ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/Getty Images

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said today that the Russian military is "gaining in strength and power like all of Russia."

To prove it, he marched troops, tanks, and Topol-M nuclear missiles around Red Square today. The event was reportedly planned as early as January, and Medvedev was so intent on making the Soviet-style show of prowess a success that he ordered Russia's air force to make sure no clouds rained on the festivities. So they carried out a cloud seeding operation in advance of the parade. Meant to mark the 63rd anniversary of the victory of Nazi Germany, it was the first parade of its kind in Red Square since 1990.

It is right to consider the images coming out of the parade as a bit disconcerting. But press reports from the scene seem a bit over the top, with stories of "glamorous" troops and "mixed messages." This ignores the realities of today's Russian military. Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Falgenhauer provides a good reality check:

Russia still has large stocks of Soviet-made military hardware; most of it fully or partially out of order. Only a handful of ships, tanks, and jets are truly operational at any given time.... The task of reviving defense hardware parades on Red Square will face grave technical and logistical problems and in any event will most likely produce only a pathetic imitation of Soviet military grandeur.... One can only hope that ...  no ancient building will collapse as tanks and ICBMs roll into central Moscow to serve the vanity of Russia’s leaders."

Let's not get carried away with the Cold War nostalgia just yet.

VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images

Georgia's State Minister today described the prospect of war with Russia as "very close" as more Russian troops poured into the breakaway region of Abkhazia. Meanwhile, Abkhazia's "foreign minister" welcomed the troops and said his government favored Russia taking military control.

Despite the inflammatory rhetoric, it still seems unlikely to me that Georgia would actually go to war with its much larger and militarily superior neighbor. Since Georgia is looking for NATO protection and Russia wants keep Georgia out of NATO at any cost, the war of words seems tailored for an audience in Washington and Brussels. Both sides have a vested interest in the rest of the world perceiving the threat of war as genuine.

Still, as Russian web journalist Alexander Golts argued in today's Moscow Times, a war of words can quickly become something more serious if both sides feel the need to save face:

And so we have a paradoxical situation. Nobody wants war, but both sides are doing everything to spark a military conflict. This is not the first time this situation has arisen. Recall how World War I began. States wanted only to protect their national pride and frighten their opponents. But at some point, the tensions escalated sharply and, coupled with mass mobilizations of their armies, the conflict in the Balkans spun out of control with tragic consequences for the entire world. This scenario could be repeated in the Caucasus.

STEPHEN JAFFE/AFP/Getty Images

Today is the fifth anniversary of the day George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, just 42 days after the invasion of Iraq. 

This morning, the Center for American Progress hosted a speech by Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha. Murtha, a Vietnam veteran, voted to authorize the war in 2003, but has since become one of its most strident critics. As he put it today:

I was skeptical about giving the president authorization to go to war in 2003, but I gave this president the benefit of the doubt. That decision was a mistake. In Vietnam, we never had a strategy to win. In Iraq, we never had a strategy.

Murtha, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, agrees with a majority of retired and active military officers that Iraq has left the U.S. military unprepared for future threats. He's also very concerned about China's military buildup, and thinks leaders in Beijing are watching the situation closely:

We must refocus our attention to the threats down the road. If you remember in World War II, we cut off the oil supply of the Japanese when they attacked. us. Now, I don't say that's going to happen with China. But one thing's for sure, if they misperceive our readiness to act, we're going to have a real problem.

While it's pretty unlikely that the Chinese are planning another Pearl Harbor (the line was absent from Murtha's prepared remarks so he may have ad-libbed it), it's fair to say that Iraq has decreased both U.S. military readiness and diplomatic standing.  

After five years, the administration seems unwilling to come to terms with what an embarassment "Mission Accomplished" was. As of yesterday, White House spokesperson Dana Perino was still insisting that Bush was misinterpreted. "Mission Accomplished," she claimed, only referred to "sailors who are on this ship on their mission" (though it's hard to believe that even she buys that line). However they try to spin it, "Mission Accomplished" will haunt the Bush administration as a symbol of the myopia and reckless optimism that characterized the early days of the Iraq war.

Reader Jonathan Hendry wrote in with some interesting backstory related to my post about Apple, Inc. becoming a defense contractor:

Actually, [Steve] Jobs isn't a stranger to selling to the Pentagon. While his products are thought of as consumer electronics, there was a time when his best customers were in very serious industries like defense and high finance (UBS, Swissbank, Merrill Lynch, First Chicago, Soros, etc).

Jobs' company NeXT Computer (which Apple bought in 1997, bringing him back into the fold) sold quite a few machines to the spooks in the early 90s. The spy agencies liked how quickly software could be developed on the NeXT operating system. I personally interviewed for a defense-oriented NeXT programming job with, I think, Lockheed-Martin back in 1994, my senior year of college. (I don't recall what the system was, but I know I would have needed a security clearance - they gave me the forms to fill out. I wound up taking a job in Chicago that put me on a contract at Swissbank.)

Around 1993, NeXT stopped making computers, changing to an OS-only strategy. Supposedly they had to run the assembly line for a little while longer, in order to fulfill the spare-parts stock requirements of their defense contracts.

I expect Mr. Jobs is feeling a little deja vu right now.

Jonathan's email reminded me that the Pentagon has recently begun integrating Apple computers to bolster its network security. So, high-profile defense contracts are nothing new to the most powerful man in business.

Steve Jobs's shop recently announced the $278 million purchase of a small computer-chip maker named P.A. Semi—a takeover that most analysts assumed was designed to shore up efficient chip technology for future versions of the iPhone.

But it turns out some of P.A. Semi's best customers are defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and they're not at all comfortable with the company's new latte-drinking, yoga-practicing, peacenik boss. Rumors are flying that Apple will shut down production of a key processor used in "more than 10" different defense systems.

EE Times reports: 

Apple Inc. may have to face the ire of the U.S. Department of Defense following its planned acquisition of P.A. Semi Inc. The startup's PWRficient processor is designed into DoD programs in every major branch of the armed services, said one P.A. Semi customer who expects Apple will end production of the parts.

"We've had customers saying they are going to the DoD on this one," said a source in one of the several companies making embedded computer boards with the processor.

Lends new meaning to the term "iPod Killer," doesn't it?

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Today's big news is no surprise: U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that Gen. David Petraeus will be promoted to head Central Command, pending Senate approval.

It's been a good week for the top American general in Iraq. On Monday, FP and Britain's Prospect magazine named Petraeus one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals, and he's doing remarkably well in the early voting.

It'll be interesting to see how Petraeus handles his new role. Matt Yglesias is cynical, calling the promotion "a pretty savvy political move" by Bush:

In this new office, Petraeus will have the appropriate kind of standing to argue that, no, those who say we ought to shift resources out of Iraq and toward Pakistan/Afghanistan are wrong.

Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, in contrast, is highly enthused:

The allegedly lame duck Bush administration has--if this report is correct--hit a home run. CENTCOM is the central theater of the war on terror, and the president is putting our best commander in charge of it.

I'd be surprised if Petraeus proceeds as Yglesias fears and Kristol hopes. The general strikes me as a pretty smart guy who is carrying out his mission to the best of his ability, but not some kind of fanatic about Iraq. Once he gets comfortable at CENTCOM, he's going to have to start weighing priorities and matching them up to resources across his entire command. He may well conclude that a strategic shift is in order, even if it takes some adjustment. He may also conclude, as his predecessor William J. Fallon did, that the United States is going to have to reach some kind of modus vivendi with Iran. But it's also worth noting that he'll mostly do so under the next U.S. president. According to Gates, Petraeus won't be taking the reins at CENTCOM until the fall, leaving him precious little time to effect any major changes on Bush's watch.

Anthony Cordesman; Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Yesterday, I attended the Jane's U.S. Defense Conference, an annual gathering bringing together American and European defense industry representatives with national-security officials. The theme of this year's conference was "the outlook for policy and defense business under the next presidency," an appropriate enough subject for the day of the Pennsylvania primary.

There was an overwhelming sense at the conference that despite billions more dollars in defense spending, the United States is not adequately preparing for the threats of the 21st century, nor is it giving the "warfighters" the resources they need to achieve victory. Major General Charles J. Dunlap of the U.S. Air Force, for instance, worried that an overemphasis on counterinsurgency was leading the U.S. to ignore the possibility of warfare with a "peer country" (read: China). Former Under-Secretary for Defense Acquisition Jacques Gansler argued that protectionism and the prioritization of congressional pork projects were causing the misuse of defense resources, necessitating a law stipulating that "Congress should not be making defense-acqisition decisions." The State Department's Deputy Director of Policy Planning Kori Schake lamented the miniscule size of her own agency's budget relative to defense, saying that every one of State's problems could be "traced back to chronic underfunding."

Oddly enough in a discussion of current national-defense priorities, Iraq and Afghanistan hardly came up until near the end of the day, when the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Anthony Cordesman gave a briefing on both conflicts. Given the weakness of both countries' political institutions, Cordesman feels that the term "counterinsurgency" ought to be abandoned altogether in favor of "armed nation-building." Since Cordesman sees far more progress toward this goal in Iraq, I asked him if troop withdrawal there would increase the likelihood of success in Afghanistan:

If we can move forward in Iraq in ways that seem possible, we may be down to 10 brigrades by 2009. You can't suddenly move those brigades to Afghanistan. They require retraining. They will have to be re-equipped and restructed to fight a different kind of war on different terrain, dealing with a different culture with different values.

I also have to say that while troops are important... far more important are the aid teams and advisory teams... rapid turnover of deployments in a country where personal relationships are even more important than they are in Iraq, the inability to take aid workers out into the field where they are really needed... The problem isn't troop levels and it won't be solved by moving out of Iraq."

It seems ironic that the takeaway message of a national-defense conference was that what we traditionally think of as defense can only do so much. The next president's foreign-policy team will need to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time if it wants to begin to address the problems left over from the current one.

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

A shipment of ammunition, rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment's landlocked destination. 

On Friday, South Africa’s High Court barred the transport of weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang, arguing that the shipment would be used by Zimbabwe's president of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, against members of the opposition party. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, temporarily in self-imposed exiled, declared himself the victor of the March 29th elections. Since then, journalists and activists alike have reported that hundreds of opposition supporters have been detained, beaten, or tortured (warning: illustrations may be unsettling).

Although the An Yue Jiang is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by air in order to "expedite the delivery and to circumvent the controversy around last week's shipment by sea." The story also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government, were finalized just days after Zimbabwe's elections.

The arms shipments brings to light the hazards of China's growing role in the world's poorest and most unstable continent. According to Serge Michel in the current issue of FP, in the last seven years, "trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion." But the resulting projects highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African cooperation:

Take, for example, the dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it's a huge success: It's expected to help double national electricity production by 2009... [But according to a project engineer] the quality of the cement being used is sub-standard, the Congolese workers are so poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and, above all, the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site and could cause it to collapse one day."

From weapons to shoddy cement, the Chinese-Africa deal is looking more like a recipe for disaster every day.

A study released today by the Rand Corporation finds that nearly 20 percent of military personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. For those interested in the math, that's some 300,000 soldiers. Only slightly more than half have sought treatment, telling researchers that they feared doing so would harm their careers. Here are some highlights from the first large-scale, nongovernmental assessment of the psychological and cognitive needs of military service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past six years:

• 19 percent of returning service members report that they experienced a possible traumatic brain injury while deployed
• 7 percent report both a probable brain injury and current PTSD or major depression
• The study estimates that about 320,000 service members may have experienced a traumatic brain injury during deployment, from mild concussions to severe penetrating head wounds. Yet, just 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for that injury
• Half of service members say they had a friend who was seriously wounded or killed
• 45 percent report that they saw dead or seriously injured non-combatants
• Over 10 percent say they were injured themselves and required hospitalization

The Rand study is highly focused on the monetary societal costs of PTSD and depression among returning service members. The study asserts that, in the 2 years after deployment, these injuries will cost the United States between $6,000 to more than $25,000 per case, or as much as $6.2 billion in total. Of course, an equally high cost is being borne by the families and loved ones of these soldiers. Sadly, it's unlikely anyone will ever be able to quantify that.

Spain swore in its new defense minister, Carme Chacon, this past Monday. Not only is she the first woman to hold the post, she's also seven months pregnant:

JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/Getty Images

Kinda puts Donald Rumsfeld's complaints about standing all day in context, doesn't it?

(Hat tip: Passport reader Eric Jon Magnuson)

David Silverman/Getty Images

For the first time ever, a female Muslim Arab soldier has joined an elite Israeli Air Force unit. Upon completing a medic training course with top honors, she became part of the Airborne Combat Search and Rescue Unit 669, a premier unit that extricates wounded soldiers from combat zones in sensitive and highly classified operations.

Unlike Jewish young adults, most Arab Israelis are not required to serve in the military, but this soldier, from an Arab village in northern Israel, volunteered to serve. But Muslims and Arabs are prevented from serving in the elite Unit 669, which requires an extremely high security clearance, due to fears about conflicting loyalties should they have to serve in Palestinian areas or fight Muslim countries. So how did she get in? An investigation revealed that an error was made, although news reports have not described the nature of the error or who made it. (My hunch is that those details are confidential.)

Nonetheless, the unit's commander has been so impressed with the woman's exceptional ability that he is allowing her to stay. Although some on the Internet say she may end up betraying her unit, it may be that in this case an error ended up yielding the correct outcome -- letting in a talented, loyal soldier.

Salah Malkawi/Getty Images

Every two years, military and government VIPs from around the world descend on Amman, Jordan for the Special Operations Forces Exhibition, the Middle East's largest military equipment trade show. Exhibitors and buyers from the United States and Britain rub shoulders with their counterparts from Libya and Syria, all in the name of superior military capability.

For more images from the convention floor at SOFEX 2008, check out the new FP photo essay, "Where the World Shops for Weapons."

As today's marathon Iraq testimony continues to wind down, the overwhelming sense a viewer gets is that the whole event has proceeded according to script. The presidential candidates took the opportunity for free airtime, then took off before the hearings had even ended. Code Pink protesters were ejected from the room. And Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus stated that while enormous progress has been made in Iraq's security, cuts in troop levels should be avoided. One might even ask why, with everything these men have on their plates in Baghdad, they needed to travel all this way to perform this Capitol Hill kabuki drama.

Petraeus pushed for a 45-day pause in troop level reductions, saying that an immediate reduction would doom any hope of national reconciliation in Iraq:

This process will be continuous, with recommendations for further reductions made as conditions permit," General Petraeus said. "This approach does not allow establishment of a set withdrawal timetable. However, it does provide the flexibility those of us on the ground need to preserve the still-fragile security gains our troopers have fought so hard and sacrificed so much to achieve."

Never mind the fact the dubious proposition that Iraq's political progress will look much different in 45 days than it does now. It's no longer clear that the U.S. military can continue to sustain the level of commitment that Petraeus is talking about. In the U.S. Military Index, from the FP March/April issue, we found that nearly nine out of ten U.S. officers believe that Iraq has stretched our military dangerously thin, and less than half believe that we are prepared to fight another war on short notice. In light of this, how long will it be before factors other than what passes for Iraqi political progress begin to inform U.S. actions?

For more on the lack of progress in Iraq, check out Blake's new web exclusive, "Why the Surge Doesn't Matter."

JIM WATSON

While NATO allies publicly debate their role in Afghanistan, attendees say a secret memo is circulating around the conference that plans for the alliance's exit from the conflict. Der Spiegel reports that Germany played a major role in drafting the "master plan" for the eventual removal of 47,000 NATO troops.

The document is actually less dramatic than it seems. In the short term it "calls for soldiers to gradually focus their attention more on training Afghan police forces and to hand over responsibility for actual conflict situations 'as soon as external circumstances and Afghan capabilities allow.'"

Wasn't equipping Afghan forces to eventually handle their own security always NATO's plan in Afghanistan? How is this a major change in policy? Der Spiegel hedges that the benchmarks layed out the memo might keep a NATO presence in Afghanistan until 2015, so it's possible that the document is just a fantasy meant to assuage the skeptical German public.

While the paper avoids a specific date for withdrawal, Germany Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung is optimistic about its implementation:

According to everything I've seen and to everything that other countries have added," Jung said of the paper, "I am very hopeful that it can be achieved in the forseeable future."

Mission accomplished?

For this week's Seven Questions, "Waiting for a Cyber Pearl Harbor," FP asked Richard A. Clarke, former U.S. counterterrorism chief and former special advisor to the president on cybersecurity, about what offensive capabilities the new U.S. Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER) should have. He succinctly replied: "Highly classified ones."

Though Clarke isn't interested in mentioning specifics, someone else is. Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder of the U.S. 8th Air Force, under which AFCYBER will be housed once it's officially launched this fall, has revealed how the United States plans to "hit back" in cyberspace.

In an interview with ZDNet.co.uk, he said offensive capabilities that AFCYBER is working on include denial of service, confidential data loss, data manipulation, and system integrity loss. These "cyberpunches" will be paired with kinetic (physical) attacks. Elder said:

Offensive cyberattacks in network warfare make kinetic attacks more effective, [for example] if we take out an adversary's integrated defence systems or weapons systems. This is exploiting cyber to achieve our objectives.

Now that the U.S. military has put on its cyber boxing gloves, it looks like it'll be no holds barred in the online world.

CLAUS FISKER/AFP/Getty Images

At the current NATO summit, countries' troop contributions to the effort in Afghanistan has been a hot topic. Last week's FP List "Who's Left in Afghanistan?" listed the top five and bottom five countries in terms of the number of troops they had committed to Afghanistan. At the time, the top five were the United States (29,000 troops), Britain (7,800), Germany (3,210), Italy (2,880), and Canada (2,500), while the bottom five were Singapore (2 troops), Austria (2, sometimes 3), Ireland (7), Luxembourg (9), and Iceland (13*).

But these numbers can be somewhat misleading when it comes to determining who is pulling their weight, given that, for example, the U.S. population is about 1,000 times that of Iceland. So, another measure would be troop contributions relative to military-age population (defined as those between 20 and 39 years old**). When expressed this way, using updated troop numbers, it's tiny Denmark that comes out on top!

The Top 5 (troops per 1,000 people 20-39 years old):

1. Denmark -- 0.55
2. Britain -- 0.47
3. Norway -- 0.43
4. Netherlands -- 0.39
5. United States -- 0.35***

The Bottom 5 (troops per 1,000 people 20-39 years old):

1. Ukraine -- 0.0002
2. Georgia -- 0.0008
3. Austria -- 0.0009
4. Singapore -- 0.0016
5. Ireland -- 0.0053

Yet another way to crunch the numbers would be to look at troop fatalities relative to the military-age population. (Just the top five, and not the bottom five, are listed here because there are several countries with zero fatalities.) Sadly for Denmark, it's at the top again:

The Top 5 (troop fatalities per 1,000 people 20-39 years old):

1. Denmark -- 0.0099
2. Canada -- 0.0090
3. Britain -- 0.0056 (includes Ministry of Defense civilians)
4. Estonia -- 0.0053
5. United States -- 0.0051 (includes fatalities in Pakistan and Uzbekistan)

The U.S. Air Force mistakenly sent Taiwan electrical fuses involved with triggering nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missles, the Pentagon just announced.

Seven months ago, the Air Force accidentally flew nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the United States.

As Britney Spears would put it: Oops, they did it again.

As Mark Leon Goldberg notes, Mark Helprin's call for a strategic bombing campaign against the Sudanese regime (or at least the threat of one) is bizarrely out of touch with present realities on the ground in Darfur:

Ever since the Darfur Peace Agreement in May 2005, the conflict has proliferated from the government and janjaweed vs three distinct rebel groups to a conflict that pits a panoply of over 15 rebel groups fighting the government, former janjaweed, each other, and sometimes humanitarian workers and peacekeepers. Some of the janjaweed have joined the regular Sudanese armed forces, some have joined the rebels.

We like to impose a narrative of "good guys" vs. "bad guys" in such situations, but sometimes there are only bad guys vs. bad guys -- and the innocent people caught in the middle.

Robert Spencer/Getty Images

Critics of Republican presidential nominee John McCain often point to his inconsistent stance on military intervention as a sign that he is not the straight-talking maverick he presents himself to be. An examination of McCain's stances on intervention, however, reveals not mixed signals but a steady transformation of worldview. The young Vietnam vet who once vocally opposed military overreach has become the elder statesman who passionately advocates the need for military action. Here's a look at the stances McCain has taken on some of the major U.S. military operations of the past few decades.

Lebanon

Stance: As a freshman congressman, John McCain broke with President Ronald Reagan and most of his party to oppose invoking the War Powers Act to extend the deployment of U.S. peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Statement: "The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place." Sept. 29, 1983

Iraq (Operation Desert Storm)

Stance: McCain worried about the prospect of an extended deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq and hoped to limit the U.S. action to a bombing campaign.

Statement: "If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.'' Aug. 19, 1990

Somalia

Stance: After a failed operation that led to the death of 19 U.S. soldiers, McCain proposed cutting off funding to the U.S. mission in Somalia in order to force the Clinton administration to bring the troops home. He later wrote that he regretted this stance.

Statement: "I'll tell you what can erode our prestige Mr. President. I'll tell you what can erode our viability as a world superpower, and that is if we emesh ourselves in a drawn-out situation, which entails the loss of American lives, more debacles like the one we saw with the failed mission to captured Adid's lieutenants using American forces and that then will be what hurts our prestige." Oct. 14, 1993

Haiti

Stance: Like most congressional leaders at the time, McCain opposed sending U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to assist the return of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power.

Statement: "I don't think our vital national security interests are at stake... In Haiti, there is a military government we don't like. But there are other governments around the world that aren't democratic that we don't like. Are we supposed to invade those countries, too?" July 10, 1994

Bosnia

Stance: McCain initially strongly opposed intervention in Bosnia, but after the signing of the Dayton accords in 1995, he changed his stance and cosponsored a resolution supporting the U.S. peacekeeping mission.

Statements: "If we find ourselves involved in a conflict in which American casualties mount, in which there is no end in sight, in which we take sides in a foreign civil war, in which American fighting men and women have great difficulty distinguishing between friend and foe, then I suggest that American support for military involvement would rapidly evaporate." April 23, 1993

"Our troops are going to Bosnia. Congress should do everything in our power to insure that our mission is truly clear, limited and achievable, that it has the greatest chance for success with the least risk to the lives of our young men and women. The resolution that the majority leader and I have offered does not ask senators to support the decision to deploy. It asks that you support the deployment after the decision had been made. It asks you further to condition your support on some important commitments by the President." Dec. 13, 1995

Kosovo

Stance: McCain not only favored the use of force to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but pressed the Clinton administration to send ground troops into Serbia.

Statement: "If we lose this war, the entire country and the world will suffer the consequences. Yes, the President would leave office with yet another mark against him. But he will not suffer that indignity alone. We will all be less secure. We will all be dishonored.'' May 9, 1999

Afghanistan

Stance: McCain strongly supported the U.S. operation to defeat the Taliban and attempt to capture Osama bin Laden.

Statement: "[W]hat we need to understand is that we may have to put large numbers of troops into Afghanistan for a period of time, not a long period of time, but for a period of time, in order to effectively wipe out these terrorists' nests and track down Mr. bin Laden. In other words, it's going to take a very big effort, and probably casualties will be involved, and it won't be accomplished through air power alone." Dec. 28, 2001

Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom)

Stance: McCain has been among the most vocal supporters of the initial invasion of Iraq and last year's troop surge. His stance on these issues has largely defined his presidential run.

Statement: "Only an obdurate refusal to face unpleasant facts -- in this case, that a tyrant who survives only by the constant use of violence is not going to be coerced into good behavior by nonviolent means -- could allow one to believe that we have rushed to war... Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq -- a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for the two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice. Some of our soldiers will perish in this just cause. May God bless them and may humanity honor their sacrifice." March 12, 2003

ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty Images

As FP recently explored in the Military Index, the U.S. Army last year had a shortage of 3,000 captains and majors, a number expected to double by 2010. Behind these statistics are folks like 26-year-old Army Capt. Kirkner Bailey of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Mosul, who says:

I have served my time; I've done two tours in Iraq. For the past three years of my life I have either been in Iraq or training to go to Iraq. I just know that there is more to life than this war, and my girlfriend, Shannon, and I are interested in finding out what that is. I can't speak to trends. But 8 of my 10 friends who are captains are leaving the Army."

When people talk about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are hollowing out of the military, this is what they mean. The trend is particularly scary when you consider that officers like Captain Bailey have tremendous amounts of combat experience and the Army is counting on them to be the next generation of leaders.