Military

JUST A MONTH before the next U.S. Army unit is due to deploy in Iraq to relieve the hard-pressed forces already there, the military is confessing to a potential showstopper. The deploying unit%u2019s new armored vehicles may have faulty armor which would leave them vulnerable to machine-gun fire and to the rocket-propelled grenades that are the Iraq insurgents%u2019 favorite weapon.
        The vehicle is the prized new Stryker wheeled troop carrier, advertised as the first fruit of the Army%u2019s plan to transform itself into a lighter, go-anywhere-fast force.
        Worse still: the Army has known it might have a problem since February, but has kept quiet about it. [MSNBC]

The Navy announced late yesterday that it had relieved Capt. Ruth A. Cooper of her command of Naval Station Newport because of alleged mismanagement at the military base.

Rear Adm. Joseph A. Walsh, commander of Navy Region Northeast, removed her “after losing confidence in Cooper’s judgment and ability to command,” according to a statement the Navy released. She has been temporarily reassigned to a position with Navy Region Northeast. [Providence Journal]

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seeking to increase the nation’s combat power without hiring more troops, is poised to order a sweeping review of Pentagon policies, officials say. It will include everything from wartime mobilization and peacekeeping commitments, to reservist training and incentives for extended duty.

In essence, Mr. Rumsfeld will ask the service secretaries and chiefs and his under secretaries to address how the Pentagon can more efficiently use its troops at a time when the armed forces are spread thin by global deployments. [New York Times]

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain will always remain as one of my favorite persons of the 19th Century. He was a common man, a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, who volunteered for the Union Army.

At the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, he led the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment and held the end of the Union line. Having been ordered to hold the line at all costs, he eventually led a bayonet assault against the advancing Confederate Army. He held his ground.

For his actions that day Chamberlain would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. At war’s end, he would be a Major General. And it would be he, above all other officers, who General U.S. Grant chose to receive the surrender of the Confederate Army.

As the Confederates stacked their arms to return home, Chamberlain ordered his men to salute the departing Confederates.

One incredible man.

Aug. 10, 2003The top American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, was quoted on Sunday as saying that intelligence reports indicate that hundreds of Islamic militants who fled the country during the U.S.-led war had returned and were planning to conduct %u201Clarge-scale terrorist attacks.%u201D Bremer%u2019s comments follow another day of violence in Iraq, during which at least four U.S. soldiers were wounded in separate attacks. [MSNBC]

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 ó The United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi exiles began a broad covert effort inside Iraq at least three months before the war to forge alliances with Iraqi military leaders and persuade commanders not to fight, say people involved in the effort.

General Hashem’s ministry was never bombed by the United States during the war, and the Pentagon’s decision not to knock Iraqi broadcasting off the air permitted him to appear on television with what some Iraqi exiles have called a veiled signal to troops that they should not fight the invading allies. [NY Times]

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Monday plans to take command of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan’s war-shattered capital, a move that reflects the 54-year-old alliance’s shifting priorities in the global war on terror.

NATO will take over command of the 5,000-strong International Security Assistance Force, known as ISAF, from Germany and the Netherlands during a ceremony in Kabul. [Boston Globe]