Les forces armées terrestres US (Army et Marine Corps) sont entrées dans une “spirale de destruction”

C’est un article apocalyptique que publie le Washington Post, à propos de l’état des forces terrestres US, — US Army et Marine Corps, — ce 19 mars. Le terme impressionnant dans le jargon anglo-saxon de “death spiral” impressionne effectivement beaucoup les experts et les parlementaires, mais il a dans ce cas une réelle signification. Il implique une logique de destruction : le temps qui passe détruit plus du potentiel de ces forces qu’il ne le renforce du fait des mesures habituelles (fournitures, commandes, réparation, entretien, entraînement, etc.).

Mise à part la dramatisation implicite, — on est dans un environnement parlementaire et il est question de budget, — il apparaît évident que les USA se trouvent désormais dans une position de vulnérabilité stratégique considérable par rapport à leurs engagements et à leurs ambitions. C’est l’idée qu’a exprimée le chef d’état-major de l’U.S. Army, le général Schoomaker, jeudi dernier au Sénat : «We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it.»

«Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

»More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

»The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.»

Mis en ligne le 20 mars 2007 à 12H05