Interview with James Webb

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES WEBB

I'LL SET this up like one of those Scotch ads.

NAME: James H. Webb.

AGE: 40.

PRESENT OCCUPATION: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs.

EDUCATION: Annapolis, Marine Officers Basic School, Georgetown Law Center.

MILITARY SERVICE: Rifle platoon commander in Vietnam. Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts.

MOST RECENT ACHIEVEMENT: Emmy Award for covering the U.S. Marine involvement in Lebanon.

OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS: Fields of Fire, A Sense of Honor, A Country Such as This--all best-selling novels.

QUOTE: "With respect to the service academies, if you accept the presumption that they have existed to produce combat troops, then women shouldn't be there. One out of every six Naval Academy graduates goes into the Marine Corps--and they are the only males that have not been indoctrinated in an all-male environment. It's pretty clear, in a military sense, that they haven't been stressed in the same way that the other guys have.'

DRINK: Any old beer, more or less.

NR: What exactly are Reserve Affairs?

JW: When conscription ended and we went to a volunteer system, we shifted the whole notion of what missions the National Guard would perform --it's called the Total Force Doctrine. The Reserve components are no longer in deep standby. There are a tremendous number of units that'll go in the first seven days.

NR: What is your department in charge of?

JW: We've got half the combat power of the U.S. Army under our jurisdiction. We've got about one-third of the Air Force's mission, including more than two-thirds of the air-intercept mission. A huge percentage of the strategic airlift. Twenty-five per cent of the Marine Corps mission. I've got a little DOD. All the services including the Coast Guard. I've got 98 people on my staff. I've got all seven Guard and Reserve components and all four active services. I've got the most interesting staff in the Pentagon.

NR: How do you prepare what are essentially civilians for combat?

JW: For instance, we have a drill we do every year, which we call Reforger, where they practice reinforcing our people in Germany. Forty per cent of the units that went over this year in January were Reserve component units. We took an entire brigade out of Wisconsin, 5,500 people. Two-thirds of all the Army Guard in that state, with their gear. We shipped them out, put them in place, had them do their drill, had them repack and come home.

NR: Frankly speaking, how ready are we?

JW: It's a mixed bag. On the air side I've got some super people. They're getting old. I'd say probably 36 to 37 per cent of the pilots are over forty. And they've got maybe five more years that they can fly. Last year the Air Force had three different competitions. The Air Reserve pilots beat the actives in all three of them.

But when you get on the ground side it's different. There is tremendous personnel turbulence. Changeover, people quitting. It's hard to develop real cohesion. Army ground units. Guard and Reserve, we've got problems. With a mixed degree of success, they're getting fixed. On the medical side, I shudder.

NR: Shudder?

JW: On the Army side we have 70 per cent of the combat medical mission if we ever go to war. On the active side, 80 per cent of the people they treat are dependents and retirees. We're in bad shape. And there are a lot of what we call turfers, people who say that's a health-affairs issue, not a Reserve Affairs issue. Since conscription ended we've had a terrible situation with medical-care personnel. What kind of incentive do they have to enter the services? The thing that moves me is having watched a kid bleed to death and not having been able to stop it. I don't care what they say, we're going to see what we can do to fix the problem.

NR: How?

JW: Well, I also sit on the Defense Resources Board, which figures out what we're all going to get. The twenty top people in the Pentagon sit around a table for three weeks and argue where the hell the Pentagon's going to go in the next five years. It's like the old hung juries--only water until you come up with a verdict. They lock us in. It's really tedious.

NR: Do you think the U.S. will fight even a medium-sized ground war again?

JW: That's a hell of a good question. I don't have the answer. Nicaragua and Vietnam? What we fail to remember about Vietnam is that it wasn't a dirty little war. The population of Vietnam, North and South together, is more than the whole of East Germany. We had more Marine casualties in Vietnam than we had in World War II. Anybody who thinks we lost that war on the ground, go to Hanoi and try to find someone my age. But I don't think we need American troops in Nicaragua. Korea, yeah. Europe. And, if the need were demonstrated, I think we would go in. The question becomes how to unify a diverse citizenry in order to do something like that. What we lacked in Vietnam was the legal device by which the country could express its resolve. If we had declared war in Vietnam, we would've created a different domestic environment. The thing we've learned is that you can't debate a war and fight it at the same time.