This is the kind of story that might be expected to draw a journalist’s attention, for it has the kind of elements that should outrage the average reader: a commander playing politics with the military, troops called upon to execute a mission they had neither expected nor been trained for, and subsequent accusations that heavy casualties might have been avoided, but for politically-motivated shell games.

The commander in question is the commander-in-chief, who has made it the policy of his administration to reduce troop deployments in the “bad war” (Iraq) while increasing the number of boots on the ground to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. While the President has followed through on the latter, the former has yet to happen in any substantive way and our troops have paid the price for this political sleight of hand.

On February 17, 2009, the Defense Department announced, to great fanfare, that it was deploying an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, including the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. The problem with that, which would soon become evident when the 5th Stryker entered combat, is that the Brigade was trained to fight one kind of war and then, apparently for the sake of political expediency, deployed to fight quite another.

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One of the 5th Stryker’s units, the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment (1-17) has been particularly hard hit since arriving in Afghanistan last fall, suffering twenty-one combat deaths in one battle in the Arghandab district alone. One of the battalion’s company commanders, Capt. Joel Kassulke was replaced after that action, a move that angered some of the Captain’s troops, according to this Army Times article. The problem, some soldiers said, was not their commander, but mismatched training: (more…)