-Caveat Lector-
OpinionJournal.com-October 10, 2000
WRITTEN ON WATER
Mr. Clinton's Army
The military has suffered through eight years of neglect.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Tuesday, October 10, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
Many people have come to believe that thinking about war is akin
to fomenting it, preparing for it is as unjustifiable as starting
it, and fighting it is only unnecessarily prolonging it. History
suggests that as a consequence of these beliefs they will bear
heavy responsibility for the defeat of American arms on a
battlefield and in a theater of war as yet unknown. Theirs are
the kind of illusions that lead to a nation recoiling in shock
and frustration, to the terrible depression of its spirits, the
gratuitous encouragement of its enemies, and the violent deaths
of thousands or tens of thousands, or more, of those who not long
before were its children.
They will bear this responsibility along with contemporaries who
are so enamored of the particulars of their well-being that they
have made the government a kindly nurse of households, a
concierge and cook, never mind a resurgent Saddam Hussein or
China's rapid development of nuclear weapons. They will bear it
along with the partisans of feminist and homosexual groups who
see the military as a tool for social transformation. And they
will bear it with a generation of politicians who have been
guilty of willful neglect merely for the sake of office.
So many fatuous toadies have been put in place in the military
that they will undoubtedly pop up like toast to defend Vice
President Gore's statement that "if our servicemen and -women
should be called on to risk their lives for the sake of our
freedoms and ideals, they will do so with the best training and
technology the world's richest country can put at their service."
This is an abject lie.
To throw light on the vice president's assertion that all is
well, consider that in Kosovo 37,000 aerial sorties were required
to destroy what Gen. Wesley Clark claimed were 93 tanks, 53
armored fighting vehicles, and 389 artillery pieces; that these
comprised, respectively, 8%, 7%, and 4% of such targets, leaving
the Yugoslav army virtually intact; and that impeccable sources
in the Pentagon state that Yugoslav use of decoys put the actual
number of destroyed tanks, for example, in the single digits.
To achieve with several hundred sorties of $50-million airplanes
the singular splendor of destroying a Yugo, the United States
went without carriers in the Western Pacific during a crisis in
Korea, and the Air Force tasked 40% of its intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, and 95% of its regular
and 65% of its airborne tanker force, in what the chief of staff
called a heavier strain than either the Gulf War or Vietnam.
One reason for the "inefficiency" of Operation Allied Force is
that this very kind of farce is funded by cannibalizing
operations and maintenance accounts. Such a thing would not by
itself be enough to depress the services as they are now
depressed. That has taken eight years of magnificent neglect.
Case in point: The U.S. Navy now focuses on action in the
littorals, and must deal with a burgeoning inventory of
increasingly capable Third World coastal submarines that find
refuge in marine layers and take comfort from the Navy's near
century of inapplicable blue-water antisubmarine warfare. But our
budget for surface-ship torpedo defense will shortly dip from not
even $5 million, to nothing in 2001.
The reduction of the military budget to two-thirds of what it was
(in constant dollars) in 1985, and almost as great a cut in force
levels, combined with systematic demoralization, scores of
"operations other than war," and the synergistic breakdown that
so often accompanies empires in decline and bodies wracked by
disease, have produced a tidal wave of anecdotes and statistics.
Twenty percent of carrier-deployed F-14s do not fly, serving as a
source of spare parts instead. Forty percent of Army helicopters
are rated insufficient to their tasks. Half of the Army's gas
masks do not work. Due to reduced flying time and training
opportunities within just a few years of Bill Clinton's first
inauguration, 84% of F-15 pilots had to be waived through 38
categories of flight training. The pilot of the Osprey in the
December 1999 crash that killed 19 Marines had only 80 hours in
the aircraft, and the pilot who sliced the cables of the Italian
aerial tram in 1998, killing 20, had not flown a low-altitude
training flight for seven months. It goes on and on, and as the
sorry state of the military becomes known, the administration
responds by doing what it does best.
In the manner of Gen. Clark presenting as a success
the--exaggerated--claim of having destroyed 8% of the Yugoslav
tank forces in 78 days of bombing, the administration moved to
"restructure" the six armored and mechanized divisions by
shrinking force levels 15% and armor 22%, while expanding the
divisional battle sector by 250%, the idea being that by removing
3,000 men and 115 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles while
vastly expanding the area in which it would have to fight, a
division would somehow be made more effective. The two failed
Army divisions cited by George W. Bush in his acceptance speech
were returned to readiness with speed inversely proportional to
the time it takes the White House to produce a subpoenaed
document, perhaps because, according to the Army, "new planning
considerations have enabled division commanders to make a more
accurate assessment," and "the timelines for deployment . . .
have been adjusted to better enable them to meet contingency
requirements." In 1995, brigade officials told the General
Accounting Office that they felt pressured to falsify readiness
ratings, and that the rubric "needs practice" was applied
irrespective of whether a unit scored 99% or 1% of the minimum
passing grade.
That these components of an indelible picture are in themselves
small parts is relevant only in that the best intelligence is the
proper notice of small details. But there is more. Mainly by
coincidence but partly by design, several broader measures exist.
The Army rates its echelons. In 1994, two-thirds of these were
judged fully ready for war. By 1999, not one of them was. More
than half the Army's specialty schools have received the lowest
ratings, as did more than half its combat training centers
(although the chaplains are doing very well). These training
centers serve as an instrument that illuminates the character of
all the units that pass through them. By examining their ratings
it is possible to get a comprehensive view of the Army's true
state.
I have obtained National Training Center trend data that are the
careful measure of unit performance in 60 areas over three years.
Of 200 evaluations, only two were satisfactory. This 99% negative
performance, stunning as it is, is echoed in the preliminary
findings of a RAND study that, according to sources within the
Army, more than 90% of the time rates mission capability at the
battalion and the brigade levels as insufficient. RAND has
voluminous data and doesn't want to talk about it until all the
t's are crossed, long after the election.
If Gov. Bush becomes president, the armies his father sent to the
Gulf will not be available to him, not after eight years of
degradation at the hands of Bill Clinton. Given that their
parlous condition is an invitation to enemies of the United
States and, therefore, Mr. Bush might need them, and because the
years of the locust are always paid for in blood, he should take
this issue and with it hammer upon the doors of the White House
at dawn.
In the Second World War, Marine Brig. Gen. Robert L. Denig said,
with homely elegance, "This is a people's war. The people want to
know, need to know, and have a right to know, what is going on."
Nothing could be truer, and the vice president of the United
States does not speak the truth when he characterizes as he does
those forces that for two terms his administrations have
mercilessly run down. The American military does not deserve
this. It is not a cash cow for balancing the budget, a
butler-and-travel service for the president, an instrument of
sexual equality, or a gendarmerie on the model of a French
Foreign Legion with a broader mandate and worse food.
If we are, in effect, the enemies of our own fighting men, what
will happen when they go into the field? The military must be
redeemed. Should Gov. Bush win in November he should bring
forward and promote soldiers and civilians who understand
military essentials and the absolute necessity of readiness and
training, people both colorful and drab, but who would, all of
them, understand that these words of Gen. George S. Patton are
the order of the day:
In a former geological era when I was a boy studying latin,
I
had occasion to translate one of Caesar's remarks which as
nearly as I can remember read something like this:
"In the winter time, Caesar so trained his legions in all
that became soldiers and so habituated them in the proper
performance of their duties, that when in the spring he
committed them to battle against the Gauls, it was not
necessary to give them orders, for they knew what to do and
how to do it."
This quotation expresses very exactly the goal we are seeking in
this division. I know that we shall attain it and when we do, May
God have mercy on our enemies; they will need it.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall
Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
His column appears Tuesdays.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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