Speaking Truth To Power

One has to wonder just what Rep. John Murtha is seeing and reading when long time military folks have no problem debunking the whole 'hand to mouth' nonsense uttered by Murtha last week, and gobbled up by a willing media and anti-war types:

As anyone who has read this blog knows, The Inner Prop and I served in Operation Enduring Freedom V (Afghanistan, March 2004-March 2005). We stood at the end of the longest sustained supply line in the history of human conflict. We were in war-torn Central Asia. Af-frickin'-ghanistan. We had decent food, e-mail, phone (OK, sometimes they weren't always working, but almost all the time) excellent medical support, good pay, regular (if slow) mail. We had a PXs at most of the larger bases, and coffee places sprang up too. We had so damned much ammunition that we needed to build a bigger ammunition supply point at Bagram, AF. We had so many vehicles that we were constantly squabbling over where to put them all - and we had enough up-armored ones too. Our supply warehouses were stuffed with clothing, boots, body armor and the like. "Living hand to mouth" is the worst lie of the bunch.

The constant stream of re-enlistments was a revelation to me. When I was the Executive Officer of the garrison at Bagram Airfield (a job I gladly traded away after 5 months) I had to find room to more than double the size of the Retention Office. I personally administered the oath of re-enlistment to an E-5 and an E-7. The E-5 was a mother of two young children and the E-7 was eligible to retire when we got home!

Broken? Hardly. Is it difficult work? Yes.

Do not mistake hard work for foundering. Respectfully, Rep. Murtha - you are wrong. Dead wrong.

And one has to wonder that if the appropriations and acquisition process for the military is so broken that the troops are living hand to mouth, why Congress deems it sufficiently important to meddle in the BCS college football system (HT Instapundit - who thinks that it's Congress that is broken). Someone has screwed up priorities, and it isn't the military. It's Congress. And I will further note that Rep. Murtha is an important person in the leadership of Congress. He's the ranking Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. If the military doesn't have what it needs, Murtha's the one to ask why that is the case.

UPDATE:
Ace has related points. He notes that the anti-war folks willingly need the US to lose this war because they've staked out a position conditioned on our failure to be successful politically.