More strain, more stress for US
forces By David Isenberg
"Give 'til it hurts." It is a common expression
used in the United States, usually by charitable
organizations seeking donations. But nowadays it applies
equally as well to the status of the US armed forces,
which are being exhausted by their military operations
in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This was
the subject of talks at a panel discussion late last
month in Washington, DC. It was organized by the
Security Policy Working Group (SPWG), a consortium of
non-governmental organizations and university
researchers.
One of the speakers, James Fallows,
national correspondent of Atlantic Magazine, said: "Do
we have a problem? I think we do. James Chace died last
month. His book Solvency was about matching means
to ends. It reminds him of LBJ [former US president
Lyndon Baines Johnson] in Vietnam, where such a mismatch
existed. There is a current imbalance in US foreign
policy."
When one talks about strains
and stress on US military forces one is primarily referring to
the US Army, and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps.
The navy and air force, being used far less, are doing
reasonably well. By looking at some of the statistics it
is not hard to see why there is a problem.
Consider the deployment rate. According to
information provided by the Project on Defense
Alternatives (PDA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, soldiers
can occasionally deploy for 120 days overseas without
missing out on important yearly routines at their home
bases, such as training and leave. But deployments of
much more than that result in deficits adversely
impacting other aspects of a soldier's career and
personal life.
PDA estimates that
the 120-plus-day overseas deployment rate (averaged for 2003
and 2004) has been 46% during the Iraq war years, with
most of it being 365-day deployments. This rate is likely
to decline only marginally in 2004. And, many of
the soldiers deployed in 2005 will be on their second
365-day deployment in three years. PDA anticipates that
accumulated stresses by late 2005 will exceed any since
the Vietnam War period.
Another way of looking
at it is that the actual percentage of US
active-component military who are overseas, in terms of
deployment for military operations, is greater than in
1990-91, during Operation Desert Storm. Back then it
was 1.7%. Now it is 14%.
It is not hard
to find examples of the army being stretched thin.
The 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was sent
to Iraq in January this year, even though it had
returned from Afghanistan only five months before. Meanwhile,
the 3rd Infantry Division, which liberated Baghdad
in early April 2003, has had its tour in Iraq extended
at least five times. In mid-July 2003, Lieutenant-General
John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, announced
that all army units would have to spend a full year in
Iraq, double the normal tour for peacekeeping duties.
Meanwhile, several National Guard
and Reserve units have been mobilized without
reasonable notice, kept on active duty for longer than anticipated
and sent overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan
without effective training. Members of the Michigan National
Guard, for example, were sent to Iraq with only 48
hours notice. The Maryland National Guard's 115th
Military Police Battalion, meanwhile, has been mobilized three
times in the past two years, and by the end of its
last tour will have remained on active duty for 18 months.
This is all despite the fact that a reserve soldier
should be given at least 30 days of notice before
being mobilized and should not be kept on duty for more than nine
to 12 months in a five-to-six-year time frame.
According to an analysis by Michael O'Hanlon of
the Brookings Institution published this past June,
deployment demands are likely to remain great. Foreign
coalition partners in Iraq continue to provide about
25,000 troops, but that number does not seem likely to
increase. That makes it likely that US troop strength
will have to remain substantial for years to come.
Indeed, even before the worsening of the Iraqi security
environment in the spring of 2004, the US military was
preparing for the possibility that its current strength
of just over 100,000 might have to remain at that level
for years - perhaps until 2007 or so. The history of
recent stabilization missions suggests that even a
favorable scenario might see the number decline to about
75,000 in 2005, 50,000 or so in 2006/2007, and perhaps
half that latter number for a period thereafter.
As a result, the typical active-duty US soldier
in a deployable unit could literally spend the majority
of the next three to four years abroad. In 2004 alone,
26 of the army's 33 main combat brigades in the active
force will deploy abroad at some point; over the course
of 2003 and 2004 together, virtually all of the 33
brigades will be deployed.
The typical
reservist might be deployed for another 12 months over the
next three to four years. As one example, all 15 of the
Army National Guard's enhanced separate brigades are to
be deployed at some point by 2006. But the greatest
problem is with units that have to be mobilized more than
once. To date, somewhat less than 40,000 reservists have
been involuntarily mobilized more than once since
September 11, 2001, not an enormous number, but one that is
continually growing. The overall pace of army overseas
deployments on tours away from home base is more than
twice what it was during the 1990s, when overdeployment
was frequently blamed for shortfalls in recruiting and
retention on several occasions.
According to
Larry Korb, a
former assistant secretary of defense in the administration of
president Ronald Reagan, and one of the speakers at
the SPWG forum, "The Guard and Reserve missed their
recruiting goals, because people getting out of active
service are not joining up. They know that if they do
they will get called up again. The army made its goals
by dipping into the Delayed Entry Pool and slightly
dropping educational standards."
Korb
said one preferred solution would be to limit deployments
to six-month tours. The army says it would like to do so
but will be unable to until the security situation in
Iraq improves.
According to army vice chief of
staff General Richard Cody, the standard unit deployment
schedule in the two combat zones is one year in, one
year out. If combat tours were set at six months, units
would only get six months back at home post before
turning around and heading back to war "again and again
and again", he said during a press conference at the
annual Association of the US Army symposium in
Washington late last month.
Part of the army's
problem is funding. Traditionally it has received about
24% of the defense budget, compared with about 30% each
for the air force and the navy. Those shares were
established during the Cold War, but that era has been
over since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Army supporters
say that with soldiers shouldering the biggest burden of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is time to reflect
new realities in the defense budget.
Another
problem has to do with the very nature of the US
military force structure itself. According to retired
army officer Douglas MacGregor, author of the
well-received book Breaking the Phalanx ,
"Adding to force structure is a mistake until you examine
all the force structure. You need to go back to '91
when Desert Storm was an abysmal failure when we
didn't destroy the Republican Guard. So we decided
to perpetuate the Desert Storm army. After-action
reviews were not objective. They were Stalinist exercises
in eliminating dissenters who didn't parrot the party
line. Why did nothing happen? The generals were left
in charge. We reduced down to 10 divisions and kept the
Cold War structure. We didn't engage in experimentation.
There was no strategic realignment; we left troops in
Korea and Germany."
Initiatives intended as
solutions have their own problems. For example, General
Peter Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, has since
January lobbied for extra troops to relieve a service
strained by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In
October he was rewarded when Congress passed the 2005
Defense Authorization Act that awaits presidential
signature. The legislation requires the army, whose end
strength currently is set by law at 482,400 soldiers, to
grow to 502,400 by the end of 2005 and to 512,400 by
2009.
But instead of a formal, permanent
increase to end strength, which holds the army to a
mandated level, Schoomaker would have preferred Congress
giving him the authority to raise or lower manning
levels as the situation in Iraq and the army's own plans
evolve.
Congress provided no extra money for the
extra soldiers that eventually will cost $3.6 billion in
pay and benefits annually as calculated in 2004 dollars,
service officials say.
Schoomaker intends to pay
for the extra troops out of supplemental spending bills
passed to fund combat operations. That is how Congress,
which also approved a smaller end strength increase for
the Marine Corps, plans to pay for them. But the crunch
will begin when the wartime supplemental payments
disappear.
The money for the extra troops likely
would come from the army's procurement account,
considered the service's only discretionary spending and
a budgetary sitting duck. But bleeding procurement
programs now can delay programs and drive up costs
later.
It's worth noting that it is not just
outside critics who are concerned about an overburdened
military. In September the Defense Science Board, a
panel of outside advisers to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, released a report stating that the US military
lacks sufficient personnel to meet the nation's current
war and peacekeeping demands throughout the world in
coming years, despite steps being taken by the army to
stretch its ranks and increase the number of soldiers
available for combat.
David Isenberg,
a senior analyst with the Washington-based British
American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a
wide background in arms control and national security
issues. The views expressed are his own.
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