-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! ARTICLE 1 DoD Examines Captain/Lieutenant Retention Ed.: Survey follows survey, examination follow examination. The Services and DoD are still not getting it. Listen to the capable young leaders who are leaving: It’s not the economy but the lack of mature and up-front leadership. Source: American Forces Press Service. By Jim Garamone WASHINGTON, May 17, 2001 -- Officer retention patterns are changing, causing the services increasing worry about continuation rates, particularly among O-3s. Anecdotal reports to DoD officials suggest Army, Air Force and Marine Corps captains and Navy lieutenants are leaving the military in numbers not seen since 1973 -- the founding of the all-volunteer force. If the stories are accurate, the services might find trouble ahead when it comes time to pick promotion-worthy O-3s -- they prefer large candidate pools, but might not have that luxury in some specialties. A hot economy is partly to blame, said service officials, but exit interviews with departing officers seem to indicate a growing disenchantment with military life. Army officials said departing officers most frequently mentioned operations tempo and personnel tempo as major irritants during exit interviews. The officers said they saw deployed time growing and felt they couldn't take even more time away from their families. The problem does not appear to be as acute in other services, except in certain technical and aviation specialties. Navy Vice Adm. Patricia Tracey, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military personnel policy, said another contributing factor may be the services misreading their needs and not making enough O-3s to start with during the draw-down. In some important skill areas, she said, some services won't have as many O-3s as needed to allow them the O-4 promotion selectivity they'd like. She also noted a slight change in the continuation patterns of service academy and ROTC graduates. DoD is watching that situation -- there's no panic, she said. "The track record's not long enough for us to know exactly how big that problem is. It may be an anomaly that corrects itself in the next several years because of other things we are doing," she said. But there is really little that any higher headquarters can do in respect to retention. "Retention generally is not an issue you can address from a headquarters level," she said. "It's really difficult to make systemic changes that address this type of issue." "You really do have to have a command climate ... that is conducive to retention, that's conducive to people really being excited about continuing military life," Tracey said. Some news stories say that junior officers are leaving because the military "isn't fun anymore." "I've heard that for 30 years, that it isn't fun anymore," Tracey said. "I haven't yet been able to figure out exactly what the systemic issues are that would need to be addressed." Other young officers complain that a "zero defect" mentality in the military leads senior officers to "micro-manage." "Look at the people who are in command right now. These are the men and women who were the survivors of the downsizing," Tracey said. "The commanders' attitudes have to have been colored by that experience -- they saw who retired early or who was asked to leave, she said." "So some attention to reinforcing their role as mentors and to preparing their junior officers for the environment they will serve in -- not the environment that current O-5 and O-6 commanders experienced when they were junior officers - is probably merited," Tracey said. She admitted, though, that the zero-defects attitude has been a "pretty pervasive and constant drumbeat for the past several years." She said she hasn't seen a zero-defects mentality in the selection boards she has participated in, but said the view persists and DoD must overcome it. "Commanders must restore a sense of trust in the system," she said. "The department needs people who are willing to take prudent risks and it must prove that it's the kind of organization that rewards people who take risks that are prudent and well-thought out, whether they lead to success or failure." ARTICLE 2 Can Pentagon Inc. sell its IPO reforms? Ed.: A glimpse at the difficulties of changing national defense. Excerpts from a National Journal article. By George C. Wilson Now that CEO Donald Rumsfeld has succeeded in recruiting the business executives he wanted for Pentagon Inc., his next big challenge is to succeed in the initial public offering of his reforms. This will not be an easy sell within Pentagon Inc., the White House, or Congress. Within the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff feel frozen out of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's myriad strategic reviews. They fear the worst, especially the Army chief and his deputies. Although they are muzzled from speaking out publicly, the Army brass point to and embrace the fears expressed in this e-mail sent last week to Washington influentials by Gen. Gordon Sullivan, the former Army chief of staff, who is now safely retired: "My sensing is the Army will suffer greatly because of flawed assumptions and theories…we will soon hear the following: The world is such that we have no threats in the near future, so we can take a strategic pause" and skip a generation of weapons, rather than upgrade the ones in hand….while I am not opposed to change, it strikes me the Army could carry a disproportionate share of the load in the transformation of the [Defense Department]....and I fear, if my predictions are right, we will have taken the wrong fork in the road, and once again pay the price in the blood of soldiers." Navy, Air Force, and Marine leaders are also apprehensive about the promised Rumsfeld revolution… Rumsfeld is counting on his corporate division chiefs--the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force--to reassure the uniformed military as he and President Bush unveil the Secretary's master plan bit by bit in the coming weeks. Rumsfeld will use these freshly confirmed wise men from industry--Army Secretary Thomas White, Navy Secretary Gordon England, and Air Force Secretary James Roche, along with procurement czar Edward "Pete" Aldridge--as his management committee… Within the White House, Rumsfeld's most controversial reforms will be a tough sell. Budget chiefs are readying their knives for the Defense Secretary's expected requests for extra billions for this fiscal year and next. The White House already has warned congressional committees that a fiscal 2001 supplemental of $6.5 billion, just to pay this year's bills, is all the government can afford without breaking into the Social Security trust fund. Democrats will howl that this is not enough to keep the military ready to fight, much less to buy the new weapons the armed services want. They'll try to add billions to the President's request. Any big add-ons will set the stage for a veto if Bush makes good on his threat to slice off congressional pork. Within Congress, probably more than anywhere else, Rumsfeld's IPOs will meet resistance. Every single weapon has defenders in the House and Senate. Members of the Appropriations and Armed Services committees will be in the best position to derail Rumsfeld's proposals. Although not on those committees, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi is spring-loaded to attack any reforms that would cost jobs in his home state, particularly at Litton Ingalls Shipbuilding of Pascagoula. Taking on the DD-21 destroyer means taking on Lott. Old hands at the Pentagon and in Congress predict that, rather than risk angering key lawmakers and their constituents in the run-up to the 2002 elections, Bush will reject recommendations that major weapons systems be canceled. He'll probably settle, instead, for less-controversial reforms, such as streamlining defense contracting; farming out more Pentagon work to private industry; overhauling Pentagon Inc.'s accounting system; and providing more money for the military's human needs, such as higher pay and better health care and housing. To revolutionize the American military anytime soon, Bush would need to wage a major campaign similar to the one he waged for his tax cut. The last President to invest enough political capital to cancel major military weapons was Jimmy Carter, who scrapped the B-1 bomber and suspended construction of aircraft carriers. Congress went along with him reluctantly. But in the very next Administration, it backed President Reagan when he reversed Carter's decisions. Will Bush opt for revolution or evolution of the American military? That is the key question to be answered in the months ahead, with the old-timers in this town predicting revolutionary rhetoric--and evolutionary action. ARTICLE 3 Beijing Gets Voice Data From Plane Ed.: The truth about lost intelligence a data, drowned out by awards ceremonies and hero cults. Another question is why the awards for the crew weren’t handed out by the appropriate commanders, instead of the President, SecDef, and Chairman of the JCS. Source of report: The Washington Times. By Bill Gertz China’s government learned important U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities from the downed U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, including that U.S. eavesdroppers can identify individual Chinese military officers by the sound of their voices, The Washington Times has learned. Defense officials with access to classified reports said the Chinese did not know about the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to recognize individual voices from intercepted communications until after they began studying the EP-3E and its equipment. The aircraft has been held on Hainan island since it made an emergency landing April 1. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday told a Cable News Network interviewer that the resolution of the impasse could be reached in the next several days. He said: "I’m quite sure that in the next few days we will find a way to resolve this that will be satisfactory to both sides. I’m quite confident we will resolve this issue and get our airplane back. We’re in serious conversations with the Chinese." But as the dispute continues, so have revelations about the U.S. electronic spying capabilities. Chinese government officials first learned of the identification technique after some 100 intelligence technicians from Beijing were sent to study the craft at Lingshui air base, where the EP-3E has been stranded. The U.S. plane is still on Hainan island, and it is still the object of contention and a diplomatic standoff between the U.S. and China. The United States prefers to repair and fly the craft home. The Chinese insist it cannot be flown away. CBS News reported last night that the Pentagon is proposing to cut the wings off the EP-3E and then load the pieces onto a large transport transport aircraft, either a U.S. C-5 or a foreign-owned Russian Il-76. The Pentagon had no immediate reaction. Pentagon sources who requested anonymity have explained that military and civilian linguists have been trained to distinguish among individual "targets" of electronic eavesdropping and to make the voice identifications. Doing so requires that the linguists have very clear communications, free of static or other noises, and that is something advanced U.S. eavesdropping equipment has achieved. The EP-3E that was captured contained some of the U.S. intelligence community’s most modern intercept gear and was one of several EP-3Es recently outfitted with the new equipment. The aircraft recently got what the Pentagon calls a Sensor System Improvement Program that integrates tactical communications, electronic-support measures and a special signal processing and exploitation system. The plane also was fitted with a new airborne signals intelligence-gathering system installed as part of an upgrade program called the Joint Signals Intelligence Avionics Family Block Modernization (JMOD). The system helps improve the onboard processing of electronic communications and signals intercepted during flight. Much of the equipment on the aircraft was destroyed by the crew after the collision. However, the Chinese obtained a cache of classified documents, officials said. The captured documents are believed to have revealed the sophistication of the U.S. intelligence-gathering capability, according to officials familiar with recent U.S. intelligence assessments of what the Chinese military learned from the downed aircraft. The information the Chinese gleaned from the aircraft is expected to make it more difficult for special U.S. planes, ships and satellites to gather data on Chinese political and military targets, Pentagon officials said. They said the Chinese could equip their radio and telephonic equipment with filtering and masking devices to frustrate U.S. eavesdropping. "This will make it harder to collect, no question," said one official. Another U.S. intelligence official explained it is the linguists and technicians of the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s electronic spying service, who are able to identify the voices of foreign officials whose conversations are intercepted. For example, they learned to identify Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi when he was speaking on Libya’s communications net. And back in the 1970s, the NSA was able to listen to the mobile telephone conversations of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as he rode through Moscow in his limousine. "The NSA people are very good," the official said. "They could tell whether Brezhnev or someone else in the car belched…." …It’s not likely that what the Chinese have learned about U.S. spying capabilities has eased their objections to U.S. intelligence gathering near their coasts. In fact, they are repeating demands for an end to all surveillance flights as a infringement of their sovereignty. 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