J. David Galland
The US Military Is In Real Trouble
Fri Apr 9, 2004 20:14
63.228.145.202

The US Military Is In Real Trouble
30-year old all-volunteer Army is crucially close to being broken.
By J. David Galland
Deputy Editor of DefenseWatch Magazine
4-8-4

Never in the history of the post-Vietnam volunteer Army has such a
beaten up and over-tasked force had to sustain itself in the face of
ever-expanding requirements and constantly accelerating deployment
tempos that we see today.

The quality of our force is suffering. Anybody who denies that fact
is either blind or ignorant. If the military is not bolstered, very
soon, with an infusion of smart, well-trained, and highly-motivated
volunteers, the force will suffer even more.

Where do we start pointing the finger? Do we just sweep this under
the rug, chin up, and stop our bellyaching? Not on your life, because
if it is not cured now, it is going to fester into a quandary that
will present the United States with an unprecedented challenge in
this time of war.

A fix is needed and it begins with the Army personnel system. This is
a system that has been in place since the waning days of our two-
decade involvement in Vietnam.

At that time our military forces were experiencing a virtual meltdown
due to the massive conscription of young men from generally "less
than affluent" America. President Lyndon Johnson deferred the
politically sensitive issue of mass mobilizations of National Guard
units for duty in Vietnam and further drew the fighting force from
the average kid back on the block.

His own guilt for his mismanagement of the Vietnam War haunted him to
the point of refusing to run for a second term and a flat refusal to
accept a Democratic nomination if one was forthcoming. It was time
for a change and it came with the election of President Richard M.
Nixon.

Shortly after Nixon occupied the White House, he embraced a quote by
an esteemed military leader. General Maxwell Taylor, the former Army
Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had
said "Although the Army had been sent to Vietnam to save that nation,
it had to be withdrawn in order to save the Army."

In response, Nixon promised to get the United States" combat forces
out of Vietnam and end the draft. He accomplished both of those goals
by the end of his first term. In July 1973, the Pentagon established
the all-volunteer force. After several years of inevitable challenges
and start-up problems, by the early 1980s the U.S. armed forces
became, without a doubt, the most professional, highly educated, and
highly qualified military force that the nation had ever fielded.

We maneuvered through the 1980s, gaining our "sea-legs" with Team
Spirit Exercises in South Korea, annual REFORGER exercises in Europe,
and numerous other training and quasi-real world, sub-exercises and
military maneuvers around the globe. Our forces grew wise in the ways
of the Central American guerrilla and we began to see the former
Yugoslavia as a future area of military focus.

Peacekeeping duties in certain areas in the Balkans, and in the
Sinai, remained sustained requirements. Many reservists were called
up to bolster the active force. Shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait in
1990, DoD was forced to call up more reserve and National Guard
troops to meet the requirements of Operation Desert Storm.

To the credit of the reserve and National Guard units and their
soldiers, volunteerism was largely back in style. Augmentation and
call-ups seemed to proceed well back then. So why are we in trouble
now?

The answer is simple! During the first Gulf War, and in line with
other global peacekeeping duties, our reserve and National Guard
soldiers were not kept on active duty for more than six months at a
stretch. Active duty soldiers who were sent on peacekeeping missions
were also rotated back to home-station after six months and they were
not deployed overseas or into hazardous duty missions until they had
spent at least a year at their home-station.

But in the aftermath of 9/11, the reserve component mobilization
system began to beak down.

Only nine months earlier Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld had
taken over at The Pentagon. In an initial announcement, Rumsfeld said
that his mandate was to transform the military by the incorporation
of the absolute latest technology in the development and acquisition
of weapons systems.

Rumsfeld, however, failed to address the issue of the sense of
balance between active-duty and reserve soldiers. This rapidly became
a critical issue once the nation went to war in Afghanistan and later
in Iraq.

Thomas Hall, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs,
told reporters that the Pentagon"s civilian and military leadership
has been aggressively studying this issue for almost two years. To
this point, apparently, not much has resulted from all of that
studying. There are consequences that are directly attributable to
the lack of results.

The reality of the present day reserve forces is that their level of
military responsibility has hardly changed since 1973.

According to the Defense Department, reserve soldiers represent 97
percent of all the military's civil affairs units, 70 percent of all
engineering units, 66 percent of all military police, and stunningly
enough - 50 percent of actual combat forces.

All this is further compounded by the fact that the active-duty Army
has shrunk to 480,000 full time green-suiters. The Army now
represents only 34 percent of the total U.S. armed forces.

The reality does not stop there. Due to poor planning, lack of
foresight, and near catastrophic shortcomings in the forecasting of
the strategic picture requirements in post-war Iraq, the situation
has seriously worsened.

The demand on our soldiers is compounded by the fact that the United
States has been woefully unable to secure sizeable military personnel
and equipment contributions from other nations for Iraq. The
resulting burden of stabilizing Iraq is being borne on the backs of
our exhausted soldiers.

The Army today is ominously overstretched. Currently there are
approximately 370,000 Army soldiers deployed in 120 countries around
the world.

The Army has 33 combat brigades, of which 24 are currently engaged in
operations outside the continental United States. That constitutes
roughly 74 percent of the Army"s combat brigades. The vulnerability
of this imbalance can be ascertained in Korea: What could we do if a
new war erupts there?

For those with minimal awareness of military planning, the brigade
figures translate directly into the fact that our combat unitsLatest
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will be subject to subsequent or back-to-back deployments. At the
very least, just about all deployed soldiers will have their
hazardous duty tours extended, usually just when they thought they
might be coming home.

A few examples that warrant attention consist of the First Brigade of
the 82nd. Airborne Division. The brigade was sent to Iraq in January
2004, when it had just returned to home station only five months
earlier from duty in Afghanistan.

The 3rd Infantry Division - the unit that liberated Baghdad in early
April of last year - had its tour in Iraq extended no less than five
times. Some frustrated soldiers of the 3rd Infantry ran afoul of
contemporary discipline standards when they were quoted as making
less than proper statements to reporters about the secretary of
defense.

Notwithstanding, in July 2003, Central Command chief Gen. John
Abizaid announced that all Army units would have to spend a full year
in Iraq, which is double the normal tour for peacekeeping duties.

Yet another shameful result of the lack of planning is that many
National Guard and reserve forces have been mobilized without proper
notification timelines. They have been kept on active duty far longer
than anyone would have anticipated. These part-time soldiers have
also been sent to hotspots such as Iraq and Afghanistan without
effective and necessary time-phased training.

For example, a contingent of the Michigan National Guard was sent to
Iraq with only 48 hours notice. The 115th Military Police Battalion
of the Maryland National Guard has been mobilized three times in the
past two years. By the end of their third tour most members of the
unit will have had actually remained on active duty for 18 months.
How can this happen?

Don't ask Lt. Gen. James Helmly, the commander of the Army Reserve.
This is the commander who went on record with the press saying that a
reserve soldier should be given at least 30 days notice before being
mobilized and those reservists should not be kept on duty for more
than 9 to 12 months in a 5-6 year timeframe. Draw your own
conclusions on veracity when it comes to the Army Reserve chief.

Another ripple effect of the failure to reorganize the personnel
structure goes right to the sinew of many American communities and
municipalities.

Many of the reservists who have been called up without proper notice
or who are being kept on duty too long are police officers,
firefighters, and paramedics in their civilian lives. Many serve as
initial responders who are vital to the safety and security of their
communities and their residents. In one West Virginia State Police
unit, 25 percent of the troopers have been mobilized and are serving
in the military.

The worsening situation also affects overall military readiness. From
my corner of the foxhole, this is where the rubber meets the road in
the need to address personnel reorganization and to confront the
problems afflicting our military forces.

In fiscal year 2003, the Army had to cancel 49 of its scheduled 182
training exercises. DoD admits that the four Army Divisions returning
from Iraq in the first five months of 2004 will not be combat-ready
again for at least six months. Pentagon officials admit that the
soldiers" equipment has worn down and their war-fighting skills have
withered while they were doing police work. So out of a total of ten
divisions in the whole U.S. Army, four can"t do anything war-related
for half a year!

The cumulative effect of this deterioration on troopers' morale
cannot be underestimated.

Following a recent survey of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by the military
newspaper Stars & Stripes, some analysts have concluded that the Bush
administration's approach to Iraq risks doing to the All-Volunteer
Force what Vietnam did to the draft.

The survey, which polled thousands of troops, found that 40 percent
of recipients said their missions in Iraq had little or nothing to do
with what they had trained for. Perhaps even more foreboding, half
the soldiers who were surveyed indicated that they will not reenlist
when their tours end or when the Pentagon lifts the stop-loss order
currently in effect that has prevented over 24,000 active duty
soldiers and over 16,000 reservists from leaving the service.

This week I spoke over twenty Army NCOs, all recently returned from
Iraq and Afghanistan duty. Ranging in rank from corporal to sergeant
1st class, all but two said they intend to leave active service once
they get the opportunity to do so. The majority added that they wish
to completely sever their military ties and will not join reserve
units to continue their service.

Two general officers, who have asked that they remain nameless, have
both told me that it is their firm belief; that if it were not for
the stop-loss policy then the total force would already be in
critically severe jeopardy and it clearly could not complete its
missions. Meanwhile, U.S. Army Reserve officials are pondering why
they have missed their reenlistment goals for 2003.

Each of these divisions should number around 14,000 soldiers and one
division should be active and the other reserve.

According to a study sponsored by retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski,
these two divisions must be added to the existing Army structure. The
divisions are critically important because our combat units have been
run ragged installing and propping-up indigenous leaders into
positions of quasi statesmanship, with American backing, and playing
the role of un-invited cop-on-the-beat. These two mandates are
clearly two types of missions that infantry soldiers are not trained
at and should not be doing.

Finally, when one considers the present and anticipated threat to
America's homeland, some hard decisions need to be made at the
Pentagon.

No longer can we allow individuals with civilian jobs, and
professions that are an important part of the homeland security
network, to sign on with National Guard and reserve units.

Homeland defense is the basis for our national security effort. The
defense of our nation, right down to the little towns in the
hinterlands, requires full-time dedicated personnel manning the local
effort.

Towns and cities that find themselves left with only a fraction of
their police and fire departments, reduced medical staff at local
hospitals, and largely absent city and town administrations, set a
dangerous precedent. This is exactly where the roots of homeland
defense and America's security begin.

By J. David Galland

J. David Galland is Deputy Editor of DefenseWatch Magazine. He can be
reached at defensewatch02@yahoo.com.

http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/98/387/12447_USMilitary.html
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