-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a prelude to war! Clinton's war on the Navy Cutbacks, political correctness, feminism take toll on U.S. pilots' morale, proficiency ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- By Paul Ciotti � 2000 WorldNetDaily.com Since the end of World War II, U.S. military pilots have been dominant in the skies, shooting down 11 Russian MiG-15s for every lost F-86 Sabre jet lost in Korea and a dozen or so MiG-19s and MiG-21s for F-4 Phantom or F-8 Crusader lost in Vietnam. Desert Storm wasn't even a contest, with U.S. Air Force F-15 pilots shooting down 26 Iraqi planes in air-to-air combat without a single loss. Therefore it came as a big shock to some when late last year in a training exercise in the Negev desert between Israeli Air Force F-16 pilots and U.S. Navy pilots from the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, Israeli Air Force pilots, according to the Jerusalem Post, "shot down" 220 Navy F-14s and F-18s while only "losing" 20 F-16s. In one exercise, the paper said, the reported kill ratio was 40:1 in the Israelis' favor, an outcome so stunning, according to an Israeli officer quoted by the Post, the results weren't made public to "save the reputations of U.S. Navy pilots." To some U.S. military observers, the shocking results seemed to confirm a long-standing fear -- that military cutbacks, over-commitments, fallout from Tailhook, and Clinton administration political interference were not just hurting the morale of U.S. Navy pilots, but were cutting into their proficiency too. When asked about the Navy's uncomplimentary kill/loss ratio, a spokesman for the Navy cautioned that it would be a serious mistake to read too much into the IAF/Sixth Fleet exercise. "The exercise was designed for training," said Capt. Steve Honda, a London-based spokesman for U.S. Naval Forces Europe. "There are no winners or losers. We don't keep score. That wasn't the purpose of the exercise." Besides, said Honda, the exercise was artificially unrealistic. The IAF "used a design scenario that limited our aircraft from using their full potential." According to an October 1999 story in Navy News & Undersea Technology, it appeared that the Israelis didn't count stand-off missile hits, a standard wartime U.S. tactic, in calculating the final results. At least in some cases the Israelis kept fighting after being "killed" -- and then counted any subsequent kills. Because the exercise took place in the Negev, the Israelis had half a dozen airfields within 20 minutes' flying time and thus could operate with extremely light fuel loads. U.S. planes, in contrast, had to fly in from the Roosevelt with heavy external fuel tanks, which limited their speed and maneuverability. In real combat, such tanks would be dropped as soon as the enemy was engaged. The real test of combat readiness isn't a training exercise, but actual combat, said Honda, and by that standard naval aviators are doing just fine. "The (aircraft carrier) Roosevelt left Norfolk, crossed the Atlantic, entered the Mediterranean and within a day of its arrival was dropping bombs in [Kosovo]. That is what counts," said Honda. "Combat is the bottom line when it comes to capability and effectiveness. And [the performance of Navy pilots there] tells me training is excellent and readiness is high." His assessment is not universally shared. "He gets paid to say that," says former F-14 radar intercept officer Jerry Burns. The hard truth, he says, is that "we are a much less effective force than we were seven or eight years ago." At the start of the Kosovo conflict, says Burns, who at the time was stationed at the Strike Weapons Tactics School in Virginia Beach, U.S. Navy pilots hadn't been trained in using laser-guided weapons. "That's why we had such high miss rates in the opening phases of the war. We had to dispatch someone [to tutor pilots] in laser-guided bomb delivery techniques." Burns, who retired in 1999, says that when he last served on the Eisenhower in the Mediterranean, the carrier was "undermanned" by 450 to 500 sailors. "They didn't have enough people to keep the [approach] radar fully manned at all times." If the weather closed in, he adds, someone would have to be sent down to the bunkroom to wake up a radar operator. "The Navy says operations are safe. But they aren't safe. Planes were running out of gas and they couldn't come on board." Flight training hours have been cut back so much, says Burns, that the last time his carrier fighter squadron went on deployment, its aviators were only getting 10 to 15 hours a month. "The pilot training matrix calls for a minimum of 27 hours. And yet we were calling ourselves fully ready. Commanders are not allowed to say their squadrons are not ready for combat," says Burns. "Anyone who says something is wrong gets thrown out of the Navy." In the meantime, "in order to maintain the level of recruits, the Navy has had to lower standards across the board. Navy boot camp is a joke," Burns charges. "Drill instructors can't yell, swear or touch anyone. If recruits get too stressed, they can pull a 'time out' card, which is hardly realistic training. You can't take 'time out' in combat." The situation among officers is no better, says Burns. "Look at the Naval Academy. It used to really mean something to be a Naval Academy graduate. In recent years they've had pedophiles, car theft rings, drug rings, cheating scandals and murderers." One reason for the problem is a shrinking military budget -- currently a smaller percentage of the Gross Domestic Product than at any time since Pearl Harbor -- as well as a drastic shortage of spare parts and old worn-out planes. According to testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last week by Dan Gour�, acting director of the Center for Strategic & International Studies International Security program, the United States is facing a $100 billion annual shortfall in defense spending, which Gour� says amounts to "de facto demobilization." The existing force structure will "run out of useful life" by 2010, he says. By the time the B-52 is finally retired, it will have been in service 70 years. Despite increased commitments, the Air Force is 36 percent smaller than it was in Desert Storm. The U.S. Navy, says former Secretary of the Navy James Webb, has gone from 930 ships in 1968, to 568 ships in 1988, to approximately 315 ships today. "And it is heading below 300," says the former Navy chief. Among U.S. Navy pilots, retention rates are down 30 percent. "The Navy can't keep the mid-grade guys, those coming back for their second tour, who have been around, who know the ropes," says former Blue Angels commanding officer Bob Stumpf. "These people are the heart and soul of squadron, the ones the new people look to for leadership." Clinton administration officials have generally blamed retention problems on the booming economy, a 4.8 percent unemployment rate and the fact that "the airlines are hiring." But to some former military officers, such comments only prove that the Clinton administration doesn't have any idea what motivates people to serve in the military. "I heard [Secretary of the Navy] John Dalton speak about the [Navy's recruiting problems]," says Stumpf. "He gave all the wrong reasons. He is clueless." Pilots will stay in the service if they feel they are appreciated and doing something valuable, pretty much irrespective of the money, says Stumpf. But it's impossible to get people to risk their lives in wartime if they feel the nation's civilian leadership is non-supportive or outright hostile. The problem today, says Webb, is that current "civilian elites" hold "cavalier attitudes toward the military" and display "condescending views." The people currently running the country, says Webb, never went to college with anyone who later joined the military. They "have no one in their family who was in the military" and "they don't know anyone in the military." In fact, neither the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state or the CIA director have ever worn a uniform. The closest this group comes to having actual military experience is National Security Advisor Sandy Berger who, says former Navy Secretary Webb, was once "a dental technician reservist." Instead, military policy is being made by people like former Assistant Secretary of the Army Sara Lister who once accused the Marine Corps of being "extremist," and Professor Madeline Morris, an advisor to Army Secretary Togo West, who once wrote a paper suggesting the Army be organized along the line of Communist Party cells to break up its "masculinist military construct" and what she regarded as its "proclivity for rape." On top of this, says Stumpf, the Tailhook scandal came along in 1991 and practically wrecked naval aviation. A highly regarded pilot whose promotion to captain was derailed by Tailhook, Stumpf says in the public mind Tailhook was nothing but an orgy, but that Tailhook did have a very useful function. "It was a symposium," he says, noting that commercial aviation was there, as well as manufacturers. Most importantly, he says, all the admirals in Naval aviation were there in civilian clothes. The idea was, forget rank, ask anything you want to know. "You would see an admiral backed up against the wall with a lieutenant sticking a finger in his chest," says Stumpf. The problem was the third floor hospitality suites got more and more rowdy each year. "They had topless waitresses," says Stumpf. "It was chaos." Women were groped and drenched in liquor, partially disrobed and forced to walk a "gauntlet" in the third floor corridor. Eventually news of Tailhook leaked to the mainstream press, whereupon Rep. Patricia Schroeder demanded an investigation, which eventually became a political inquisition intent on "cracking" the Navy "culture." Tailhook became the "longest-running investigation in memory," wrote Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal. "The Nuremberg Trials of major Nazi war criminals took less time, by far." Hundreds of aviators were interrogated by Naval or Defense Department investigators. Stumpf was interrogated nine separate times. Pilots were given lie detector tests and asked about their sexual history. It was infuriating and demoralizing. In the end, some 15 admirals and 145 aviators had their careers wrecked. Even though Stumpf was cleared of everything but being present while a stripper performed, he was relieved of command of the Blue Angels and ultimately denied promotion to captain by Secretary of the Navy John Dalton. As bad as Tailhook was, it was made worse by the failure of Navy leadership to stand up for the pilots, says Webb. "I wrote a piece for the New York Times in October 1992, asking, 'Where are all the active duty admirals?' The agenda feminists took advantage of Tailhook and the uniformed leadership failed miserably." In an effort to appease feminists in Congress and the administration, the Navy, in Stumpf's words, "bent over backwards." Secretary of Defense Les Aspin opened 15,000 to 20,000 combat slots to women. In an ill-conceived race to beat the Air Force to field the first female fighter pilot, the Navy began rushing women through flight training despite what, in some cases, were less than exemplary flying skills. For the male pilots, Tailhook had drastic consequences for shipboard life. In the past, ready rooms had been places where pilots could relax and unwind and bleed off the adrenaline that accompanies every arrested landing. Ready rooms were where pilots lived at sea. They could be raunchy. They were always lively. "They made life at sea a lot more bearable," says Stumpf. Suddenly a chance remark could ruin an entire career. The ready room became "a social minefield." The problem got worse after October 1994, when Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the first woman to fly the Navy's powerful but unforgiving F-14, was killed during a carrier landing. According to former aviation officer Jerry Burns, she made too wide a turn on final approach, banked too steeply and "blanked out the air supply" for one of the aircraft's two engines. The engine stalled, a condition which Hultgreen apparently didn't recognize, and a short while later the wings stalled as well. Hultgreen's radar intercept officer managed to eject safely but Hultgreen, who ejected upside down, was instantly killed. Navy officials attributed the crash to "engine failure," which angered some pilots who felt the Navy was cravenly trying to cover up a straightforward case of pilot error. But when they expressed such views publicly, they were attacked -- not only by senior Navy officers who called any such insinuation "despicable," but also by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, which suggested the pilots were trying to sully the memory of a brave and gifted pilot. The Navy, in the meantime, gave Hultgreen a hero's burial at Arlington National Cemetery, compete with caisson and full military honors. Naval aviators felt they no longer could speak frankly about any shortcomings of any pilot who happened to be a woman. In 1994, Adm. Stanley Arthur, a Vietnam-era veteran with over 500 missions and 11 distinguished flying crosses, was denied promotion to Commander in Chief of Naval Forces in the Pacific by Sen. David Durenberger for approving a recommendation by junior helicopter instructors that a female trainee, whom they judged to be irrational and erratic, be washed out of flight school. Then Chief of Naval Operations Jeremy Boorda -- who subsequently committed suicide -- would later call it "the worst mistake I ever made." In the end, according to some estimates, thousands of pilots left the service in disgust. Many of them were mid-grade pilots who set the standards and maintain the professionalism for the people right out of flight school. Their loss, some observers have asserted, will leave Naval aviation in a hole from which it will not escape for an entire generation. "Tailhook was a stake through the heart of the military," says Stumpf. After his captain's promotion was blocked by Navy Secretary Dalton, Stump retired from the service, moved to Pensacola and now works as a FedEx pilot. 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