Something isn't adding up. Bush is expected tonight to request an additional 20-30 thousand soldiers for Iraq. And to meet this goal there are going to be more callups of the reserves and extensions of current duty tours - which also seem to be made up in large part by reserve troops.

But if you check the reference sources, the US military is supposed to have about 1.4 million active duty personnel - today. If these competent and trained soldiers aren't available to be put to work on the largest military task at hand, where are they? What are they doing?

I for one question the logic of adding an arbitrary number of troops to a situation that is tenuous at best. But a larger question emerges. If we're adding 20-30 thousand weekend warriors to a staff comprised largely of weekend warriors, why not just put a half million active duty folks over there tomorrow and act like we mean business? That would still leave us close to a million folks to handle any other world crises which might demand attention. Surely we don't have any immediate crises requiring close to a million active duty personnel.

It makes me wonder if we really have 1.4 million active duty soldiers. Maybe we don't.... Which brings up the question - how many do we really have? Given the gyrations the military is going through to keep 150,000 or so in Iraq (our most demanding campaign at the moment), it leads me to believe that the total active force must in fact be somewhat less than 300,000 (50% on standby for immediate national defense); and nobody is talking about this because it might point out how badly the volunteer army has failed and how vulnerable we really are.