Flash: Army Training Centers’ Unreadiness Offers Fresh Evidence of the Increasingly Hollow Military

(Washington, D.C.): The front page of today’s Washington Times leads with an
article revealing
the deplorable condition of over half of the U.S. Army’s combat and support training centers.
Among the twelve out of twenty organizations reporting in internal documents that their
operations are at the “C-4” level (i.e., “unable to handle missions without additional resources”
and experiencing “training deficiencies [that] will have a significant impact on Army readiness”)
are: the Army’s combined arms center, artillery, aviation, military intelligence and air defense
schools.

These documents evidently are riddled with forceful indictments of the unacceptable condition of
these training centers and schools by their commanders. One cited by the Times is attributed to
Army Major General Peter Cuviello, who was at the time the report was filed the commander of
the Army Signal Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia:

Insufficient personnel and training equipment, use of obsolete training equipment, and a
lack of funding have continued to plague our ability to accomplish our training mission
for more than two years. We are barely meeting the requirement, and in fact, we are
graduating soldiers from Advanced Individual Training, noncommissioned officer
courses, and officer courses who have not received the comprehensive training we owe
them in order to be successful in their jobs.

These findings contrast sharply with blithe assurances now issuing forth from the Clinton-Gore
Administration, the Gore-Lieberman campaign and their friends to the effect that the U.S.
military is in the “finest” shape in history. It can only be hoped that they will not be the last such
insights into the actual hollowing out of the armed forces to come to light before November’s
election. The following article by the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.,
which was distributed via National Review On-Line yesterday, underscores the importance of
getting the full facts on the table before the balloting begins so that the next President will have a
mandate to take the needed corrective actions.

National Review Online, 28 August 2000

Gore Defense Triangulation

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Against all the pundits’ prognostications, national defense has suddenly become a hot issue in the
2000 presidential election. Governor George W. Bush and his running mate, former Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney, have seized upon evidence that the Clinton-Gore team will bequeath a
hollow military to the next administration.

For example, candidate Bush cited unready divisions in his acceptance speech at the GOP
convention. Last week, before the annual conclave of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he decried
the fact that 5,000 troops are on food stamps and warned about recruiting shortfalls. And, with a
comradely touch of Reagan-style bravado, he urged U.S. servicemen and women to “hold on”
because “help is on the way.”

Vice President Gore knows that this is a potentially lethal line of attack. While poll after poll
shows the American people to be relishing the fruits of peace and prosperity; and, as a result,
assigning low priority to national security concerns — they are not fools. When apprised of the
fact that the “peace dividend” we have been cashing in for the past decade or so has left the
nation’s military in sorry shape, most of them are alarmed and want corrective action taken.

More to the point, the public tends to regard Republicans as more responsible on national-security
matters. If Bush can succeed in making defense a prominent feature in his case for taking back the
White House, chances are good that the ensuing debate will redound to his advantage. Not
surprisingly, Gore and his surrogates are trying manfully to lay down suppressing fire.

The day after “W.” accepted his party’s nomination, Clinton Pentagon press spokesman Ken
Bacon and General Hugh Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were mustered out to
dispute the governor’s assertion that two of the Army’s divisions were not combat-ready. To be
sure, the Army acknowledged that that had been the case last November but, we are assured, the
problem had been rectified in the intervening months.

Senator Carl Levin — whose role as ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee
should not obscure his record as one of Congress’s most assiduously anti-defense legislators —
was also trotted out to denounce this error. In television appearances, he labeled it as
“irresponsible,” going so far as to call it “purple rhetoric” during an appearance on CNN on
Sunday, the senator expressed shock, shock that Gov. Bush would try to “partisanize” (sic) the
condition of the U.S. armed forces.

To show, by contrast, just how bipartisan he was, the Michigan Democrat extolled the qualities of
his former Republican colleague-turned-Secretary of Defense, William Cohen. Levin repeatedly
quoted a bit of Cohen’s politicized hyperbole to the effect that today’s military is “the finest, the
most powerful, the best led…in history.” He caviled that the number of troops on food stamps is
way down from the Bush years, recruiters are now making their quotas, and President Clinton has
signed into law in 1999 the first increase in defense spending and pay in many years.

Now, the pundits would have us believe that Bush and Cheney are on the defensive on defense. In
the wake of the Democratic counterattacks, we are told, Gore has effectively parried Republican
criticisms and shown them to be ill-informed and vacuous. If the GOP ticket will just let it go at
that, the chattering class will be proven to be right that national security will not be a prominent
issue this year after all. Of course, for the reasons mentioned above, this would be a windfall for
the Democrats and a strategic error of major proportions for the Republicans. George W. may
nonetheless fall for it — as his father did before him in 1992 when Bill Clinton and his Rasputin,
James Carville, pronounced that it was “the economy, stupid,” and Bush Sr. effectively allowed
the campaign to be fought on territory and terms of his opponent’s choosing.

If like-father-like-son pertains eight years later, it will be only partly due to the wiliness of George
W. Bush’s adversaries, who will do and say anything to reduce their vulnerability to attack on this
score. A far more serious problem is the fact that the Texas governor has left himself exposed to
precisely this sort of smoke-and-mirrors operation because he has, thus far at least, refused to
address himself to the full magnitude of the problem: It is not only today’s military that is facing
severe shortfalls that impinge upon readiness, recruitment, retention, and morale. An even more
acute problem looms with respect to the ability of tomorrow’s armed forces to fight and prevail in
future conflicts.

How acute? Two respected experts in the field, Daniel Goure and Jeffrey Ranney, warned in an
authoritative study they published last year that the nation faces nothing less than a “defense train
wreck.”

Utilizing the Clinton-Gore administration’s own data — developed in the course of an exhaustive
1997 Pentagon assessment known as the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) — Goure and
Ranney conclude that:

The budget shortfall (total dollars required compared with total dollars budgeted) for Fiscal Years
2001-2005 is estimated to be $573 billion, or 29 percent. This five-year shortfall is equivalent to
almost a year and a half of annual Defense Department funding. That is, the President’s DoD
spending plan for FY 2000-2005 provided only enough financial resources to pay for three and a
half years of the next five years of costs for fully supporting the QDR force.

Nowhere is this problem more severe than with respect to the funding required to modernize the
armed forces. According to Goure and Ranney: “The acquisition budget shortfall [for FY 2001-2005] is
estimated to be $475 billion and is expected to account for 86 percent of the overall $573
billion budget shortfall [for this period].” As a result, even the ships, planes, armored fighting
vehicles and other equipment that the Clinton-Gore administration deems to be essential to our
combat forces’ ability to dominate and survive the battlefields of the future are going substantially
unfunded.

Gov. Bush must come to grips with this travesty. To do so, however, he will have to address it
squarely, as candidate Reagan did twenty years ago — namely, by promising not just to fiddle at
the margins (a pay raise here, a reenlistment bonus there) but to restore the U.S. military to
fighting trim by allocating to it, on a sustained basis, the sorts of resources that are clearly
required to recapitalize as well as to maintain the force.

If W. is to secure in this area the kind of electoral mandate that Ronald Reagan enjoyed, however,
he is going to have to abandon glib talk about “skipping a generation” of military hardware. Such
a scheme sounds good to the uninitiated and holds out the false promise of cost-avoidances that
powerfully appeal to politicians who describe themselves as “cheap hawks.”

In practice, however, it is a formula for condemning America’s armed forces to operating
obsolete equipment long after its useful service life is ended — and inviting others to perceive and
perhaps to act upon exploitable weaknesses on the part of the United States. This is the sort of
gambit one expects from Al Gore. It is unworthy of a ticket committed to restoring to the U.S.
military the strength and credibility the nation requires it to have.

On Sunday, Dick Cheney correctly declared that “Either Al Gore doesn’t know what’s going on
in the U.S. military, or he’s chosen not to tell the truth about it.” If the former Secretary of
Defense and his running mate want to ensure that the same cannot can be said of their ticket, they
must speak the truth about the full magnitude of the problem confronting America’s armed forces.

No less importantly, the Republican ticket must commit itself to the sort of corrective action that
is required. This means ensuring that the country invests on a sustained basis no less than four
cents on the national dollar — what might be called the Four Percent (of GDP) Solution — to
redress the legacy of the Clinton-Gore years and to prepare America’s military for the challenges
of the 21st Century.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr,. is president of the Center for Security Policy.