Military overstretch, part XXIII
By Phillip Carter - Intel Dump
Esther Schrader reports in Thursday's L.A. Times on a hearing by the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday where the service chiefs testified they were running into dangerous manpower and materiel shortfalls. The shortages exist largely because of the global war on terrorism, and the failure so far by the services to refit themselves -- derivative of the failure by Congress and the Pentagon to shift funding into areas like resetting the pre-positioned fleets. The effects exist in other areas too, like manpower recruiting and retention, and may lead to dire results for the military down the road. According to Ms. Schrader:
In testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, the service chiefs said the military would need considerably more money for Iraq over the next year. The chiefs of the Army and Marines in particular stressed the increasing difficulty of recruiting and retaining soldiers, and then equipping them for combat.
"Make no mistake, today we are at war," Gen. Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, told lawmakers.
In the last year, as the insurgency in Iraq has grown, "the demand on the force has increased exponentially," Hagee said. "This demand is especially telling in the strain on our Marines, their families, and on our equipment and materiel stocks."
For the Army, which has 110,000 soldiers serving in Iraq — five times as many troops as the Marine Corps — the strain is particularly acute, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said. Despite racing over the last year to install heavy armor on its fleet of more than 8,000 Humvees in Iraq, it has so far manufactured the armor for only half, he said. And not all of that has been installed on the vehicles.
The Army has sent more than 400,000 sets of body armor to its forces in Iraq but needs 373,000 more this year, Schoomaker said.
It has equipped soldiers serving in the war with 180,000 sets of top-of-the-line clothing and fighting equipment under an initiative to rapidly equip the forces, but it is short 131,000.
The Army is also rushing to provide its troops with 41,600 more radios, 33,500 M-4 carbines and 25,000 machine guns, and to repair thousands of tactical wheeled vehicles, Schoomaker said.
Current operations take a heavy toll. That's not news, and it's not surprising. Gen. Hagee is right -- we're at war, and we should devote every available resource to winning the war as expeditiously and efficiently as possible -- especially in terms of lives. But we must also recognize that there is a future for the U.S. military beyond this war, and that certain actions we take now will either help or hurt tomorrow's military. Despite its size, the defense budget is finite. And when you pour your money into current operations, other things will suffer -- like maintenance, recapitalization, transformation, long-term personnel investment, and so forth. I wrote earlier this year about the problems the military faced in its pre-positioned vehicle fleet -- those problems have not been abated yet. There has been talk of the Army reprogramming funds from one area to another to fix the matter, but that hasn't happened. And some of this refitting cannot happen until the fighting in Iraq is over. Nonetheless, the military (and Congress) must start looking at the effects of today's war on tomorrow's military. If they don't, we may be vastly underprepared for the next fight, wherever and whenever it happens. |
