Personnel, gear worn by years of war, military says
By DALE EISMAN, The Virginian-Pilot
© March 19, 2007
WASHINGTON - As they wade through the largest defense budget proposal since World War II, lawmakers are hearing an increasingly grim message from the nation's top military commanders:
Despite large and steady jumps in defense spending, the generals and admirals say, five years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn out much of America's military equipment and dangerously eroded their ability to handle additional threats.
"I'm skeptical that we have adequate forces available" to respond to a new crisis in Europe, Army Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. European Command, told a House subcommittee last week.
When they come home from duty in Iraq, his troops can prepare for little other than their next tour in that battle zone, Gen. James Conway, the Marine commandant, testified in February.
"We're not doing amphibious training, we're not doing mountain-warfare training," or other training that would be needed "in another type of contingency," Conway told senators.
Similar warnings are coming from Navy and Air Force leaders, though their forces are bearing less of the burden.
The Navy has dispatched thousands of medics, Seabee construction units and explosives disposal experts to support ground forces in Iraq, Adm. Robert Willard, the service's vice chief, told members of C ongress last week. Leaders worry that those sailors are being worn out by repeated tours of duty. The medical deployments have "stressed our ability to provide health care" to sailors at home, he added.
"We are currently meeting our wartime requirements, but our future dominance is at risk," Air Force Gen. John Corley declared at the same hearing. Some of the service's C-130 cargo planes "can no longer deploy to combat because we have literally flown the wings off of them," he said. " The center wing boxes are cracked."
Such alarms fall short of last fall's declaration by former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell that the Army is "about broken."
But because active duty military leaders traditionally are upbeat in public about the state of their forces - and perhaps because Congress' new Democratic majority is questioning the Bush administration's military management - the warnings are getting high-profile attention on Capitol Hill.
House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., last week asked c ongressional investigators to open two inquiries - one on the effect of the Iraq war on U.S. military equipment and a second on reports that some wounded soldiers are being returned to combat zones with injuries that could impair their performance.
In the Senate, Armed Services chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and ranking Republican John McCain, R-Ariz., have grilled a parade of generals in recent weeks about their failure to spotlight readiness problems sooner.
"It was pretty well known to many of us that we were going to be in this thing for a long time," McCain said in February. "It was very (clear) that these things were going to happen. And yet, somehow, it doesn't seem that the Pentagon anticipated, at least sufficiently."
The services "can't hide this stuff anymore," said Larry Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.
Now a fellow at the Center for American Progress, which describes itself as a "progressive" think tank, Korb argues that the military's readiness problems have been growing for a long time but until recently senior military leaders were too timid to acknowledge them in public.
In an interview, Korb traced the new outspokenness of uniformed leaders to outgoing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker's refusal last summer to submit a budget plan within constraints set by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld had hand-picked Schoomaker to lead the Army, but the service chief would not accept the boss' spending limits for a wartime army.
"There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we cannot execute... a broken budget," Schoomaker told a group at the National Press Club in August.
Rumsfeld is gone now, dismissed by President Bush in November and replaced by former CIA Director Robert Gates, a more low-key manager.
The change loosed "a lot of pent-up frustration" in the service branches, said Loren Thompson, the director of the pro-defense Lexington Institute who has been sounding alarms about wear and tear on U.S. military equipment for years.
Thompson said the military's new candor about readiness shortcomings suggests that Rumsfeld's reputation for intolerance of internal dissent was well-deserved.
The former defense chief came into office focused on fashioning a smaller, leaner force equipped with futuristic weaponry and wasn't keen on investing in additional troops or maintaining old equipment, he added.
Rumsfeld shunned then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki for suggesting publicly in early 2003 that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
U niformed leaders argue that the recent statements have more to do with changing conditions - a year ago most anticipated that the war in Iraq would be winding down by now - than stylistic differences between Rumsfeld and Gates.
"I never felt, nor did I sense that other people at (high) levels felt constrained" in speaking candidly to Rumsfeld about the military's needs, Air Force Gen. Lance Smith, head of the Norfolk-based U.S. Joint Forces Command, said last week.
Smith said the demands of the Iraq war on U.S. troops and equipment have changed the way the military would respond to an additional conflict in a different part of the world.
"We could still do the job but it might take longer," with additional casualties and damage, Smith said. Still, even stressed, "this is the most combat-experienced and competent force that we've ever had," he said.
