http://www.thenewrepublic.com/091100/easterbrook091100.html The myth of the hollow military. Apocryphal Now By GREGG EASTERBROOK Issue date: 09.11.00 Post date: 08.31.00 The president of the United States stood in downtown Kiev, cheered by thousands waving American flags. Throughout the seas he had traversed, vast American supercarrier battle groups roamed the waves at will, while U.S. submarines patrolled the depths and an unseen network of acoustic listening posts tracked the world's few remaining unfriendly vessels. In the skies through which the president had traveled, American fighters, bombers, and jammers enjoyed uncontested supremacy. On land, U.S. troops camped in no fewer than 70 nations. In space, an unparalleled satellite network silently watched potential adversaries, vigilant for any exhaust plume or coded transmission that might signal trouble. Back home, thousands of tanks, jets, and helicopters sat in reserve. While the president visited Kiev, American personnel examined Site 49 near Severomorsk, once one of Russia's most closely guarded secrets This is no Tom Clancy fantasy; it describes the conditions surrounding Bill Clinton's visit to Ukraine two and a half months ago. The American military is, at this moment, more powerful relative to its foes than any armed force in history And yet, in this year's presidential campaign, the American Armed Forces are widely described as crumbling. George W. Bush, in a much-publicized speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last month, bemoaned a "military in decline." At the Republican National Convention, Gulf war hero Norman Schwarzkopf derided the Pentagon as enfeebled. The Armed Services are in a "downward spiral" (Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott), "neglected" (Senator John McCain), in "bad" shape (Representative Curt Weldon), and "could not fight and win against Iraq today" (Representative Duncan Hunter). Bush advisers routinely describe the American military as a "hollow force." So where does this hollowness reside? In nuclear arms, Russia has about the same number of warheads as the United States, but many are unusable. Russia's sea-launched warheads, its most valuable kind, are effectively decommissioned because Moscow's strategic submarine fleet is in such poor repair that it rarely ventures far from port. (And when it does, well, think Kursk.) By contrast, several of America's Ohio-class strategic submarines are at sea at any given moment, and each bears enough force to incinerate every major target in Russia and China. Versus America's thousands of missile-borne warheads, ready to launch on a few minutes' notice, China possesses 18 antiquated single-warhead icbms that require hours or days of launch preparation, plus a single nuclear-missile submarine that almost never departs its dock slip. America may not have a reliable missile defense, something no country has ever had; but, if any country ever does, the United States will be the first. Overall, America's strategic deterrent is today stronger relative to the rest of the world than it has been at any point since the United States' brief atomic monopoly in the late '40s. In air power, America today possesses more jet bombers, more advanced fighter planes and tactical aircraft, and more aerial tankers, which allow fighters and bombers to operate far from their home soil, than all the other nations of the world combined. In the post-World War II era, American aircraft have flown with near impunity throughout the world. Since the early Vietnam war years, U.S.-built aircraft have decisively won every air battle in which they have participated. On the seas, the U.S. Navy boasts more than twice as many principal combat ships as Russia and China combined, plus a dozen supercarrier battle groups, compared with zero for the rest of the world. Included in the supercarrier contingent are eight astonishingly large and sophisticated Nimitz-class floating cities, crewed by nearly 6,000 people and capable of launching more aircraft per minute than Chicago's O'Hare Airport; a ninth, the Ronald Reagan, is being readied for christening. (Russia possesses the world's only non-American heavy carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but the ship is in such poor condition that it is widely viewed as a fish reef looking for a place to sink.) The power and quality of U.S. Burke-class destroyers and the new Virginia-class attack submarines are similarly unmatched. The United States rules the blue water without opposition. In fact, it possesses the only fleet in the world designed for anything broader than shore defense and regional action. On the ground, the U.S. Army not only rolls the world's best armor (including nearly 8,000 of the fearfully effective Abrams tanks, more than the combined number of modern tanks possessed by Russia and China), but, as the Gulf war showed, it has the world's best-trained troops. China has more soldiers, but the bulk of them are poorly educated forced conscripts, while America boasts the best-educated large military ever. Ninety-nine percent of American troops are high school graduates, almost all officers have finished college, and a master's degree or higher is essential for promotion at the top. The education and training shows. Iraq actually brought to the Gulf war a larger ground force than the United States, yet the army was so thoroughly routed that it sometimes appeared that the Iraqis weren't even firing their weapons. Often they weren't: Abrams tanks possess such effective long-range cannon and fire control that in most clashes they destroyed Iraq's best Russian-built armor while the enemy tanks were a full mile too far away to begin shooting back. In amphibious forces, other nations have service branches called "marines," but none possesses anything like the U.S. Marines In money, American military spending is three times China's and Russia's combined. America spends more on defense than the next twelve highest-spending nations put together. Even adjusting for the fact that American soldiers are well-paid while many of the world's are not, the money edge is huge: 63 percent of world military spending comes from the United States and its close allies. Much of that money pays for an extraordinary logistical infrastructure. During World War II, supplies expended per U.S. soldier in the field worked out to 60 pounds per day, including fuel and water; by the Gulf war, the figure was up to 400 pounds, all delivered to the right place at the right time without snafus. In the six-month buildup to the Gulf war, the United States moved more tonnage over a greater distance than in the two-year buildup to Normandy. In technology, U.S. "smart" weapons increasingly hit their targets exactly In concept, America is the world's sole military whose primary mission is not defense. Practically the entire U.S. military is an expeditionary force, designed not to guard borders The devotees of the "hollow military" school do not deny that America's Armed Services have a glittering postwar record, but they argue that, during the Clinton years, the forces have suffered serious erosion. The claim contains grains of truth but greatly underestimates the continuing magnitude of U.S. strength. It's true that personnel resources are strained in places. Army and Marine staffing is fine, but the Navy is struggling with its personnel requirements But the military is already addressing such problems Readiness has indeed fallen in the last few years from its postwar high under President Bush. But as Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, has shown, the "mission capable" rate for aircraft, tanks, and other key systems now runs from 70 to 80 percent, about the same as during the Reagan presidency. Since 1998, when the Joint Chiefs began expressing concerns, the Pentagon readiness budget has increased significantly Some note with alarm that defense spending has declined almost 40 percent in real-dollar terms from its 1986 cold war peak, mirroring the 40 percent drop in active-duty personnel. But no one, including at the Pentagon, believes spending needed to stay at the '80s level: the American military has always ebbed in the years after a win, and the cold war was emphatically a win. As part of the contraction, the Army has decreased from 18 divisions to 10, while Navy and Air Force units have declined by around one-third. Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney says this shows the Defense Department is atrophying. But the reduction in divisions, combatant ships, and fighter wings follows basically the contraction strategy laid out by Cheney himself when he was secretary of defense, in a 1990 document called the Base Force review. For all their fiery rhetoric, Republicans and Democrats today don't fundamentally disagree about defense spending, as they did, say, during the Carter and Reagan years. Since Clinton took office, his defense-budget proposals have never differed from Republican counterproposals by more than 2 percent. For fiscal 2001, for example, Clinton proposed an increase of about 4 percent; congressional Republicans replied by proposing an increase of slightly less than 6 percent of the Pentagon budget. On the campaign trail, George W. Bush has suggested increasing military spending by somewhat more than $5 billion per year Many of the military's current problems stem not from hollowing out but from bloating. And many of the very congressmen who complain about military decline are to blame. For instance, for years the Pentagon has requested permission to close additional redundant bases and has been denied; last spring the Senate voted to postpone further base-closure decisions until at least 2003. Congressional patrons also insist on expensive programs the Pentagon doesn't want. The V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft The bloat isn't confined to big-ticket items. Fully two-thirds of the Pentagon budget goes to personnel, operations, and maintenance, and most observers think nowhere near enough has been done to make routine procurement market-efficient. Only recently, for example, did Pentagon quartermasters win the authority to buy minor office supplies without filing formal purchase orders. And most basic provisions used by U.S. forces overseas are still shipped from the United States rather than purchased "on the economy." Retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, president of Business Executives for National Security, calculates that if the Pentagon did more of its nonmilitary purchasing in standard commercial ways, "outsourced" all work that does not require military personnel, and closed unneeded bases, it could save $30 billion annually Weapons-buying also needs reform. Despite numerous efforts to bring market principles to big-ticket acquisitions The V-22 aircraft, for example, cost $80 million each One reason prices are so high is the sluggish pace at which weapons systems are built. The average development cycle for a weapons program is now eleven years Take the F-22. Prototypes were airborne, and flying impressively, in 1991. So did the aircraft go into production? No, it suffered through a full decade of "engineering development," Pentagonese for periods in which the main action is lobbying and budget increases. In the case of the F-22, "engineering development" served mainly to increase the plane's cost and weight: no important features or design elements were changed. According to the current timetable, the F-22 will not actually enter service until 2005, which will be 14 years after the first models left the runway Retired Air Force Colonel John Warden, chief planner for the Gulf air war, believes counterintuitively that the solution to cost overruns is lots of small projects. "When you've got a program designed to last for decades and buy hundreds of airplanes, this gives contractors a tremendous stake in running up the price," Warden says. "Everyone in the [Pentagon] becomes incredibly conservative, because they don't want to be blamed for killing a huge program. There are endless review boards and extra bureaucracy, while the designers realize this may be the only airplane they field in their entire careers, so they gold plate it with everything." Warden notes that the F-117 stealth fighter was conceived in 1978 and operational by 1983, at a cost that, converted to current dollars, equals nearly one-third of the F-22 price. "The reason the F-117 was built cheaply and quickly is that it was a small-batch program of about 50 planes; no one's career would have been ruined or no contractor bankrupted if the thing failed," Warden says. "The F-22 program is too big to fail, and that leads to bloat." Warden thinks that if the military fielded small numbers of new fighters every few years rather than one mega-project per decade, as it currently does, total costs would fall, and the planes themselves would improve, because each successive generation could express the latest twists in technology. Given that the F-22's basic concept was developed in 1986, by the time the plane finally goes out to the flight line, this "new" fighter will be based on technological assumptions that are 20 years old. "If you were designing the F-22 today, there's no way it would look the way it does Overpricing is especially important because in the next few years the military needs to buy a lot of new weapons. The '90s, defense analysts say, were a "procurement holiday," because the Reagan buildup supplied so many tanks, ships, and airplanes that Bush and Clinton didn't need to fund many. If the U.S. military is to remain unchallenged, that holiday must end. The Army needs more battlefield rockets, a new advanced rapid-fire howitzer, and new light armor for the rapid-reaction divisions it is assembling for Kosovo-style missions. The Navy's Virginia-class submarines will ensure years of U.S. mastery of the oceans, but only if they're funded and hit with champagne bottles. The Navy has also contemplated a type of new vessel, an "arsenal ship" designed to launch cruise missiles by the hundreds, making future Serbia-scale operations more decisive while lowering the risk to pilots and civilians. (No one is saying so, but an arsenal ship might also be ideal for a future U.S. defense of Israel.) The two Clinton terms included only one major aircraft-acquisition program. Now five are "spooling up" simultaneously The new fighters alone could run $350 billion, or more than a year's total Pentagon spending. Throw in some funding for an anti-missile system, and you can see why the Joint Chiefs think the defense budget needs to rise by as much as $30 billion annually. Defense Secretary Cohen has said the next generation of weapons is "going to cost more money, and we ought to face up to it." But ending the procurement holiday does not necessarily require a larger budget. McInerney estimates the military could save all the money it needs for new weapons by reforming its purchasing. Those who claim the military needs to be more expensive to keep from being hollow are missing the point. What the Armed Forces need is to be as smart in their purchasing as they are in battle. Crucial to that effort is for the military finally to adapt to the post-cold-war world. The Pentagon has been refreshingly forthright about the passing of "the threat," as the Soviet Union was known to the services: there's no cold war nostalgia among generals and admirals. But, though the Pentagon has let go of the cold war as a mission, it clings with incredible determination to the organizational hierarchy that mission dictated Why, for example, does the post-cold-war Navy need a dozen carrier battle groups when today's world offers no other powerful navy to fight? Why does the Air Force refuse to give up its "roles and missions" budget control over close air support (the planes that aid troops in battle) when it shows no enthusiasm for this job? (The Air Force prefers "deep strike" missions behind enemy lines.) Why has the Army continued to emphasize heavy armor designed to destroy other armor when fast deployment of light forces is what it is increasingly asked to do? Why do the Marines have their own private air division, except for fear that the other services won't come to their aid? Perhaps most fundamentally, why does the Pentagon cling to its "two war" planning structure Pentagon reform is stymied by interservice rivalry. The Army insists on its own close air support units, because Army leadership does not trust the Air Force to send planes to support troops at the center of a battle. That insistence both wastes money and potentially costs lives, since what the Army has for this purpose is the Apache anti-tank helicopter, the one U.S. weapon that didn't work in the Serbia campaign. A cold-war-era Pentagon agreement says that while the Air Force, Marines, and Navy can have planes and helicopters, the Army can have only helicopters. This forces the Army to field the woeful Apache, because, according to the Pentagon's outmoded organizational chart, the Army's alternative is nothing. Following the interservice follies of the 1983 Grenada operation And so turf fights continue to impede post-cold-war restructuring. In a cogent new book, Lifting the Fog of War, retired Admiral Bill Owens notes that because individual services propose weapons projects, each tends to build its own empire rather than address military needs generally. Thus the Navy keeps proposing more money for carrier battle groups while putting the more cost-effective arsenal ship on the back burner, because it could make carriers seem outdated, imperiling the Navy's budget share. The flyboys lobby hard for the F-22 What might a revamped post-cold-war American military look like? Owens believes the Armed Forces could safely continue to reduce overall personnel, as the Army begins to realize the kind of technology-based productivity improvements that have already come to the Navy and Air Force. Role-and-mission traditions could be scrambled if a unified Joint Chiefs adopted a "whatever works" approach to conflicted issues like close air support. As the cost of technology falls, smart bombs, which even today constitute only a small share of U.S. munitions Perhaps cumbersome procurement rules might even be loosened so that new-economy technology entrepreneurs, and not just the aerospace old boys' network, could contribute ideas to national defense. "Consolidation has made the existing [aerospace] firms too large and not agile," Warden, the retired colonel, says. "If we brought true U.S. private initiative to defense, we'd be thinking up clever new technological ideas much faster than adversaries could devise countermeasures." Real defense reform of the kind Warden suggests could make the U.S. Armed Forces even stronger, while generating budget cuts that offset the expense of new weapons. If the Pentagon does one day "hollow out," it is less likely to be because America's leaders haven't given the military sufficient money than because they haven't given military affairs sufficient thought. The British military writer James Adams, who's being read around the Pentagon these days, recently wrote, "Peacekeeping and warfare today are taking place in a world the likes of which we have never seen." Actually, we have seen it NBTSWikiWiki | Recent Changes Edited 2 times, last edited on September 6, 2000 by 63.25.157.154. © 2000 NBTSC Webmasters |
the home of its navy's nuclear stockpile. America's vanquished foes in Moscow had asked the victors to go there to improve security. In return, the United States allowed Russian officers into its installations. But the Russians came mainly as peddlers offering leftover war hardware. With no chance of actually opposing the U.S. military, they figured they might as well become its supplier.
