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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rich4eagle who wrote (207846)	12/7/2001 8:16:27 AM
From: Carolyn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I heard that directly from a military man. Here: hillsource.house.gov U.S. Military Resources Have Been Depleted by Years of Clinton/Gore Neglect The Clinton/Gore Administration has stretched our military forces thin in the past seven years. Between 1960 and 1991, the United States Army conducted 10 "operational events." In the past eight years, the Army has conducted 26 operational events --- 2 1/2 times that number in 1/3 the time span. Today, there are 265,000 American troops in 135 countries. Since the end of the Gulf War, our military has shrunk by 40 percent. Army divisions have dropped from 18 to 10. The Army has reduced its ranks by more than 630,000 soldiers and civilians and closed over 700 installations at home and overseas. Since 1990, the Air Force has shrunk from 36 fighter wings (active and reserve) to 20. The Air Force has downsized by nearly 40 percent while simultaneously experiencing a fourfold increase in operational commitments. At the height of the Reagan Administration build-up, the Navy had 586 ships. Now it only has 324. The Clinton Administration’s current blueprint calls for that number to further drop to 305. If the rate of ship construction and retirement by this administration is continued, that number could fall to only 200 ships by 2020. Since 1987, active duty military personnel have been reduced by more than 800,000. To illustrate that problem: Last June, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group deployed with 770 fewer personnel than it did on its previous deployment three years before. At about the same time, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, another carrier, began a 6-month deployment 464 people short of its 2,963 authorized billets. Late last year, the USS Enterprise deployed for the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf short 400 personnel. The Navy has total of 22,000 empty slots in a 324-ship fleet. The armed services already suffer a severe ammunition shortfall going into the Kosovo engagement. According to the Service Chiefs, the FY99 ammunition shortfall for the Marine Corps is $193 million. For the Army in FY00, it is a shocking $3.5 billion. The equipment we have is aging. The average age of the B-52H bombers—now in use in the Balkans—is 37 years old. The average age of the Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAV) is 26 years old. The design of the CH-46 helicopter—a Marine mainstay—is approximately 40 years old. A-10 pilots flying over Kosovo have been forced to spend their own money to buy inferior, off-the-shelf GPS receivers at local stores and attach them with Velcro to their planes to use in conjunction with their outdated survival radios should their planes crash. At a congressional hearing held in February at the Navy’s Strike and Air Warfare Center in Fallen, NV – the world-renowned "Top Gun" fighter pilot school – Members were told that mechanical problems had grounded 14 of the center’s 23 aircraft. More than half of the B1-Bs at Ellsworth AFB are not mission capable because they lack critical parts.