This is all true, I've been following this story since I started hearing about how equipment was breaking down in Iraq due to the harsh conditions and lack of support troops (way before enemy action started taking a heavy toll on vehicles). This was so even before the actual invasion, during the staging in adjoining desert countries. If you think ground vehicles and armour are threatened, you can imagine the situation with delicate machines like helicopters.

The human costs (not casualties so much as experienced senior troops not reenlisting because their families cannot take the multiple back-to-back redeployments) are also very high. This is especially true of Reserve forces, who are willing to fight and die but not give up their civilian careers, businesses and home lives by being constantly redeployed. And all this in a military deliberately designed to rely way too much on its reserves. The surge, of course, is just running the engine past the redline, it won't take it indefinitely.

It's all to save money, of course: keep costs down, make things more efficient, leaner and meaner, cost-effective, run it like a business, outsourcing and subcontractors; the usual MBA litany of meaningless management bullshit and executive excrement. A certain amount of friction and entropy is to be expected in any military fighting a war, but this story has been swept under the rug and covered up to protect the incompetence of the perpetrators so that the usual mechanisms of correction have not been allowed to come into play. We've been told for years that "everything is fine, don't worry, we know what we're doing, leave us alone".

The day may yet come when Caesar's legions will be forced to hack their way out of the Black Forest. Let's hope they still can.