The Price of Maintaining Our Troop Levels

SusanG of the Daily Kos links to a story from ABC News about the mentally ill in the military:

U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.

The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.

(snip)

Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.

"I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country," said Dr. Arthur S. Blank, Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist who helped to get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.

(to pg. 2)

The Army's top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.

We don't have what everyone would recognize as a legally constituted draft but we clearly seem to have a de facto draft that begins to obscure what is meant by an all-volunteer military. Sooner or later, our leaders have to start repairing the considerable damage that is being done to our institutions and our people. There is no sign that the president or his fellow Republicans are beginning that repair.