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Show National Defense Strategy vs. Funding Disconnect: I Think I Can, I Think I Can't, I Know I Can't James V. Hansen To extend the train analogy, "two MRC" represents the right rail designed to tackle the mountain head-on. These two rails, strategy and resources, started to diverge only months after Secretary Aspin first declared the "two MRC" national military strategy. Then Aspin announced that, incredibly, the right force structure required to meet two MRC's was just "Win-Hold-Win" plus only two army divisions. This plan also just happened to stay within his budget allowance. The Sound of a Train Wreck in Slow Motion Uniformed military men and women were incredulous, but characteristically stoic. After all, they were members of the executive branch of government, sworn to defend the Constitution and respect the President as Commander-in-Chief and their superior in the chain of command. You did not hear them saying "I think I can, I think I can," but that's what they surely meant when they repeatedly said "we are doing more with less." Our military leaders continued to salute smartly when the President ordered them out into a post-Cold War world that was not as peaceful as the already-spent peace dividend had promised. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and scores of smaller deployments followed. In fact, while the military budget was cut nearly 40 percent, the number of overseas deployments rose about 400 percent. More and more of us began to see that the train was coming off the tracks. Predictably, the rank and file soldier, sailor, airman and marine began to chafe at the high operational tempo. Many were spending more than 200 days a year separated from spouse and children, year after year, in murky engagements with murkier exit strategies. Reports of increases in military spouse and child abuse as well as climbing divorce rates inexorably began to surface. Soon, word of deteriorating conditions in the military got out. Career servicemen and women, historically our best recruiters, were advising their children, siblings and friends to avoid military service. Recruiting success declined drastically. In 1998, Army quotas were short by more than 7,000 soldiers in a single year, and the Air Force failed to reach its goals for the first time in nearly 30 years. With its 12,000 man shortage, the Navy recently lowered its entrance standards and stopped discharging overweight and misbehaving sailors just to keep afloat. A recent survey published in the October 4th edition of the Navy Times reported that startlingly high percentages of enlisted servicemen had had enough, and were getting out - 48 percent in the Marine Corps, 55 percent for the Army, 70 percent in the Air Force, and 75 percent in the Navy! Perhaps just as alarming, equipment readiness indicators began to drop. Air Force mission capable rates for fighter aircraft fell below their minimum allowable levels, with the non-mission capable rate for F-16 fighters doubling. More than half of all B-l bombers could not take off for lack of spare parts. As the March 8, 1999 edition of Aviation Week and Space Technology reported, the Navy's famous Top Gun training unit could only generate 6 of the required 15 F-18 sorties, and 1 or 2 of the 4 F-14 sorties required to train aviators prior to deployment - all for a lack of spare engines and avionics parts. Crash rates for single engine F-16's, like those flown at Utah's Hill Air Force Base, rapidly rose to 5 times the historic trend. Meanwhile, the President has continued to task an already over-tasked military - effectively accelerating the train toward the split in the tracks. After cruise missile attacks against Afghan terrorists, Iraqi weaponeers, and Balkan thugs, the supply of munitions in our stockpile reached critically low levels. Due to frequent use of President Clinton's weapon of choice, we now have fewer Air Launched Cruise Missiles than we have bombers to launch them. Tomahawk cruise missile stockpiles got so low that regional commanders were raiding each other's war reserve supplies to meet their daily tasking. For the first time since the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy was forced to leave the entire Pacific Ocean unguarded by a carrier battle group while it strained to cover simultaneous conflicts in Iraq and Kosovo. Under "two MRC," the U.S. is supposed to be able to fight two wars nearly simultaneously, yet we are unable to maintain even mere presence in the world while none of the President's current engagements qualified as a Major Regional Conflict! Dealing with the Disconnect Citing these alarming readiness trends, we in the Congress took notice. For years the military service chiefs toed the administration line. "All of our requirements are met by the President's budget," they repeatedly testified. It was apparently lost on them that the same Constitution that placed the President over them as Commander-in-Chief, also placed the responsibility to "raise and support Armies" and to "provide and maintain a Navy" squarely on Congress. Fortunately, and to the credit of a handful of brave officers, this tune has begun to change. Only by 1998 did the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally begin to admit the disparity between the stated strategy and fiscal pressure - even if obliquely. At first the code words were difficult to recognize. The line changed to "all of our essential requirements are met by the President's budget," then, most recently, to "all of our most critical, essential requirements are met." Statements about readiness to conduct both MRC's, likewise, have started to hint at the danger. In the past 18 months, the Joint Chiefs' assessment of risk for that second conflict has gone from "high" to "very high" - a military diplomatic euphemism for impossible. We, in Congress, began to authorize and fund many of the Service Chiefs' (oxymoronic) "nonessential requirements." Predictably, the press and the President then 94 |
