Well, the supplemental/pork-filled, military-withdraw-attached Iraq Bill passed the senate, and so goes on directly to the White House shredder. Meanwhile, the Associated Press argues that, in fact, the deadline to get a military budget bill passed all the way through can go up to possibly June, if the Pentagon started re-routing it's priorities(and I bet soldiers could still do our jobs if we had our units' budgets cut in half, but that doesn't mean that's the best way to do it).

Let me put it this way, a single company unit can keep it's costs down for several weeks, but eventually something is going to go wrong and a certain genius will get a $150,000 robot blown into pieces. By the way, I'd like to give a shout out to the sargeant involved in operating it. Way to go.

In order to keep casualties down, the Army has spent literally billions on robotic equipment that takes the hits for their operators, and they have already done so for our unit. We have gone from using bandages that were developed originally in world war I to clotting agent bandages (that are over 100 dollars apiece) in just 5 years. Medical advances are coming several times faster than they were before the war. By stopping the war via a budget cut, we reduce the protection and treatment of the soldiers involved(easily the costliest element in the war) and risk making the death rate higher than it already is.

But politicians see where the political winds are blowing on the war, yet they want to "support the troops" at the same time. What's a congressman to do? Especially in Arkansas, where tens of thousands of people are affected by the lives of service members in the 39 th Infantry Brigade, the 875th Engineer Battalion, and several C-130 equipped Air Force units based in Little Rock? Why, pledge your support of the troops, while starving the budget of the troo..errr....umm... "illegal war for oil".

Therefore, politicians like Congressman Berry use a politically charged, doomed bill against the advice of brilliant generals such as General David Petraeus (a man that literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency tactics in a military field manual right before his transfer to the MNF-I command) to give our Army one final chance, after he had shown up months earlier at a soldier support group fundraiser giving a thousand dollars(by the way, he is the richest member of the Arkansas Congressional delegation, worth well over a million dollars) and talked like he just donated his own kidney. Ironically enough, the long fight for the bill he voted for also risks desperately-needed support for units (including mine) in the billions of dollars, much much more than a thousand dollars, or one of his kidneys for that matter.

Congressman, by voting on this bill, you started a chain of events that I believe does not help the 875th. It does not bring the 875th back here any sooner, and if political bickering in Washington D. C. continues into late Spring without an Iraq War budget bill, it will ruin our financial and materiel support, harming my unit, its mission, and possibly harming its soldiers.