Americans should at least be aware of the article by Mark Halprin today...Mr. Clinton's Army
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opinionjournal.com
Mr. Clinton's Army
The military has suffered through eight years of
neglect.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Tuesday, October 10, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
Many people have come to believe that thinking
about war is akin to
fomenting it, preparing for it is as unjustifiable
as starting it, and
fighting it is only unnecessarily prolonging it.
History suggests that as a
consequence of these beliefs they will bear heavy
responsibility for the
defeat of American arms on a battlefield and in a
theater of war as yet
unknown. Theirs are the kind of illusions that
lead
to a nation recoiling
in shock and frustration, to the terrible
depression of its spirits, the
gratuitous encouragement of its enemies, and the
violent deaths of
thousands or tens of thousands, or more, of those
who not long before
were its children.
They will bear this responsibility along with
contemporaries who are so
enamored of the particulars of their well-being
that they have made
the government a kindly nurse of households, a
concierge and cook,
never mind a resurgent Saddam Hussein or China's
rapid development
of nuclear weapons. They will bear it along with
the partisans of
feminist and homosexual groups who see the
military
as a tool for
social transformation. And they will bear it with
a
generation of
politicians who have been guilty of willful
neglect
merely for the sake of
office.
So many fatuous toadies have been put in place in
the military that
they will undoubtedly pop up like toast to defend
Vice President Gore's
statement that "if our servicemen and -women
should
be called on to
risk their lives for the sake of our freedoms and
ideals, they will do so
with the best training and technology the world's
richest country can
put at their service." This is an abject lie.
To throw light on the vice president's assertion
that all is well, consider
that in Kosovo 37,000 aerial sorties were required
to destroy what
Gen. Wesley Clark claimed were 93 tanks, 53
armored
fighting vehicles,
and 389 artillery pieces; that these comprised,
respectively, 8%, 7%,
and 4% of such targets, leaving the Yugoslav army
virtually intact;
and that impeccable sources in the Pentagon state
that Yugoslav use
of decoys put the actual number of destroyed
tanks,
for example, in
the single digits.
To achieve with several hundred sorties of
$50-million airplanes the
singular splendor of destroying a Yugo, the United
States went without
carriers in the Western Pacific during a crisis in
Korea, and the Air
Force tasked 40% of its intelligence,
surveillance,
and reconnaissance
assets, and 95% of its regular and 65% of its
airborne tanker force, in
what the chief of staff called a heavier strain
than either the Gulf War
or Vietnam.
One reason for the "inefficiency" of Operation
Allied Force is that this
very kind of farce is funded by cannibalizing
operations and
maintenance accounts. Such a thing would not by
itself be enough to
depress the services as they are now depressed.
That has taken eight
years of magnificent neglect. Case in point: The
U.S. Navy now
focuses on action in the littorals, and must deal
with a burgeoning
inventory of increasingly capable Third World
coastal submarines that
find refuge in marine layers and take comfort from
the Navy's near
century of inapplicable blue-water antisubmarine
warfare. But our
budget for surface-ship torpedo defense will
shortly dip from not even
$5 million, to nothing in 2001.
The reduction of the military budget to two-thirds
of what it was (in
constant dollars) in 1985, and almost as great a
cut in force levels,
combined with systematic demoralization, scores of
"operations other
than war," and the synergistic breakdown that so
often accompanies
empires in decline and bodies wracked by disease,
have produced a
tidal wave of anecdotes and statistics. Twenty
percent of
carrier-deployed F-14s do not fly, serving as a
source of spare parts
instead. Forty percent of Army helicopters are
rated insufficient to
their tasks. Half of the Army's gas masks do not
work. Due to reduced
flying time and training opportunities within just
a few years of Bill
Clinton's first inauguration, 84% of F-15 pilots
had to be waived
through 38 categories of flight training. The
pilot
of the Osprey in the
December 1999 crash that killed 19 Marines had
only
80 hours in the
aircraft, and the pilot who sliced the cables of
the Italian aerial tram in
1998, killing 20, had not flown a low-altitude
training flight for seven
months. It goes on and on, and as the sorry state
of the military
becomes known, the administration responds by
doing
what it does
best.
In the manner of Gen. Clark presenting as a
success
the--exaggerated--claim of having destroyed 8% of
the Yugoslav tank
forces in 78 days of bombing, the administration
moved to "restructure"
the six armored and mechanized divisions by
shrinking force levels 15%
and armor 22%, while expanding the divisional
battle sector by 250%,
the idea being that by removing 3,000 men and 115
tanks and Bradley
Fighting Vehicles while vastly expanding the area
in which it would
have to fight, a division would somehow be made
more effective. The
two failed Army divisions cited by George W. Bush
in his acceptance
speech were returned to readiness with speed
inversely proportional to
the time it takes the White House to produce a
subpoenaed document,
perhaps because, according to the Army, "new
planning considerations
have enabled division commanders to make a more
accurate
assessment," and "the timelines for deployment . .
. have been
adjusted to better enable them to meet contingency
requirements." In
1995, brigade officials told the General
Accounting
Office that they felt
pressured to falsify readiness ratings, and that
the rubric "needs
practice" was applied irrespective of whether a
unit scored 99% or 1%
of the minimum passing grade.
That these components of an indelible picture are
in themselves small
parts is relevant only in that the best
intelligence is the proper notice
of small details. But there is more. Mainly by
coincidence but partly by
design, several broader measures exist. The Army
rates its echelons. In
1994, two-thirds of these were judged fully ready
for war. By 1999,
not one of them was. More than half the Army's
specialty schools have
received the lowest ratings, as did more than half
its combat training
centers (although the chaplains are doing very
well). These training
centers serve as an instrument that illuminates
the
character of all the
units that pass through them. By examining their
ratings it is possible
to get a comprehensive view of the Army's true
state.
I have obtained National Training Center trend
data
that are the
careful measure of unit performance in 60 areas
over three years. Of
200 evaluations, only two were satisfactory. This
99% negative
performance, stunning as it is, is echoed in the
preliminary findings of a
RAND study that, according to sources within the
Army, more than
90% of the time rates mission capability at the
battalion and the
brigade levels as insufficient. RAND has
voluminous
data and doesn't
want to talk about it until all the t's are
crossed, long after the
election.
If Gov. Bush becomes president, the armies his
father sent to the Gulf
will not be available to him, not after eight
years
of degradation at the
hands of Bill Clinton. Given that their parlous
condition is an invitation
to enemies of the United States and, therefore,
Mr.
Bush might need
them, and because the years of the locust are
always paid for in
blood, he should take this issue and with it
hammer
upon the doors of
the White House at dawn.
In the Second World War, Marine Brig. Gen. Robert
L. Denig said, with
homely elegance, "This is a people's war. The
people want to know,
need to know, and have a right to know, what is
going on." Nothing
could be truer, and the vice president of the
United States does not
speak the truth when he characterizes as he does
those forces that
for two terms his administrations have mercilessly
run down. The
American military does not deserve this. It is not
a cash cow for
balancing the budget, a butler-and-travel service
for the president, an
instrument of sexual equality, or a gendarmerie on
the model of a
French Foreign Legion with a broader mandate and
worse food.
If we are, in effect, the enemies of our own
fighting men, what will
happen when they go into the field? The military
must be redeemed.
Should Gov. Bush win in November he should bring
forward and promote
soldiers and civilians who understand military
essentials and the
absolute necessity of readiness and training,
people both colorful and
drab, but who would, all of them, understand that
these words of Gen.
George S. Patton are the order of the day:
In a former geological era when I was a boy
studying latin,
I had occasion to translate one of Caesar's
remarks which
as nearly as I can remember read something
like this:
"In the winter time, Caesar so trained his
legions in all that
became soldiers and so habituated them in the
proper
performance of their duties, that when in the
spring he
committed them to battle against the Gauls,
it
was not
necessary to give them orders, for they knew
what to do
and how to do it."
This quotation expresses very exactly the
goal
we are
seeking in this division. I know that we
shall
attain it and
when we do, May God have mercy on our
enemies;
they
will need it.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor
of
The Wall Street
Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont
Institute. His column
appears Tuesdays. |
