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Playing the Oracle at Delphi and Why the US Army is A-Okay

I participated in a panel discussion today for prospective students who have been accepted into Santa Clara Law School. Afterwards, there was a lunch outside where I shared a table with 6-7 of these students, followed by giving a slightly larger group a tour of the campus. The whole time, of course, I dispensed wisdom with the ease and fluidity that only a soon-to-graduate third year law student can. I have to say, the whole event, for whatever reason, seemed to lessen the surprising disappointment I felt at the graduation luncheon this week. It was surprisingly calming and soothing speaking to these prospective students. As their questions flew, I was filled with a sense of gratitude at how far I?ve come in the preceding three years. I remember going to similar events when I was starting law school and feeling like the older law students were the apotheosis of young legal genius. Of course they weren?t, nor am I now, but the distance covered in these past three years has been large and was certainly stark in contrast to these novice legal minds about to take the same journey I just made. To quote Ice Cube, (I didn?t even have to use my A-K), today was a good day.

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I always enjoy reading Phillip Carter?s blog Intel Dump, which was recently picked up by the Washington Post. I first met Carter when he was a third year law student at UCLA and he was allowed to teach a small seminar class of undergrads about terrorism law (in fact, that class is also where I met Nuts & Boalt?s Armen). Carter, a Captain in the Army JAG, has since served a tour in Iraq and continues to write one of the best informed blogs on the military. Carter is hardly a conservative (he endorsed freakin? John Kerry in 2004 for crying out loud) and his conclusions are rarely complimentary of the Bush administration, especially in terms of how it has handled the war in Iraq. But he is intellectually honest, which is as high a complement as I can pay anyone. In 2005 he wrote that the only way to keep our Army functioning is to implement a draft, the need being based on Carter?s assumption that the Army was fundamentally broken. So what?s Carter?s prognosis in 2008? ?Events proved me wrong.? Here was the most surprising (and encouraging) piece of information from his post as to why the Army is, in fact, doing much better than he initially prognosticated:

Approximately 1.7 million servicemembers have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, along with tens (hundreds?) of thousands of American civilian government employees and contractors. But according to the Army, just 197,000 soldiers have deployed more than once, and only 53,000 have deployed three or more times. I'm told the percentages are comparable for the Marines. Which means that only a fraction of today's troops are actually serving multiple tours and bearing the heaviest burden of the war. There's this other massive part of the force that hasn't deployed yet, or has deployed just once, for whom the strain isn't as acute. That is helping the aggregate health of the force.

This information is completely contrary to the image of the army given in the media that the army survives only by multiple redeployments and stopgap measures. Heck, they even made a crappy movie about it. But why let the truth get in the way of a good narrative?

Full post as published by SoapBox Law on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).