Military might: the United States military is becoming too weak to fulfill its strategic mandate

WALTER Lippmann once correctly defined the critical task of the strategist as keeping America's "means equal to her purposes and her purposes equal to her means." This dictum necessitates the identification of an American role in the world and the generation and maintenance of the military means required to undertake that role. In the Executive Branch, the duty for making these formulations falls chiefly to the President and his Secretaries of State and Defense. However, neither Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, nor William Cohen exercises the influence in this area enjoyed by America's principal strategist: Franklin Raines, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

In the recent Quadrennial Defense Review just released by the Pentagon, it was clear that the engineers driving the train were of the green-eyeshade sort. While the public was told repeatedly by the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that "everything was on the table," very little was not pre-determined. The unchangeable assumptions were, on the one hand, that the United States would continue to be militarily engaged in a wide and taxing set of deployments and, on the other hand, that the defense budget would be capped at $250 billion or lower for the foreseeable future. Thus presented with a set of purposes and a ceiling on means that were determined in total exclusion from each other, the Pentagon was given that classic military order for a hopeless mission: "Make it work."

The U.S. military has been reduced greatly since the end of the Cold War; com- bat units have been cut by some 40 per cent since 1991. The current QDR, which cuts another 120,000 GIs, is, in the words of Marine Commandant Charles Krulak, "simply a continuation of the national demobilization." In the space of ten years, 1991-2001, the U.S. Army will have been reduced from 18 divi- sions to 8 or 9, the Navy from 546 ships to just over 300, and the Air Force from 36 fighter wings to 17 or 18.

However, the need for American military operations around the globe has hardly decreased; in fact, many would argue that demand has increased since 1991. While the dissolution of the Soviet Union allowed the U.S. to reduce its European presence by some two-thirds, other Alliance commitments make their own demands. In addition to the 100,000 U.S. troops bolstering the American commitment to lead NATO, the United States guarantees four other areas of the world (East Asia, the South Pacific, the Persian Gulf, and the Western Hemi- sphere) that they will not be dominated by a hostile power or bloc of powers. Alliance commitments, treaty obligations, and forward basing agreements in these regions consume a large portion of a shrunken U.S. force.

On top of that, the United States has had difficulty saying no to almost any call for military action in the past five years. Since 1993, in addition to homeland defense and Alliance commitments, the U.S. military has undertaken 50-odd military missions -- in the Balkans, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific. Moreover, many are seemingly without end -- the humanitarian relief effort to protect Kurds in Northern Iraq has recently undergone an ominous name change -- from Operation Provide Comfort to the more appropriate Operation Constant Vigil. The addition of these many protracted peacekeeping commitments to the demand for U.S. forces has raised operational tempos considerably. The Army, which conducted 10 out-of-area deployments during the entire 50-year Cold War, has conducted 25 such opera- tions since 1990. The Marine Corps, called upon during the Cold War an average of once every 15 weeks, is now deploying to crises every 5 weeks. Overall, the average service member deploys at a rate 300 to 400 per cent higher than his Cold War predecessor.

The strain on ever-shrinking armed forces attempting to undertake an ever-growing set of military tasks generates a series of deleterious effects that all exacerbate one another. The frenetic pace of operations, the highest since Vietnam, is literally wearing out troops and equipment. A recent General Accounting Office investigation of units suffering from continuous deployments found "pronounced concerns about personnel problems such as divorces . . . and lowered retention." The same GAO team also found that almost 30 per cent of these front-line units were not combat-ready by military standards. Floyd Spence, Chairman of the House National Security Committee, recently released a meticulously detailed report on the deficiencies in readiness and morale caused by the high pace of operations imposed on a small force. It is sobering reading indeed -- a catalogue of horror stories that would have seemed more at home in the hollow military of the Carter years than in the professional force that won the Gulf War so handily.

Equipment stocks fare little better, the current Administration having chosen to slash spending on new equipment while running into the ground the capital investments of the Reagan-era buildup. By 2005, all of our tanks and most of our military aircraft will be older than the soldiers or pilots driving and flying them. And despite constant assurances of turning the corner on what the Congressional Budget Office termed "the procurement holiday," the 1998 defense budget drops spending on new equipment for the fourth year running. All in all, spending in the procurement account has fallen some 70 per cent since 1985. Numerous think-tanks have joined the CBO and GAO in warning of a defense train wreck that the recent Pentagon review blithely ignores. Former Pentagon planner Robert Gaskin noted that the military is "approaching burnout."