Can We Fight the Next War?
Reader's Digest
May 1999 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak
If we continue to neglect our soldiers, the answer may be no
FORT HOOD in Killeen, Texas, is supposed to be one of the Army's most important bases, but you wouldn't guess this from the infantry barracks we visited. "See that?" said Sgt. Maj. John Driver, pointing to the paint peeling from the shabby ceiling. "Now take a look at the bathrooms."
Shower pipes were rusting, toilets and outside sewage drains leaked, and the whole place reminded us of some run-down public-housing unit. "Why don't we fix all this?" Driver asked. "Because we've had to borrow from our maintenance and repair account to pay for our operational needs." Those "needs" include weapons and spare parts.
Elsewhere, at Fort Hood's 67th Armor motor pool, scores of 40-foot-long, 28-wheeled tank transporters are parked row upon row across a stretch of asphalt about the size of a football field. "I have only 65 percent of my truck-driver slots filled," says Lt. Col. Joe Games, commander of the 180th Transport Battalion. "I'm 20 percent short of my manning level for heavy mechanics," he adds. Last year the 180th was rated C-4, a combat classification that means "unable to meet war-fighting commitment."
Overstretched. Old and crumbling facilities. Missing parts and missing people. What we saw at Fort Hood is sadly characteristic throughout the nation's armed forces. The Air Force is short of pilots and the highly skilled ground crew to maintain its planes. The Navy is fighting to maintain aging equipment and depleted ammunition stocks, and is putting ships to sea (including its newest air-craft carrier, USS Harry S. Truman) with hundreds of shipboard slots unfilled. The Marines are tearing apart Vietnam-era CH-46 helicopters to find parts to keep others flying.
The blunt fact is that the U. S. military is a shadow of its former self. This is partly by design: the end of the Cold War allowed for dramatic defense reductions, and so military spending has dropped from 26.5 to 14.6 percent of the federal budget, while the number of military personnel has declined from 3.3 million to 2.2 million. But the shrinkage of metal and muscle has progressed from the calculated to the critical. Last fall, Army General Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came before the Senate Armed Services Committee seeking budget increases to prevent "a continuation of downward trends in readiness."
The admission was startling. Under unusually tough questioning, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines conceded that the picture of our military forces was not as bright as they had been painting in the past few years. "The fact is that you were not candid," Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) chastised the officers. Probing by McCain and other Senators began the unfolding of what is now seen to be a crisis in equipment, personnel and unit readiness.
Senate Armed Services investigators who visited bases last fall confirmed that the weapons and hardware bought during President Reagan's buildup of the mid-'80s need to be replaced by a new generation of fighter aircraft and bombers, battle tanks, personnel carriers, ships and missiles.
Low Morale. Meanwhile, the quality of life for personnel is deteriorating. "It is demoralizing to the men and women we send into harm's way," McCain told the Senate last fall. "It is incomprehensible to the American people, who expect a well-trained and well equipped force, to witness military personnel--up to 25,000--on food stamps." That's right, food stamps, the government program for our poorest citizens.
Enlisted men and junior officers are leaving the military in record numbers, and along with low pay and reduced benefits, Senator McCain points to "extended family separations'' as a reason. "You're constantly in the field," enlisted man Scott Hartman of the 10th Mountain Division told the Los Angeles Times. "You're in some Third World country fighting over who knows what."
Hartman's marriage broke up under repeated and prolonged separations. He's leaving the service after nine years and deployments to Somalia, Germany, Haiti, the Egyptian Sinai and, under his latest orders, Korea.
Hartman's comments point to a paradox. During 40 years of the Cold War, 1949-89, the Army made ten deployments away from its home bases in Europe, the United States and the Far East. Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to more, not fewer, deployments. Army units, for example, have been sent around the world for lengthy deployments some 30 times.
Soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen are sent overseas to be cops in Bosnia, evacuate civilians in Africa, prop up the government in Haiti, patrol the borders of Macedonia, do rescue work in Central America.
The burden of these deployments is palpable. Because of training, medical absences, fewer recruits and loss of existing personnel, the Navy has been short as many as 22,000 sailors this year--a huge strain on its ability to man its fighting ships, despite the fact that the fleet has shrunk from nearly 600 to about 330. The Navy's shortfall is coupled with a 26-percent increase in "at-sea time" since 1992.
Moreover, the all-important retention rate for carrier pilots, who have by far the most challenging and dangerous flying task, is estimated at 19 percent. The taxpayer investment in a fully trained carrier pilot is close to $15 million.
A recent survey of enlisted men asked why they are leaving in such large numbers. Inadequate retirement benefits and less-than-competitive pay were often cited. In fact, chairman Shelton told the Senate that these were the top two areas of concern across all four services.
Gigantic Bluff. When the American military successfully fought in the 1991 Gulf War, it had forces sufficient to wage a second regional conflict, if one had arisen. Is that still true? What if an outbreak on the Korean peninsula had occurred while President Clinton was bombing Iraq last December?
When Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.) asked the Joint Chiefs about the risk of fighting two conflicts at once, as called for in our national strategic doctrine, their responses were not reassuring. "We would lose terrain that we would subsequently have to regain," chairman Shelton testified. "That means that the casualties would be higher."
The Army's Gen. Dennis Reimer explained that to win both wars would require "all of the Army's reserve components," and that even then, 70,000 troops would have to be "swung" from one war to the other side of the world. Air Force General Michael E. Ryan said flatly: "From an airlift standpoint, the Air Force is not a two-war operation."
Respected experts outside of government are blunter. "The U. S. grand strategy is, in essence, a gigantic bluff," writes John Hillen, senior fellow for political-military studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Our armed forces could not replicate the Desert Storm force today," he notes. "They couldn't even come close."
Some numbers help put this in perspective. The five second echelon Army divisions, which would have to be brought into play in a second war, are shot through with deficiencies, according to a General Accounting Office study conducted for the House Committee on National Security in 1998. Of 162 infantry squads in the famed 10th Mountain Division at the time of the GAO study, 24 were not minimally staffed. More than a quarter of the remaining 138 squads were not qualified to execute wartime tasks. In the 1st Infantry Division, also a second-war unit, the 1st Brigade lacks almost half the soldiers needed to man its Bradley troop carriers.
Price in Blood. As Commander in Chief, Bill Clinton necessarily bears ultimate responsibility for the present deficiencies in military readiness. But Congress is far from blameless. It rejected the last stage of a bipartisan plan to close unneeded military bases, for example. Secretary of Defense William Cohen says this measure, if taken, would eventually generate at least $4 billion a year in savings that could be spent on pay, retirement, readiness and quality of life.
Congress has also loaded the budget with weapons, equipment and other projects the Pentagon has not sought--pork-barrel gluttony designed to attract campaign contributions and re-election support. Officers shake their heads trying to figure out what $5 million earmarked for the "National Defense Center for Environmental Excellence'' will do to enhance readiness. Says Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.): "I don't think we contribute much when we add a lot of equipment the Pentagon has not asked for."
Late last year Congress voted a 3.6-percent increase in military pay effective January 1--more than President Clinton then wanted. At the beginning of this year, with recruitment and re-enlistments falling and the specter of a "hollow force" growing, the President proposed a 4.4-percent pay raise, a $4-billion real increase in the fiscal 2000 defense budget, and the promise to "add" another $8 billion through a combination of anticipated "inflation savings,'' delayed funding and other accounting tactics. Congress sought to trump the President with a $20-billion increase. The Pentagon says it will need at least $112 billion more over the next six years to begin to stop the erosion to the force.
Meanwhile, as the politicians jockey for position on the issue, we continue to lose veteran soldiers, sailors and airmen. In a letter to Senate Armed Service Committee Chairman John Warner (R., Va.), retiring Command Sgt. Maj. Clifton P. O'Brien, the senior enlisted man in a top-rated, special-operations airborne unit, spoke for his comrades in arms: "If you don't fund, train, properly equip or take care of them, they may fail when we need them most. The price we will pay can't be measured in dollars. Our sons and daughters will pay the price in blood and body bags."
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