The Department of Defense announced today the death of a sailor who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Hospitalman Aaron A. Kent, 28, of Portland, Oregon, died Apr. 23, from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations near Fallujah, Iraq. Kent was assigned to 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward), Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Yours truly is exceedingly ignorant in these matters. But, is it normal procedure for Sailors to be conducting combat operations on land? Or is it rather a further sign of the Army's and Marine Corps' decreasing manpower? There was also a report the other day that a Marine Sailor had died doing the same thing: conducting combat operations in Fallujah.
(Which, of course, raises another question: what is going on in Fallujah? If, after absolutely leveling the city, and requiring residents to obtain ID cards to get back to their flattened homes, the "Multinational Force" is still not in control there; just how much in-control can we expect it to be in the rest of the country?)
Update: Commenter GD informs that the case noted above is not out-of-the-ordinary. However, many thanks to commenter John Seal for the serendipitous link to a story in today's Boston Globe concerning the practice of using lightly-trained soldiers to paper over the Military's personnel shortages:
At least 3,000 Navy and Air Force personnel such as Peters -- trained mainly in non-combat specialties such as mechanics and construction -- are serving on the front lines of the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraq war is the first military engagement in which such large numbers of air and naval personnel are serving in combat roles on the ground, facing imminent threat of attack.
Most of them have received only crash courses in basic combat, in some cases after they've arrived in the Middle East and then been stationed near the front lines because of shortages of troops in the Army and Marine Corps. Though technically defined as support units, their jobs -- guarding convoys and oil facilities, or defusing bombs under fire -- bear little resemblance to traditional ''non-combat" duty in the safety of a base.
''Airmen are driving trucks in Iraq because the Army didn't have enough of them," Brigadier General S. Taco Gilbert, the Air Force's deputy director for strategic planning, said in a recent interview. ''They're manning .50-caliber machine guns."
Navy medics are routinely attached to Marine combat units (the Marines are "self-contained combat force within the Department of the Navy").
Posted by: GD on April 26, 2005 01:51 PMHere's the link to this story
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2005/04/26/unready_for_combat?mode=PF
Posted by: John Seal on April 26, 2005 02:20 PM"exceedingly ignorant"
You got that right.
Posted by: MStooge on April 26, 2005 05:47 PMNavy doctors and corpsmen serve with the US Marine Corps. The Marine Corps possesses no intrinsic medical personnel.
However, you are correct in surmising that personnel not traditionally or typically assigned to ground combat units in the Army and Marines are finding their way to these units by way of purposeful assignment, assignment that blurrs their defined roles under the Geneva coventions or perhaps worse without field training appropriate for the job.
Furthermore, Army psychiatrists, forensic types, have publicly rationalized their role in interrogation of enemy combatants by citing a higher ethical duty to justice than to their Hippocratic and Geneva duties to their patients, reference Colonel Elspeth Ritchie Medical Corps US Army. Remember Lt.Colonel Pappas of Abu Ghraib fame provided testimony(available online) that psychiatrists/psychologists helped to design interrogation methods (?torture?) at his prison in Iraq.
Troop shortage?
According to this well-passed-around article in Monday's Times, a Marine company "resorted to making dummy marines from cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to place in observation posts on the highway when it ran out of men."
I doubt this is what Rumsfeld means by a "lighter, leaner" fighting force.
Posted by: dack on April 27, 2005 08:15 AM