thedrifter
11-26-04, 06:31 AM
11-25-2004
From the Editor:
More Signs of a Military Unraveling
By Ed Offley
When I first heard about the bedsheet cutbacks a couple of months ago, I thought it was some weird practical joke: To save money, a local Navy base planned to end a longstanding practice where staff housekeepers washed and replaced the sheets and pillowcases in the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Henceforth, a bunch of single ensigns and lieutenants were being banished to the local laundromat.
Now I know better. This was no joke – instead, it was a precursor of the oncoming train wreck.
The defense train wreck.
All but drowned out by the videotapes of street battles in Iraq and the shouting TV-heads of the 2004 presidential race, a long-ignored resource crisis confronting the U.S. military has steadily worsened over the past year.
Simply put: The massive structural under-financing of military operations and the intentional plundering of military procurement funds in the decade before 9/11 set the stage for the defense train wreck.
By 2000, the Defense Department had been short-changed by an estimated $426 billion over actual requirements during the previous decade, mostly in deferred or cancelled procurement. Despite hefty increases in defense spending since then, the Defense Department and White House have grossly underestimated the actual costs for prosecuting the war in Iraq, allowing the dangerous trend to continue despite the apparent infusion of new funding.
It is not difficult to find evidence of the looming crisis in major defense program activities. As I noted in an article about the Navy several months ago (“Navy’s Newest Heads for Troubled Waters,” DefenseWatch, Aug. 28, 2004), barring a turnabout in new ship construction rates, the sea service is vanishing before our very eyes as the size of the fleet steadily declines from about 300 ships to a projected level of 120 in the next two decades.
My colleague, Senior Editor Paul Connors, revealed this summer a future massive downsizing of Air Force tactical aviation driven by the same budget pressures (“Smaller Fighter Force On The Way,” DefenseWatch, July 14, 2004). And it’s impossible to write about the Army or its reserve components nowadays without tripping over the multiple problems of deployment “overstretch” and unit manning woes that have occurred by shoving a 10-division ground force into a 20-division wartime operational requirement.
What is distressing to realize is that no one – the DoD civilian leadership, Joint Chiefs of Staff, congressional defense committees or even the White House – is taking this problem seriously. That is because correcting the lag in procurement, closing the end-strength personnel gap, and covering all wartime operating costs will require an order of magnitude increase in defense spending.
Meanwhile, instances of what I term “21st century chicken****” are proliferating. These are variants of the BOQ bedsheet ban, instigated by frantic military middle managers to keep the checks from bouncing.
Item: The Baltimore Sun revealed today that a shortage of Army officers available for staff duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is prompting the service to consider imposing changes in a number of longstanding programs to provide the warm bodies for a new 12-month tour, up from the current 179 days. Options include yanking a small number of officers out of the one-year Army War College degree program before they finish their 12-month stay; delaying entry for other officers until they have served the year abroad; and even curtailing a family-friendly program that allows Army families to extend their tours at a base for a year to allow their children to graduate from the local high school.
A number of Army officers interviewed by the Sun* said such changes would backfire, prompting good leaders to get out or retire early. “A lot of people who have options to retire will retire,” one officer told the newspaper. “We are eating our seed corn.”
Item: Despite its success in increasing the availability of surface warships and amphibious vessels overseas, the Navy’s “Sea Swap” program – where several entire crews take turns operating a warship in the Persian Gulf region – is sparking strong resentment among the sailors, the General Accountability Office recently concluded (for an earlier explanation of “Sea Swap,” see “One Ship, Three Crews, Enhanced Sea Power,” DefenseWatch, Apr. 2, 2004).
According to a report this week in The Virginian-Pilot, “The GAO, Congress’ financial watchdog agency, said sailors in each of 26 focus groups it conducted for crews of the destroyer Higgins and several coastal patrol ships reported ‘a highly negative quality of life, decreased morale and a strong desire to not participate on any more crew rotations.’ ” The newspaper also noted that the Center for Naval Analyses reported in July that 73 percent of sailors it surveyed said they would be less likely to stay in the Navy “if all deployments were like Sea Swap.”
No one has sucked it up more since 9/11 than the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. They have deployed to harsh, isolated, dangerous places teeming with our enemies. There they have fought, bled and died to prevent the horrors of that black Tuesday from ever happening again to Americans in their own homeland. They have, served with honor and distinction, and will continue to do so.
But this remains an all-volunteer military, and essential to that construct is an explicit social contract between people in uniform and the American taxpayers: They serve, but we promise them and their families in turn a decent life – not a plethora of costly luxuries, but a stable, middle-class environment in which to raise their children and to live when the overseas deployment is finished. Even in wartime.
Nearly four years ago, defense analyst Dan Goure – one of the unheralded Cassandras of the looming defense train wreck – said this: “Everybody hits the wall about 2005-2006. The derailment is in sight.”
We are starting to see how this will play out: A cash-starved and personnel-deficient Defense Department will continue to balance the checkbook on the backs of 19-year-old soldiers living on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the deeper structural crisis. We will begin to see an exodus of experienced personnel the likes of which we have not seen since the post-Vietnam 1970s. We will see more breakdowns in unit discipline and morale like the ill-prepared 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, our battlefield performance will begin to degrade, raising the possibility of a serious setback or even battlefield defeat.
This is one problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. A lot of money.
That requires a national leadership willing to recognize the crisis for what it is, and to spend the “political capital” necessary to win the support of the American people for a genuine wartime mobilization.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=60&rnd=223.32461870712194
Ellie
From the Editor:
More Signs of a Military Unraveling
By Ed Offley
When I first heard about the bedsheet cutbacks a couple of months ago, I thought it was some weird practical joke: To save money, a local Navy base planned to end a longstanding practice where staff housekeepers washed and replaced the sheets and pillowcases in the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Henceforth, a bunch of single ensigns and lieutenants were being banished to the local laundromat.
Now I know better. This was no joke – instead, it was a precursor of the oncoming train wreck.
The defense train wreck.
All but drowned out by the videotapes of street battles in Iraq and the shouting TV-heads of the 2004 presidential race, a long-ignored resource crisis confronting the U.S. military has steadily worsened over the past year.
Simply put: The massive structural under-financing of military operations and the intentional plundering of military procurement funds in the decade before 9/11 set the stage for the defense train wreck.
By 2000, the Defense Department had been short-changed by an estimated $426 billion over actual requirements during the previous decade, mostly in deferred or cancelled procurement. Despite hefty increases in defense spending since then, the Defense Department and White House have grossly underestimated the actual costs for prosecuting the war in Iraq, allowing the dangerous trend to continue despite the apparent infusion of new funding.
It is not difficult to find evidence of the looming crisis in major defense program activities. As I noted in an article about the Navy several months ago (“Navy’s Newest Heads for Troubled Waters,” DefenseWatch, Aug. 28, 2004), barring a turnabout in new ship construction rates, the sea service is vanishing before our very eyes as the size of the fleet steadily declines from about 300 ships to a projected level of 120 in the next two decades.
My colleague, Senior Editor Paul Connors, revealed this summer a future massive downsizing of Air Force tactical aviation driven by the same budget pressures (“Smaller Fighter Force On The Way,” DefenseWatch, July 14, 2004). And it’s impossible to write about the Army or its reserve components nowadays without tripping over the multiple problems of deployment “overstretch” and unit manning woes that have occurred by shoving a 10-division ground force into a 20-division wartime operational requirement.
What is distressing to realize is that no one – the DoD civilian leadership, Joint Chiefs of Staff, congressional defense committees or even the White House – is taking this problem seriously. That is because correcting the lag in procurement, closing the end-strength personnel gap, and covering all wartime operating costs will require an order of magnitude increase in defense spending.
Meanwhile, instances of what I term “21st century chicken****” are proliferating. These are variants of the BOQ bedsheet ban, instigated by frantic military middle managers to keep the checks from bouncing.
Item: The Baltimore Sun revealed today that a shortage of Army officers available for staff duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is prompting the service to consider imposing changes in a number of longstanding programs to provide the warm bodies for a new 12-month tour, up from the current 179 days. Options include yanking a small number of officers out of the one-year Army War College degree program before they finish their 12-month stay; delaying entry for other officers until they have served the year abroad; and even curtailing a family-friendly program that allows Army families to extend their tours at a base for a year to allow their children to graduate from the local high school.
A number of Army officers interviewed by the Sun* said such changes would backfire, prompting good leaders to get out or retire early. “A lot of people who have options to retire will retire,” one officer told the newspaper. “We are eating our seed corn.”
Item: Despite its success in increasing the availability of surface warships and amphibious vessels overseas, the Navy’s “Sea Swap” program – where several entire crews take turns operating a warship in the Persian Gulf region – is sparking strong resentment among the sailors, the General Accountability Office recently concluded (for an earlier explanation of “Sea Swap,” see “One Ship, Three Crews, Enhanced Sea Power,” DefenseWatch, Apr. 2, 2004).
According to a report this week in The Virginian-Pilot, “The GAO, Congress’ financial watchdog agency, said sailors in each of 26 focus groups it conducted for crews of the destroyer Higgins and several coastal patrol ships reported ‘a highly negative quality of life, decreased morale and a strong desire to not participate on any more crew rotations.’ ” The newspaper also noted that the Center for Naval Analyses reported in July that 73 percent of sailors it surveyed said they would be less likely to stay in the Navy “if all deployments were like Sea Swap.”
No one has sucked it up more since 9/11 than the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. They have deployed to harsh, isolated, dangerous places teeming with our enemies. There they have fought, bled and died to prevent the horrors of that black Tuesday from ever happening again to Americans in their own homeland. They have, served with honor and distinction, and will continue to do so.
But this remains an all-volunteer military, and essential to that construct is an explicit social contract between people in uniform and the American taxpayers: They serve, but we promise them and their families in turn a decent life – not a plethora of costly luxuries, but a stable, middle-class environment in which to raise their children and to live when the overseas deployment is finished. Even in wartime.
Nearly four years ago, defense analyst Dan Goure – one of the unheralded Cassandras of the looming defense train wreck – said this: “Everybody hits the wall about 2005-2006. The derailment is in sight.”
We are starting to see how this will play out: A cash-starved and personnel-deficient Defense Department will continue to balance the checkbook on the backs of 19-year-old soldiers living on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the deeper structural crisis. We will begin to see an exodus of experienced personnel the likes of which we have not seen since the post-Vietnam 1970s. We will see more breakdowns in unit discipline and morale like the ill-prepared 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, our battlefield performance will begin to degrade, raising the possibility of a serious setback or even battlefield defeat.
This is one problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. A lot of money.
That requires a national leadership willing to recognize the crisis for what it is, and to spend the “political capital” necessary to win the support of the American people for a genuine wartime mobilization.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=60&rnd=223.32461870712194
Ellie