Posted on 02/11/2006 6:12:41 AM PST by SLB
WASHINGTON - No one has been more contemptuous of Cold War thinking and planning in our military than Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his band of transformers and reformers, and yet when it came time to fish or cut bait this week, they just sat in the boat doing nothing.
The Defense Department thinkers have had four years to write the document that is to guide and inform our military strategy, tactics, arms acquisition and manpower for the next 20 years, the Quadrennial Defense Review mandated by Congress.
For months the Rumsfeld lieutenants have floated trial balloons warning that the most capital-intensive branches of service, the Air Force and Navy with their costly aircraft and ships, were going to feel the pain of severe cutbacks or cancellations of cherished next-generation goodies.
The savings would be invested in lower-tech but higher-utility things like the soldiers and Marines who are still required to win wars the old fashioned way, by killing people, and controlling contested territory by the simple act of standing on it, rifle in hand.
After all the talking and posturing and debating, what did they choose to do? The short answer: nothing much different. No hard choices made. Both the old and the new continue rolling along, and the problem is shoved along for another administration, in another QDR, to solve and pay for.
The QDR, with its talk of preparing to fight the ''long war'' against terrorists and irregulars, came out as the Bush administration unveiled a $439 billion 2007 Defense budget.
In the budget the Pentagon continues to fund three very costly short-range jet fighters - The F/A-22 Raptor, the F/A-18 Super Hornet and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - as well as the Navy's Virginia class nuclear attack submarine at $2.4 billion each and the CVN-21 next-generation aircraft carrier and the DD(X) destroyer. The Army's expensive and futuristic Advanced Combat Systems program based on systems that haven't been invented yet is still rolling along.
The huge weapons programs may be sexy, and certainly they are beloved by members of Congress in whose districts the big defense-industry plants and shipyards are located. The usefulness of such aircraft and ships in the wars against terrorism in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, however, is just about zero, since our control of air and sea are unchallenged there and elsewhere in the foreseeable future.
At a time when many analysts say that our problems in Iraq lead back to a failure to send enough soldiers and Marines to secure the place after the invasion, there's no money in the 2007 budget to increase Army and Marine manpower - and the QDR actually calls for shrinking the Army from today's inadequate 491,000 to no more than 482,400 over the next five years.
The budget proposes a 30 percent increase in the number of special operations, psychological warfare and civil affairs units vital to counterinsurgency operations, but the money earmarked for the language and cultural training members of such units desperately need - $191 million - is less than the cost of just one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Another problem that was not addressed in the budget or the QDR is re-capitalization of transport aircraft, helicopters, vehicles and gear of the military. Put simply, that stuff has been ground down in nonstop operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three-plus years. Assuming that sometime in the next four years our forces will be coming home, we will need to fund repairs and replacement programs that won't be cheap.
The war costs, which will top $300 billion this year, have to date been funded by off-budget supplemental bills. When the war ends, so too will the supplemental pile of cash.
The trouble with this nuts-and-bolts budgeting and the strategic vision, or lack of it, in the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the Bush White House is that they won't be around when the bills come due.
One military analyst, Col. (ret.) Ken Allard, former dean of students at the National War College, put it this way: ''As Winston Churchill was unkind enough to point out, it is occasionally necessary in war to suspend one's preferences and actually consider the enemy. The QDR has not done that for one simple reason. It says little or nothing about the need for soldiers. And how they can best be provided, trained, protected and sustained to meet an enemy who thinks in generational rather than technological timelines - which is why that enemy thinks he can win and why he may be right.''
FYI
Weak gruel for thought.
DoD went into the QDR determined to kill or strongly trim all these programs. That they survived is a good indication that there really IS a reason we need them.
Joe is an OK reporter, at best. He is a pee-poor military strategist. He's focused on THIS war. The Pentagon has to focus on what CAN happen during the next 30-40 years. There is a big difference between the two.
The arguements he's using were used almost word for word in the 70s to try to stop purchase of Abrams tanks and the F-16 / F16. I've got some 30 year old books on my shelves explaining why we didn't need to buy any of them - glad those authors lost the fight as well.
Actually they are undoing part of the Clinton disaster by moving more of the force off the reserves onto active duty. Also, those "Short range fighters" are delivering munitions on target for the groundies. Or making sure the bomber get to the target They are needed to support TACTICAL aircraft.
Finally the big lie. The Virgina attack subs is designed for Littoral Warfare. You know places like the Persian Gulf. They are exactly the weapon system needed to take out North Korean , Iranian or Chinese Diesel Electric subs or put Seal Teams on the beach.
All the old military writers like this have just gotten so use to whining about what the Pentagon is doing, they simply do not know have anything else to say.
The question is, does the quadrenniel continue the remaking of the Army into smaller more mobile divisions, with the logistics and hardware to back them up. Secondly, by 2020 there will be a qualitative change in our weapons of war. When military strategists talk about the soldierless battlefield, they appear to know what lies ahead.
Four years to clean up 50 years of political fifedoms within the Pentagon - Rumsfeld and company are hardly "doing nothing", their brooms rarely stop!
If Galloway is talking about the suicide bombers here, I don't think he understands the meaning of the term 'generational'. These folks are killing the next generation of freedom haters, as well as the present.
Or that enough campaign funders kvetched at the Congressbeasts they feed.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that we are going to be playing Keep The Mad Mooses Out for a long time to come, prolly in half a dozen or more countries than we are now. We don't need more glamorous space weapons for that, we have plenty as it is.
There you go again.
No doubt we must consider and be prepared for the most dangerous threat. But, we must also have the capability to deal with the most likely threat. I believe that this is Mr. Galloway's point. The most likely threat is GWOT in its various permutations. Fighting in this environment is and will continue to be up close and personal and will require well equipped soldiers and Marines in numbers no currently on the rolls. The Defense Department continues to believe that technology can answer against all comers.
This have never been true and never will be.
Can we accept more risk by delaying our air and maritime modernization for a few more years in order to raise the equipment and manning levels of our ground forces? I think the answer is yes, but the technologists rule. The trade off is protracted ground campaigns and more dead solders and Marines. Not a good result, in my view.
What this report leave out is china and russia. Sure we may be able to destroy any other nation with old f-16 but we need newer fighters in our arsenal if we ever go up against them. The F-22/F-35 and virginias is money well invested for US security worldwide.
It is sad to me that he would expect the QDR to reflect as minority critic's opinion, but he is just one of many who cannot accept when they lose or are overruled.
1 - Delay modernization. This won't save money. F-35 will delay itself by a few years, but won't be available in significant numbers for 10+ years anyways. Cancelling it would mean starting over from scratch...when? In 3 years? 5? The costs of killing it and restarting a few years from now would be greater than proceeding. And the F-22 is already being built in very limited numbers.
BTW - I'm making my living trying to see how we (the USAF) can keep our F-15s, 16s and A-10s viable for at least 15 more years, and preferably more. I do believe we could trim either the F-22 or F-35 purchase by very small numbers (1%) and keep the legacy fighters viable for a long time.
2 - Manning levels. Right now, they are about as high as we can get - there just aren't enough people joining to allow a big increase. I do object to cuts in the Army and Marines, but it is a tough sell when folks aren't joining anyways. I'm also not happy with the USAF plan to cut 50,000 people during the next few years - manning is already tight.
3 - Technologists rule. To a certain extent. I do believe the F-35 will be the last manned fighter built. QDR is pushing for acceleration of unmanned planes - and I agree that is a good route to pursue.
Good points. The Army's FCS program keep slipping to the right, but the Boeing/SAIC burn rate stays the same. I think that's the PM/PEO's fault - we ought to be scaling back various pieces of the program while we work on critical path technologies and accept that the first operational systems are going to come later. Instead, the entire program keeps marching along spending money like a drunken sailor, increasing per unit cost at an exponential rate.
We can recruit an increased end strength. It means adjusting pay and recruiting incentives. That's what the Army did when it missed goals last years. That problem has been solved. The pool of recruits is out there, you just have to pay market rates.
Much as I respect Joe Galloway, it's not either or. It must be both. Not all opponents will be several generations of technology behind us. The problem is not that we are spending too much for the Navy and Air Force, and not enough on the Army and Marines. The problem is that we are spending too much on entitlements, bridges to nowhere, and all sorts of things not within the Federal government's constitutional powers, and not nearly enough on the prime mission of the Federal government, that is Defense of the nation.
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