‘PENTAGATE’? WHAT DID D.O.D. KNOW ABOUT THE READINESS CRISIS — AND WHEN DID IT KNOW IT?

(Washington, D.C.): What a difference a few days make!
Last month, Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch
dismissed concerns that the U.S. armed forces were being
reduced to the “hollow military” of the late
1970s, claiming that readiness was actually better than
it was at the start of Desert Storm in 1991. This week,
in a letter to Members of Congress, however, Dr. Deutch’s
boss — Secretary of Defense William Perry — was obliged
to acknowledge something approximating the truth: Fully
three out of twelve active duty Army divisions
are rated as “C-3” or seriously unprepared for
combat.

Secretary Deutch claims that he did not know about
these statistics when he made his misleading statement.
This strains credulity, however, since the position of
Deputy Secretary of Defense traditionally has
responsibility for day-to-day management of the Pentagon,
including oversight of such data as readiness ratings for
the services and their key components. If, indeed, Dr.
Deutch were unaware of the true condition of one-fourth
of the U.S. Army’s combat power until a few days ago —
when Secretary Perry publicly confirmed the facts — one
might be forgiven for wondering whether there are other
aspects of his duties with which he may also be
out-of-touch.

Read Their Lips

The “didn’t-get-the-word” explanation seems
all the more incredible since alarms have been
raised repeatedly in recent months by senior military
personnel, key legislators and the media concerning the
plummeting readiness of the U.S. military. For
example:

• A top Marine officer recently noted that the
  Corps was being asked to do missions on a scale
  commensurate not with the 175,000 troops and
  resources it currently has but with those at its
  disposal when it had 50,000 more Marines. Worse
  yet, it is being funded at a level of training,
  operations and investment appropriate to a Marine
  Corps of only 125,000 troops.
• Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in
  September 1994 published a lengthy report
  chronicling on the basis of congressional
  testimony from members of senior military
  officers myriad, serious deficiencies in the
  readiness and sustainability of the Nation’s
  armed forces. And the ranking member — and
  incipient chairman — of the House Armed Services
  Committee, Rep. Floyd Spence
  (R-SC), has issued a series of press releases
  over the past few months highlighting a problem
  which he aptly summarized this week:

“Wholesale categories of combat units
are in a reduced state of readiness and those
that are not are managing to preserve
short-term readiness only through engaging in
a desperate ‘shell-game’ with dwindling
resources.”

• On the eve of the
  invasion-turned-uncontested-occupation of Haiti,
  ABC News broadcast a stunning picture of a U.S.
  military whose personnel were going untrained, size=”-1″> whose equipment was being
  cannibalized and going unmaintained and whose
  operating tempos were being stretched to the
  limit in order to perform — and pay for — the
  various peacekeeping and other non-combat
  operations in which the United States military is
  now engaged. To varying degrees, other news
  organizations have also documented the phenomenon
  Dr. Perry has now acknowledged:

“Any major contingency operation is
not in the budget. And, therefore, if you
conduct that, you either have to put in
supplemental funds to pay for that, or you
have to take away funds which we have in the
budget for the standard thing….And, therefore,
you will degrade your readiness to conduct
any operation.”

It goes without saying that the serious shortfalls
being experienced by the U.S. armed forces, shortfalls
that go well beyond three divisions in a C-3 status,
will only be exacerbated by increasing costs of the
American military’s open-ended constabulary mission in
Haiti and those new ones associated with a Pentagon
peacekeeping (or ‘peace-monitoring’) assignment on the
Golan Heights.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that the new
Republican majority has an obligation not only to take
those steps necessary to undo the hollowing-out of the
U.S. military that has occurred in recent years. It also
must get to the bottom of the multi-billion dollar
question: Was official confirmation by the
Clinton Defense Department concerning this deplorable
situation deliberately withheld from the public until
after the November balloting, presumably in the hope of
preventing an electoral outcome as dramatic as — or even
more lopsided than — that which actually occurred? If
so, who was responsible for this action and what will be
the consequences for having engaged in it?