National Guard and Reservists: Just Thank Mr. Bush And Senator McCain For Your Impending Deployment

Also posted at Blah3:

People have been asking of McCain's and now apparently Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq, well, where you gonna get 'em? There's an easy way to solve that:

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker plans to tell the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves on Thursday that the Army needs to be able to mobilize the 345,000-member Army National Guard and 196,000-member Army Reserves more frequently and for longer periods than current restrictions allow, two senior Army officials said Wednesday. [....]

The practice under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been to mobilize part-time troops for no more than 24 cumulative months. National Guard and Reserve troops called for service in Iraq usually spend about six months training, then a year in Iraq, leaving them only six months of eligibility to serve in other active-duty roles.

Officials also have promised to call up part-time units no more than once every five years, which they said cuts the Army short of much-needed manpower. It also would make it much more difficult for the Bush administration to send as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq, as officials are contemplating.

More than 1 million American servicemen and women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them National Guard and Reserve troops.

One million. One million.

All of this so Bush can continue to play King and McCain can swell his already bloated ego on his way to become King.