The Washington Post reports the increasing strain on the U.S. Army, the Army Reserve, and the National Guard.
Two years after the United States launched a war in Iraq with a crushing display of power, a guerrilla conflict is grinding away at the resources of the U.S. military and casting uncertainty over the fitness of the all-volunteer force, according to senior military leaders, lawmakers and defense experts.The unexpectedly heavy demands of sustained ground combat are depleting military manpower and gear faster than they can be fully replenished. Shortfalls in recruiting and backlogs in needed equipment are taking a toll, and growing numbers of units have been broken apart or taxed by repeated deployments, particularly in the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve.
"What keeps me awake at night is, what will this all-volunteer force look like in 2007?" Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, said at a Senate hearing this week.
The Iraq war has also led to a drop in the overall readiness of U.S. ground forces to handle threats at home and abroad, forcing the Pentagon to accept new risks -- even as military planners prepare for a global anti-terrorism campaign that administration officials say could last for a generation.
To be sure, the military has also benefited from two years of war-zone rotations, and from a historical perspective it is holding up better than many analysts expected. U.S. troops are the most combat-hardened the nation has had for decades, and reenlistment levels have generally remained high. The war has also spurred technological innovation while providing momentum for a reorganization of a military that in many ways is still designed for the Cold War.
Moreover, military leaders are taking steps to ease stress on the troops by temporarily boosting ranks; rebalancing forces to add badly needed infantry, military police and civil affairs troops; and employing civilians where possible. Yesterday, defense officials worried about recruiting announced that they will raise the age limit, from 34 to 40, for enlistment in the Army Guard and Reserve. The Pentagon is spending billions to repair and replace battle-worn equipment and buy extra armor, radios, weapons and other gear.
Yet such remedies take time, and no one, including senior officials, can predict how long the all-volunteer force can sustain this accelerated wartime pace. Recruiting troubles, especially, threaten the force at its core. But with a return to the draft widely viewed as economically and politically untenable, senior military leaders say the nation's security depends on drumming up broader public support for service.
"If we don't get this thing right, the risk is off the scale," said Lt. Gen. Roger C. Schultz, director of the Army National Guard, the military's most stressed branch.
Likewise, retired major general Robert Scales, widely known as an expert commentator on Fox News, recognizes the same challenges and worries about the decisions being made for the future.
[H]e makes a compelling case that the U.S. government is misdirecting funds to "the wars we want to fight" - air, sea and space battles - rather than "the wars we have to fight," on the ground in the Middle East."Since the end of World War II," he said in an interview, "four out of five Americans killed in action have been infantrymen. Yet the Army gets only 23 percent of the regular military budget, and the top 10 items in the Pentagon procurement budget are five airplanes, four ships and the missile-defense system."
Scales thinks that the United States faces "generations" of smaller wars in the Mideast. And to fight them, it needs 100,000 more Army combat troops, 30,000 more Marines and 20,000 more Special Forces, plus a modernization of their equipment, a reorganization of their units and a much better training regime for small-scale urban combat and intimate contact with foreign cultures.
Right now, he says, "we essentially have two services at war, the Army and the Marines, and two services at peace, the Air Force and the Navy. You can't dispute that.
"We have the Army stretched to the absolute limit. Both the Army and the Marine Corps are tired beyond belief. We're beginning to see cracks in recruiting for the National Guard and the Army Reserve. And we're beginning to see bits and pieces of that in the active Army."
Scales is encouraged that Rumsfeld favors more "special operations" capability. But he's worried that, overall, "transformation" will emphasize expensive high technology when America's real enemies are fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.
One of the immediate causes of this situation is the utterly irresponsible dismantling of half our military after the fall of the Berlin Wall, urged on with callous disregard by both political parties. Our military should be vastly larger and stronger in every way, a force of overwhelming strength in every way.
Mark Helprin said it best last year.
When soldiers are killed because they do not have equipment (in the words of a returning officer, "not enough vehicles, not enough munitions, not enough medical supplies, not enough water"), when reservists are retained for years, and rotations canceled, it is the consequence of a fiscal policy that seems more attuned to the electoral landscape of 2004 than to the national security of the United States. Were the U.S. to devote the same percentage of its GNP to defense as it did during the peacetime years of the last half-century, and the military budget return to this unremarkable level, we would be spending (apart from the purely operational costs of the war) almost twice what we are spending now.Posted by Alan at March 19, 2005 09:47 AMThe military must be reconstituted so that it has a surplus of power without having to choose between transformation and tradition, quality and numbers, heavy and light: All are necessary. This is expensive, and would require more plain speaking and less condescending manipulation from those who govern, but would allow for the quick and overwhelming application of force, unambiguous staying power, coverage of multiple contingencies, and, most importantly, deterrence. It is always better to deter an enemy than, by showing weakness, to encourage him to take the field.