GALLOWAY - Army being pushed past its limits

The State | 09/30/2006 | Army being pushed past its limits
Army being pushed past its limits
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
The Bush administration and the Congress have so starved the U.S. Army of funds - in the middle of a war whose burdens fall most heavily on that Army - that push has finally come to shove.
Without major reinforcements, both in money and manpower, the Army won't be able to provide enough units for the next rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan, much less provide the additional troops that many, if not most, officers think are needed to stave off disaster in both countries. The Marines aren't much better off.
Put simply, the Army doesn't have enough soldiers, equipment or money to do the jobs assigned to it, even as the administration and the Pentagon talk about a "long war" against global terrorism and the nation's intelligence community warns that our policies are stoking the global spread of Islamic terrorism.
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, in mid-August clearly signaled just how bad the situation has become when he refused to put an Army budget on the table.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had told Schoomaker that he had to come up with a spending plan that provided approximately $114 billion for fiscal 2008 - a $2 billion cut from 2007.
Schoomaker's response: "There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we cannot execute... a broken budget."
He said it would cost an additional $17 billion just to work through the huge backlog of broken and worn-out Army tanks and Bradleys and Humvees at Army repair depots. Nearly 1,500 worn-out fighting vehicles are sitting at the Red River Army Depot in Texas, and 500 useless M1 tanks are at the Anniston Depot in Alabama.
Meanwhile, the Army is so bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq that only two or three of its combat brigades, fewer than 10,000 soldiers, are ready and able to deal with any new crisis elsewhere in the world.
None of the other brigades that have returned from combat duty for a year at home are ready for combat: Some of them have only half their allotted number of troops and none of their fighting vehicles.
Army leaders say they'll require substantial numbers of Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers to make the next rotation that Gen. John Abizaid, the regional commander, says will be required in Iraq. Since most Reserve and Guard units have already maxed out at the permitted two years on active duty out of every five, Congress will have to change the law so they can be sent back again.
Schoomaker has told the Pentagon and the White House that the Army needs $138.8 billion in 2008, 41 percent more than the current budget of $98.2 billion. So, either Congress ponies up the money or the administration will have to scale back demands on the force that's carrying virtually all the load in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of course there's an alternative, and one that I predict the politicians will grab for in desperation: Cutting back on the Army's $200 billion Future Combat System, the only major weapons system on the Army's books.
That would be eating the seed corn - cutting off research and development of future fighting vehicles and the only hope of rebuilding and refitting the Army in the wake of Iraq - but a little thing like that has never bothered our politicians.
This is a problem could have been addressed in the Pentagon's last Quadrennial Defense Review, the one in which Secretary Rumsfeld was going to re-order the world of defense contracting and kill all those costly and unnecessary Air Force and Navy weapons programs that consume the bulk of the defense budget.
He was going to, but he didn't, and now the Army and the Marines are paying the price.
Rumsfeld came into office convinced that brilliant technological leaps were rendering the Army ground-pounders obsolete. He thought the quick victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan confirmed that.
But just as some of us always knew, it turned out that if you want to hold and pacify a hostile land, or two hostile lands, you need soldiers and Marines standing on that ground, rifles in hand, bayonets fixed.
It's galling in the extreme for the leaders of our Army - an outfit that believes in "Can Do" as a way of life - to admit that they can't do it anymore; to admit that they can't do a 12-division mission with 10 divisions.
There are no more easy fixes. The people who are fighting your wars are broke. It's time for the people who proclaim their support for our military and use soldiers as extras in their political events to put up or shut up.
Write to Mr. Galloway at jlgalloway2@cs.com