The US military is short on training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge, reports Ann Scott Tyson in The Washington Post today.
Tyson’s survey: Includes testimony before Congress by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, that concludes that the recent increase of more than 32,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has pushed already severe readiness problems to what some officials and lawmakers consider a crisis point.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“You take a lap around the globe — you could start any place: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea, back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There’s no dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces.”

The troop increase has also created an acute shortfall in the Army’s equipment stored overseas — known as “pre-positioned stock” — which would be critical to outfit U.S. combat forces quickly should another conflict erupt, officials said. That was the same problem at the beginning of the Iraq invasion in 2003. Halliburton/KBR contract officers regularly complained (to me on background) that the company had no prepostioned stock or pre-approved vendor lists.
Here’s The Washington Post story, which states:

The Army should have five full combat brigades’ worth of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units to rotate in and out of the country. Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, according to military and government officials.