Tomgram: William Astore, In the Military We Trust

Hardly a week passes in which we don't hear about what the fallout from two disastrous wars is doing to the overextended, overstrained U.S. military, not to speak of the problems the armed forces are facing in retaining and recruiting members. Recently, there have been reports on a startling rise in war-related suicides, figures that "could push the Army's overall suicide rate to its highest level since [it] began keeping such records in 1980"; on a possible link between the concussions one in six American combat troops suffer from roadside bombs in Iraq and a heightened risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder or a variety of other ailments; on another lowering of recruitment standards ("the percentage of new recruits entering the Army with a high school diploma dropped to a new low in 2007…"); on increasingly over-deployed, ill-equipped, ill-prepared Reserve and National Guard units that may be incapable of coping with future domestic crises ("Guard readiness has continued to slide since last March, when the panel found that 88 percent of Army National Guard units were rated 'not ready…'"); and on the ever more slippery slope downhill in the "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. This is certainly one aspect of the U.S. military equation -- the one readers at Tomdispatch are most likely to hear about.