"A flippin' disaster"

In a harshly worded critique of U.S. national security policy, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey said Wednesday it is too late to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and that Saudi Arabia is likely to follow. Furthermore, he said, the U.S. is woefully unprepared to handle new threats, let alone the ones it now faces.

Gen. McCaffrey, interviewed during a Dallas visit, sharply criticized the Pentagon's handling of the Iraq war, saying the military is debilitated and on the verge of disaster as it confronts up to 100,000 armed insurgents and militiamen there.

The four-star general suggested that another major crisis, such as a military threat from North Korea or Iran, could force the U.S. to respond with nuclear weapons because it lacks the resources and staffing to fight another conventional ground war.

Gen. McCaffrey, formerly head of the U.S. Southern Command and once the Army's most highly decorated generals, made his assessment after completing trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at the invitation of the U.S. Central Command in February and March.

On Iran's nuclear research program, which Tehran insists is for peaceful purposes, Gen. McCaffrey warned that the Persian Gulf country will have a nuclear bomb within the next five years. "It's too late, without question. They're going nuclear," he said.

"The sad part is ... they [the Iranians] are not going to be any safer. The region will be less stable, and they will be acutely at greater risk," he said. If Tehran were to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear attack, it should expect the severest possible response, he said.

"If we ever saw a threat to our key allies or ourselves, there's no question in my mind: We would, if required, deploy a nuclear weapon."

He added that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim kingdom, would not sit idly by if its Persian Gulf Shiite neighbor acquired nuclear weaponry.

"For sure, if the Persian-Shia bomb becomes a dominant factor in the security of the Middle East, there will be a Sunni-Arab bomb to counter it," he said.
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He responded harshly to Pentagon announcements during the past week about extended troop deployments in Iraq and a recall of Texas-based troops who have had as little as seven months at home since their last combat tour.

"These completely inadequate ground combat forces cannot sustain that level of deployment unless we ask them, essentially, to stay in near-continuous combat" far beyond the Pentagon's one-year deployment target, he said.
[snip]
"Their equipment is shot. It's coming apart. We are in a position of enormous strategic peril," Gen. McCaffrey said. "What happens if the other shoe drops?" he asked, listing a possible major natural disaster or a direct military confrontation with Iran or North Korea.

The military "is grossly under-resourced. ... It's a flippin' disaster," he said. "You have to have generators, tents, trucks, helicopters just to sustain troops in a natural disaster. The question is: Can we put four divisions [70,000 to 80,000 troops] into Korea in 90 days? The answer is, of course we can't."

As a result, he said, "we'd probably have to use nuclear weapons before we lost 30,000 U.S. troops on the ground. If they're getting their asses kicked, we'd probably go nuclear."