Real Problems, Wrong Focus

Tom Donnelly & Gary Schmitt
The Washington Post
August 27, 2000

It is a long-standing point of pride with the Clinton administration that it has been a careful steward of U.S. military might. Defense officials have boasted that they have "broken the cycle of military decline that has followed every major conflict this century"--such as the deep cuts after World War II and the force reductions after Vietnam that created the so-called "hollow Army." His administration, Clinton said in 1996, "decreased the size of our forces while increasing their readiness, capabilities and technological edge. . . . Our men and women in uniform remain the best-equipped and the best-trained fighting force in the world."

That's not how Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush sees it. He has made repeated, barbed attacks on the administration's military policy, declaring at his party's convention, "If called on by the commander in chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report: 'Not ready for duty, sir.' " Last week, in an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he charged, "The current administration inherited a military ready for the dangers and challenges facing our nation. The next president will inherit a military in decline."

His Democratic opponent, Al Gore, shot back the next day: "Our military is the strongest and the best in the entire world. . . . As the United States Army reported just this month, all 10 of its divisions are combat-ready and able to answer the nation's call. Our Navy has more than twice as many surface ships as China, more than three times as many as Russia, and our Air Force is by far the largest and most modern in the entire world."

An overdue debate on the American military has begun. But who's right?

The short answer is that neither candidate is completely correct. Gore is technically accurate on the narrow issues of current military readiness. But it is irrelevant for him to compare the capability of American forces to those of countries that do not have our global leadership responsibilities. By doing that, Gore diverts attention from the troubling fact that U.S. forces are not capable of performing the many and varied tasks they are being asked to do.

Thus it is Bush who comes closer to accurately portraying the challenges we face today. Unfortunately, some of his remedies are problematic. He suggests, for example, that the way to reduce the strain of peacemaking and peacekeeping deployments is to "scrutinize" them--hinting that European nations should take over the full burdens of Balkans missions. In fact, U.S. troops comprise only 15 percent of the NATO force in the Balkans, and the total American commitment is a mere 5 percent of the U.S. force stationed in Europe at the end of the Cold War. Leaving the Europeans on their own would be strategically shortsighted, compromising the U.S. position of leadership in Europe, and perhaps the viability of the NATO alliance.

In sum, although we now may have a defense debate--thanks to Bush--we don't yet have the informed debate that we deserve.

That debate should begin by correcting the misleading formal assessments of readiness. Whoever coined the phrase "statistics lie" was no doubt wrestling with the Pentagon's system for calculating unit readiness. Brought to arcane heights of refinement during the Cold War, this system rated units from a ranking of "C-1" down to "C-4," based on a complex amalgam of personnel, equipment and training statistics. Everything that could be counted was: numbers of soldiers and their specialties; spare parts; how many aircraft were "fully mission capable" and how many merely "mission capable"; hours and levels of training; and so forth. This system worked reasonably well for the static missions of the late Cold War, such as the defense of West Germany.

Over the past decade, however, it became clear that the system was no longer adequate for the shifting demands of new times. For example, an Army division with half its troops and the better part of its leadership deployed in Bosnia, where it was too busy peacekeeping to do combat training, could not be counted fully ready to fight in Korea or in the Persian Gulf. Thus, The Washington Post could report last fall that the two Army divisions with deployments in the Balkans were rated as C-4--not immediately prepared for war. This is the fact that underlies Bush's claim at the convention.

Congress ordered the rating system changed two years ago, but implementing changes will take some time--and meanwhile, we still don't have a true picture of combat readiness. Take the decision last fall by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki to address personnel problems in the 10 combat divisions by shifting manpower into them from other parts of the service. Other combat units, such as Patriot missile batteries, still have tremendous shortages of personnel, as do training, recruiting and other cadres in the institutional Army. So the Army's manpower problems have not been cured--just moved.

Further, the current deployments to the Balkans are anomalous in ways that disguise their impact on Army readiness. For example, a brigade of the 1st Armored Division is in Kosovo, but few if any of its divisional units (such as separate engineering, artillery and support units) went with it. Now the division has one brigade in Germany, one in Kosovo, and a third in the United States--and according to the formal rating system, it's ready to go to war. Welcome to the hall of mirrors that is Pentagon readiness reporting.

The bottom line is that there are simply too few soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to keep up the high tempo of operations demanded by today's global missions. There are shortages of spare parts and training. And these problems pale in comparison with the long-term challenges that will result from cutbacks in defense research and weapons procurement over the past decade. Though Bush's statistics about Army readiness are out of date, he has latched on to a significant truth about the overall condition of U.S. armed forces: We are not prepared for the full range of missions necessary to exercise geopolitical leadership.

From defending the homeland to fighting large-scale conventional wars to preserving the peace in critical regions to preparing for tomorrow's threats, U.S. defense needs have been ignored not only by the Clinton administration but also by the majority of congressional Republicans. As has the question of defense spending: You can't remain the world's sole superpower by investing less than 3 percent of GDP in national defense (the lowest level since before World War II).

For all the shortcomings of both Bush's and Gore's defense arguments, they represent a promising step toward tackling these difficult questions. We now have a decade's worth of experience of the post-Cold War world, more than enough to know how to rebuild, reform and reposition the U.S. military.

There also exists, despite the ongoing rhetoric about isolationism, a remarkable underlying consensus that American geopolitical leadership is a good thing, to be preserved. Certainly that is the only way to explain American military actions from the Gulf War to Operation Allied Force in Kosovo. With the preservation of American preeminence as a goal, it may be that the current Bush-Gore argument will mature into something like the defense debate that we need--and we should demand from the men auditioning for the job of commander in chief.

Gary Schmitt is executive director and Tom Donnelly is deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a Washington think tank that specializes in defense and foreign policy issues.