Is that what it takes to make a military unit unfit?

From today’s L.A. Times:

From their first days as “Screaming Eagles,” the 18,000 soldiers of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division are taught to be ready for anything. As the force’s proud creed goes: “First in, last out.”

But at its sprawling home base — after a long year in Iraq that wreaked havoc with the blades of its helicopters, the sights of its guns and the nerves of its soldiers — the 101st is as far from ready as it has ever been.

Outside a gun locker the other day, a soldier used a bristled brush to scrape out Iraqi sand lodged in the seams of his rucksack. In the motor pool, mechanics pulled the transmission from a bomb-battered Humvee. At a social worker’s office, a soldier ticked off the names of buddies he had watched die and mourned the breakup of his romance back home.

The 101st has no choice but to fix itself. And fast. With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saying this week that the U.S. military presence in Iraq will stand at 135,000 troops for the foreseeable future, the Pentagon must prepare these soldiers to return to the fight.

What the 101st is going through is a microcosm of what lies ahead for the entire Army. Iraq is its biggest test since Vietnam, and the rigors of fighting a counterinsurgency have demolished much of the Army’s equipment and allowed its soldiers’ skills to atrophy. For the first time, three Army divisions — more than a third of its combat troops — are classified as unfit to fight. . . .

Wow, “as far from ready as it has ever been”: There’s sand in the seams of rucksacks. Transmissions need changing. Soldiers mourn their friends, and bemoan Dear John letters. Yup, I remember well that scene from Band of Brothers, where Easy Company was pronounced unready to fight precisely because of that.

So it seems to me there are three possibilities:

1. Our military has always been so easily rendered “far from ready.”

2. Once, the military could withstand sand, transmission repair, death of fellow soldiers (at a scale far greater than we’ve seen in this war), and broken romances; but now it is no longer able to do so.

3. More likely, the L.A. Times doesn’t really know much about what causes military units to be ready or unready — or, if it knows, it isn’t really accurately telling us in this story.

Interestingly, the story never tells us what the military’s “unfit to fight” designation exactly means. Is it a relative term? An absolute one? What does it tend to take to make a unit fit to fight again? Whatever it is, I doubt that the list in the opening paragraphs of the story says much about the matter.

UPDATE: On rereading, I realize that I might have missed one possible definition that the story did give:

But in order to be judged as fit for combat, the 101st and other returning divisions must restore themselves to readiness in every aspect of their potential mission — even those that aren’t required in Iraq.
That means working through a checklist that includes everything from ensuring its soldiers are outfitted with the proper number of chemical protective outfits to verifying that enough of its soldiers can run a speedy mile. On parking lots throughout Ft. Campbell, soldiers have laid out the long strings of parachutes to make sure every one is free from knots. Inside the base gymnasium, they practice wrestling holds to prove themselves capable of hand-to-hand combat.

If that is the definition, then the story does tell us (halfway down, past the jump) what the military’s “unfit to fight” designation means — but then the meaning seems to me something quite different from what the earlier part suggested. “Unfit to fight” seems to be a technical phrase that’s quite different, in a noteworthy way, from its lay meaning: While naturally it’s important that a unit be entirely ready on all matters, partly because you can never be entirely sure what its tasks should be, it doesn’t seem quite accurate to say that simply on the strength of failing some perhaps unimportant items on a checklist, a unit is “as far from ready as it has ever been.” (This is why I missed the definition, if it is a definition, on first reading: It was so different from the rhetoric of the rest of the piece, in which the reporter seemed to be talking about true unreadiness, on the most important dimensions.)

So I ask again: Are these units genuinely unready? Does sand in the gear, machines that need fixing, romantic troubles, and even grief over fallen comrades (58 dead and 387 wounded out of 18,000 total) make the unit really unfit to fight? Just which items on the checklist did they fail? Should we be worried about real unreadiness, or is this simply a technical military designation that’s intended to get a unit to shape up, even if it’s quite capable of doing the tasks that it is in fact likely to be asked to do?