Eric Alterman, a far from unbiased source, makes the following assertions:

• Fully two-thirds of the active U.S. Army is officially classified as “not ready for combat.”
• The National Guard is “in an even more dire situation than the active Army but both have the same symptoms; I just have a higher fever.”
• The Army has almost no nondeployed combat-ready brigades at its disposal.
• The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions.
• The total Army–active and reserve–now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall.
• After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January–only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June.
• The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year.
• Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.

Given the partisan nature of the source, I have been seeking at the least a quasi-neutral refutation.

I have not yet found one that is both credible and releveant.

Any volunteers with real data are encouraged to respond.

Others, well, your $0.02 is worth exactly what you pay to comment here..