THIS is how this clown SHOULD have left office...
Posted on 07/18/2006 5:44:44 AM PDT by Quilla
The Army’s Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, has recently done something extraordinary within the realm of Beltway politics – he told the truth about our Army’s readiness. His message before the House Committee on the Armed Services was simple and disturbing:
Five years after 9-11 and the US Army, the service that bears the largest burden in this conflict, is still struggling to build a force capable of conducting a long -term global war within established budget constraints.
This grim assessment may be hard for some to accept, but we need to know the unvarnished truth if we are to be victorious in this long struggle. Gen. Schoomaker’s statement has not been widely publicized since it represents a major departure from the canned and formulaic readiness data spouted by his predecessors, and accepted as gospel by the media and certain spendthrift lawmakers.
I wrote about DC political and bureaucratic shenanigans in funding our military, barely a week before Gen. Schoomaker’s testimony, and was pleased that he reinforced some of the same major points I made.
The 90s drawdown – worse than we thought
Serving high-ranking public officials and flag officers rarely, if ever, bring up short-sighted policies of past administrations. In my view, the mere mention by Schoomaker of troop strength and funding reductions during the Clinton administration demonstrates that he was handed an Army in much worse shape than we had imagined.
Gen. Schoomaker notes that 500,000 Soldiers were given their pink slips during the drawdown of the 90s. Active duty strength was reduced by roughly 285,000, and just as important, an additional 215,000 Soldiers were dropped from the Reserve Component rolls. Therefore, on September 11, 2001, not only did undermanned active duty units have an even greater need for reserve Soldiers as trained fillers, but the reserve units also had a vastly reduced manpower pool to satisfy the need for replacements in preparation for deployment.
Army equipment and weapons systems were no better off during the years of neglect. As Schoomaker notes,
“Historically, the Army has been under resourced – and it is a fact that the decade preceding the attacks of September 11, 2001 was no exception. Army investment accounts were underfunded by approximately $100 billion …”
The previous Army leadership must however, share the blame for this mess by failing to prioritize scarce budget dollars. In the 90s, we spent billions of dollars on ill-advised, pie-in-the-sky military transformation programs in order to satisfy the vision of quick and neat wars with no or low casualties fought from 30,000 feet using laser designators. Also, combat troops spent less time on the tank gunnery range and maneuver training centers and more time as armed meals-on-wheels providers. Meanwhile, uniformed and civilian leaders who promoted this nonsense were allowing the best warfighting equipment in the world to fall into disuse as it sat in motorpools for months on end.
Help was not on the way
George Bush the candidate was likely sincere in his 2000 campaign promise that he would reverse the effects of a too-severe drawdown. Yet, once in office, it seems as if he and Rumsfeld had no desire to tackle the DC political and military establishment head-on. After 9-11, they experienced a game played by the Pentagon during the 90s that was cynically carried forward to the eve of OIF. That is, sandbag the Congress and the President about the inordinate number of troops required for an operation, or make a jargon-filled Pentagonese excuse and hope the whole thing gets called off before the boss finds out they can’t reasonably deliver on their promises. GW may have been sucker-punched with this bureaucratic technique, but an experienced player like Rumsfeld should have known better.
Operation Iraqi Freedom went ahead as planned, and the number of troops was sufficient for toppling Saddam’s regime, but ever since, the Army has been struggling to get out of a huge hole in the middle of a prolonged fight against Hussein’s Baathist irregulars. Rebuilding our troop strength up to stated pre-war levels has been a massive spending exercise with only a miniscule increase in numbers of Soldiers.
The equipment side of the equation has not received much help either. Gen. Schoomaker lays it out:
There were about $56 billion in equipment shortages at the opening of the ground campaign in Iraq [emphasis mine] in the spring of 2003. In contrast, at the height of the Second World War, Defense expenditures exceeded 38 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. Today, they amount to about 3.8 percent and are projected to shrink. In this extraordinarily dangerous time for the Nation, we can – and must – reverse this trend.
How does it happen that over two years after 9-11, after the successful campaign in Afghanistan and the buildup for OIF, that the Army was still $56 billion short of required equipment? As I noted in my earlier piece, the main culprit for this appalling situation is the flawed funding mechanism that makes use of discrete budget authorizations tied to specific military operations.
Since Congress thinks it must maintain both defense and non-defense related pork programs rather than make the tough budget decisions, only units scheduled for deployment are given spending authority to get their equipment fully repaired, and to order required sets, kits, and outfits. Even then, some units may receive this authorization so late in the game that they may have to embark without necessary gear. This is not a good way to prepare for battle. Gen. Schoomaker notes that policies of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) contribute to this budgetary sleight of hand in addition to Congressional reluctance to commit to victory.
Also, the bean counters at the Department of the Army continue to use meaningless or wildly unrealistic planning factors for calculating wartime costs. Gen. Schoomaker sets the record straight about battlefield operations:
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, crews are driving tanks in excess of 4,000 miles per year – five times more than programmed annual usage rates of 800 miles.
To the layman, this huge error may be chalked up to an estimate based on historical data from the previous years of OIF that didn’t play out due to unforeseen events, but it isn’t. This 800 mile planning factor was used in the late 80s in a peacetime training environment! To use this figure for budget programming in war over 20 years later is either a case of gross negligence or incompetence, or both.
We are falling behind
The SecDef took the bold move of recalling Gen. Schoomaker out of retirement to lead the US Army in a momentous time in our history. As evidenced by his candor and courage in his Congressional statement, the General did not disappoint. He realizes that our country is in a war of national survival, and as the Army’s top leader, he is willing to drop all political niceties in order to field a fully capable Army.
His sobering assessment comes at a critical time. We are in the third year of a massive reconstruction effort in Iraq that is too slowly coming to fruition mainly due to a one-year Sitzkrieg that allowed remnants of Saddam’s Baathist army to escape and regroup. Diplomatic options are going nowhere concerning Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs; perhaps we are not yet capable of conducting any meaningful military action. I sincerely hope this is not the case. And now, both the western and eastern anchors of our strategic maneuver in the Central Region have come under attack.
Under the President’s watch, the so-called pro-defense Republican executive branch and the Republican controlled Congress have lost a lot of credibility by not confronting Clinton holdovers in the defense establishment and the intelligence community. The Army is now paying the price for not dealing with our internal enemies and for continuing to kowtow to both defense and non-defense special interests.
When will our leaders get serious about this war?
Douglas Hanson is the national security correspondent of The American Thinker.
In the 1990s, we had an old roof in need of renovation, repair, and innovation.
Bill Clinton's solution was to get rid of the roof.
When one looks at the war in Iraq from afar, one gets the impression that the US Army can't put the enemy away. I am sure that professional observers from other countries may draw their own conclusions. An expression comes to mind - Guns instead of butter.
Sometime set you grandson or granddaughter on your knee and describe the kind of world that you are leaving to them.
THIS is how this clown SHOULD have left office...
Yep, and then he sold our neighbors rain making machines.
Hey, I'm all for this. However, social spending has probably increased 1000s-fold since then. Be nice to reverse that trend.
Don't get me wrong - everyone who stayed in wasn't "sick, lame or lazy", but I saw a lot of guys with great potential get out and take jobs with the airlines.
I've read a lot of editorials lately about how the military isn't planning for the "right war". The guys who write them don't understand that it takes 10-15 years to effectively fill gaps in the intermediate and senior ranks. The military can speed up promotions, but that only gives limited relief. You can't replace a 15 year veteran with someone with only a couple of years of supervisory experience without some impact to the organization. For one thing, the guy who replaces the new supervisor as a technician is going to be less experienced.
It takes a minimum of 10 years to field a new fighter plane, develop tactics, and train the pilots. The guys buying F-22s and F-35s aren't looking at the war on terror, or even the next war. They're looking 15-20 years down the road.
The manning engineers used to figure that it took about 7 years to feel the impact of drawdowns. If you reduce the number of people coming into the service you create a "wave" that ripples through the manning for the next 20 years.
Doesn't this author (and General Schoomaker) realize that there was a peace dividend paid in the 1990's and it was Bill Clinton's mission to both cashier it and squander it? How else to build a legacy during a period when there was no "history". Hey, the economy was great! Those $200 billion "deficits as far as the eye can see" vanished! Bill Clinton worked magic! All those reductions in Army personnel: they helped Clinton meet a campaign pledge to reduce the size of government (all coming from Defense) and in response to Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" -- and who can ever question Al's insights and creativity???
Now if George W and Rummy had just accepted the fact that they should have conducted this war using only bombs being dropped from 30,000 feet in both Afghanistan and Iraq, everything would be just peachy according to the Clinton playbook.
Finally, someone coming out and saying kkklinton is at fault for the Military being in the shape it was in on 9/11 and they are still feeling the effects 6 years later...
And some people want the kkklintons back in office?????
Far be it from me to defend Clinton for anything, but I was in the Air Force during Desert Storm. The military drawdowns and troop reductions began right after that war was finished under Bush 41's tenure.
The prevailing wisdom was that we had won the Cold War and were ready to cash in on the "peace dividend." The budget deficit was third-party spoiler Ross Perot's big issue to distract conservatives and pull support away from Bush. Military cuts in Bush's new world order of peace and safety were a done deal. Clinton just continued what Bush already started.
The wise and worldly will tell you today that massive armies are no longer needed because they never anticipate a global WWII-style conflict against national armies. They believe the future is low-intensity, assymetrical operations. The Russians and the Chinese are banking on us keeping this flawed paradigm and are intent on exploiting it in their own good time.
Heavens To Murtharoid!
Let's not forget who was Chairman, House Armed Services Committee when the cuts from the 1993 Bottoms Up review were engineered.
That's right... Broken Army Murtha!
I'm curious about Freeper opinions...should we have a draft in light of these remarks.
I believe that we should ramp up recruitment efforts and if we are not successful, we should consider a draft. We live in dangerouds times, and much of what may be needed, we must do alone.
Are we shorting ourselves in the hopes that the EU will assist us? It is a risk to great to bet on when the security of our western institutions is at stake.
If it takes this long for the US military, we should all consider the requirements for reuilding the Iraqi Army in that light as well, with far more handicaps.
Many are critical because the iraqi Army does nto take over for our military, but look how long it takes to even get trained up a decent non-com or a mid-level officer corps.
You are correct to a certain extent..... There was a logical drawdown after the demise of the Soviets. Clinton threw aside the Bush 41 recommended force structure and went with his own plan with much deeper cuts.
Google "Bottoms up review 1993"
Very good insight.
My understanding was that Bush 41 was aiming for a force restructuring.
My understanding of Clinton's policies was that they were aiming for a force reduction.
Clinton followed through with the reduction part of the restructuring, but didn't follow all the way with the rest of the restructuring envisioned by Bush 41's administration.
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