“Resilience” has become the new buzzword inside the Pentagon. It’s shorthand for our Army’s too small to fight the wars we’ve been fighting. The fourth annual Warrior Resilience Conference (or, as the Pentagon calls it, Warrior Resilience Conference IV) begins Thursday.
Instead of raising an Army big enough to send troops forward once or twice, we’ve decided, basically, to take the post 9/11 wars off-line and let a relatively small contingent turnstile in and out of combat repeatedly. If this were a boxing match, the referee would have called a TKO several years ago – or ordered a much bigger force.
This is what happens when you start – and continue – a war without the country invested in the cause. It’s depressing to acknowledge, but for more than a decade we have sent young men and women repeatedly off to war, knowing it will lead to increased mental ailments, divorce, broken homes, heart-broken kids, suicides and other ills.
Then we run them through “resiliency” efforts – like the conference starting Thursday – and feel we’ve done our duty.
That’s a lie, and we know it’s a lie, and we’re going to be paying for that lie, in ways big and small, for decades to come.