More Technical Skills for Iraq

I would say any of the standard service and repair skills are valuable! If your going to improve your country you need welders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, truck and heavy machine operators, and anyone or any thing else thats part of setting up a modern infrastructure.

Basically what you need are the skille posessed by a US Naval Construction Battalion but, you are sending all of those home. Good news for the SeaBees, sucks for you.

Engineering.. They have refineries and production equipment but not the know how to run and refurbish it. As a result me and my colleagues are asked to go help.

Which would be ok if they would stop shooting and exploding things...

Welding is a particularly good skill to have, and a good welder will typically have work in even the worst of times.

In fact all of the trades, like plumbing, or to be an electrician are consistently in demand.

Mechanics always have work, since every thing breaks, or gets broken.

Further these sorts of skills are in demand in most any neighborhood, are site specific often, and therefore help to maintain a level of secure economic activity.

Still what bothers me overall as far as the demands put upon the US Armed Forces seem often to be awfully broad.

As an example, we don't ask the Post Office to fight our wars.

I have long argued that the US needs to revive the US Constabulary Service which had so much success in Europe after WWII.

Of US institutions I thought that it was the mission of the Peace Corps to do the sort of work this blog reports as being done by the Army.

This is not at all to say that such work, is not worthy, but simply to say that we may well ask too much of our Armed Forces, for they actually do have in reality one specific job, and that is to use force to kill those who want to kill us.