How the Pentagon targets teens
By Nick Turse
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt , editor of Tomdispatch

The Bush administration has "basically committed most of the army's active forces (including much of the National Guard), rotating them to the point of exhaustion," said retired Lieutenant Colonel Charles A Krohn, former army deputy chief of public affairs at the Pentagon and in Baghdad, in the Washington Post.

Eric Schmitt and David S Cloud, in a front-page story in the Monday New York Times sum up part of the problem this way:

The army says it has found ways to handle the dwindling pool of reservists eligible to fill the support jobs [in Iraq], but some members of Congress, senior retired army officers and federal investigators are less sanguine, warning that barring a reduction in the Pentagon's requirement to supply 160,000 forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, or a change in its mobilization policy, the army will exhaust the supply of soldiers in critical specialties. "By next fall, we'll have expended our ability to use National Guard brigades as one of the principal forces," said General Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star army commander who was dispatched to Iraq last month to assess the operation. "We're reaching the bottom of the barrel."