Maintaining a Reserve

StrategyPage thinks even an additional $1.4 billion might not buy the Army enough ammo:

Why so much for the war reserve? Two words. North Korea. If war broke out in North Korea, the army would be using a lot more artillery and rocket ammo than was used in Iraq. Already, the army is sending the latest models of protective vests and M-1 tanks to South Korea. The economic and social situation in North Korea continues to get worse and there’s real fear that a desperate leadership up there will flip out and try and invade South Korea to “solve” their economic problems. This is not as unusual as it sounds, for money woes were the primary reason Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Sleep tight.

UPDATE: You learn a lot, having a blog. The first comment to this post reads:

All last spring, while we were sitting around the Arabian Peninsula, waiting to be told we could go home, I kept poking some of the guys: “Hey, you think they’ll really send us home, or just ship us straight to Korea now that we’ve got ‘combat experience’?”

I’m Air Force, but the Army has some similar SOPs: they wouldn’t be sending “the good stuff” anywhere they didn’t think it was really needed.

Sleep tight, indeed.