things, had some serious logical flaws. The parallel lament, the Army is broken and its because there aren’t enough troops to do the job, was the primary justification for the increase in theater called for in the recent surge. At the time, I suggested more troops meant more targets, and more–not fewer–casualties.

Since the surge began, we have had 900 US personnel killed (a toss away statistic overshadowed by the news this morning that the magic number of 4,000 KIA in the Iraq war occurred over the weekend, a figure Dick Cheney said “might” be a significant psychological threshold for Americans). 4,000 dead in just over six years of operations in Iraq, but 22.5% of that number in the last 9 months (12.5% of the duration). The KIA rate appears to me to be four times the average for the whole war–a number that astonishes me. Where am I messing up my numbers? When do we count the start of the surge?

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