Give the Army Points for Thinking Outside the Box

As Chimpie hints at a "surge and accelerate" strategy of sending perhaps 20,000 more US military personnel into Iraq, people like General Barry MacCaffery have been asking where the hell they're going to find more combat-trained GIs when the ones we have are already pulling multiple tours. Hell, he even has mentioned that non-combat-trained sailors and airmen (and that means non-combat-trained weenies like yours truly--see A Christmas Story for my terrifying war experience) are being sent on search-and-destroy patrols, which shows that the military is already stretched to its limits.

“You’ve got a foreign policy, a national security policy in Washington and they’re not resourced to carry it out,” said McCaffrey, who called for an increase of 80,000 soldiers and 25,000 Marines in each service. “The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced,” he told Army Times.

“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”

But the Army has hit upon an idea that I believe is a first in military history: encourage dead soldiers to return to service.

Just wait until Chimpie gets wind of this. "Yeah, that's it. A zombie army! Don't you have to shoot 'em in the head to stop 'em? Yeah, that's it! I saw that in Night of the Living Dead at the frat house. Yeah. A zombie army! Get Bob Gates in here pronto. I gotta tell him about this!"