Government Executive - Authors - Art Pine

Army, Marine Corps struggle with mandate to expand

Art Pine — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In January, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed adding 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines to bring the Army's total to 547,000 troops and the Marines' to 202,000. The idea was to relieve pressure on today's overstressed ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and to better equip the military to deal with similar unconventional wars in the future. The move, designed to provide six more combat brigade teams and their support units, complements President Bush's order late last year to boost U.S. troop strength temporarily for the current "surge" in Iraq.

Now, nine months later, the services are clearly struggling with the expansion, and there are signs that the effort may face serious problems. Although Army leaders announced last month that they will meet Gates's targets by 2010 -- two years sooner than the secretary called for -- outside analysts say that the numbers belie such optimism. The Army fell short of its monthly recruiting goals in May and June, and it has begun lowering standards for new entrants in an effort to fill the gap. It also is paying unprecedented bonuses -- as much as $35,000 -- to retain midlevel officers and sergeants.

Moreover, the plan has set off a heated debate about the implications of such an increase for the longer run. With the expansion expected to take several years to complete and with some troop drawdowns likely in Iraq, will the kind of force structure that the military needs have changed markedly by the time the larger force is in place? Should the Army try to provide both combat troops and new units specially trained for counterinsurgency operations and nation-building? If so, should it reduce its long-standing focus on tanks and artillery? Finally, can the service meet its recruiting goals with an all-volunteer Army, or will the nation be forced to reinstate the draft?

Few people dispute that the overall increase is needed. "The Army is absolutely committed to the max," says retired Col. Don M. Snider, a former scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and now a political scientist at West Point. "The ability to continue to send people for 12-month deployments is at this point unknown. The critical problem is midterm officers, such as captains and majors, who likely will be in short supply."

At the same time, the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has convinced Pentagon planners that U.S. forces in future wars are more likely to find themselves quelling bands of insurgents and training local military and police forces than wiping out legions of tanks and artillery. Such roles will call for greater numbers of soldiers trained in civil affairs, human intelligence-gathering, psychological warfare, foreign languages, military policing, and light-infantry operations, rather than for conventional armor and artillery units.

"Both the Army and the Marine Corps are at a crossroads," says Andrew Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense-oriented think tank in Washington. "Over the past 50 years, if you asked what kind of a force you'd need to defeat our adversaries, it was always one that was oriented primarily to conventional war -- with tanks and artillery. But today, irregular warfare is the most likely threat -- and also the most difficult. Should the Army go back to preparing for conventional war when there don't seem to be any tank armies out there to fight?"

The Army's difficulties in attracting recruits are compounding the problem. The service has already begun accepting greater numbers of recruits who lack high school diplomas, have not scored well on Army aptitude tests, or have even been convicted of low-level crimes -- compromising the standards that the Army has spent years building up. The Marine Corps, blessed with an image as an elite organization, hasn't had any serious recruiting problems so far.

To be sure, the reduction in standards has been modest. Pentagon figures show that although only 79 percent of Army recruits in 2006 had high school diplomas -- down from a 90 percent level achieved in recent years -- the percentage of soldiers who failed basic training has dropped. Instances of bad conduct, unauthorized absences, and desertion are unchanged. "Overall, the force is still in very good shape by historical standards," says Michael E. O'Hanlon, the Brookings Institution's top military analyst.

Still, some analysts view the slide in standards as a warning bell. "So far, the Army has been able to maintain its current strength only by lowering its standards," says Andrew J. Bacevich, a military-affairs expert at Boston University.Yet reconfiguring the force so that it can deal more effectively with insurgents and also train local forces is "certain to carry even more-demanding requirements," he says."This is going to pose huge challenges in coming years."

The expansion is also proving to be expensive. A study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in April estimated that adding 92,000 troops between now and 2013 would boost the defense budget by $65 billion over the fiscal 2007 authorization, and that doesn't include potential extras, such as more schools for dependents and additional military hospitals. Moreover, the bill would come at a time when the Pentagon is facing outlays of $30 billion to $50 billion to replace the trucks, tanks, helicopters, Humvees, and communications equipment that have been used up or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That said, the most critical question posed by the expansion plan concerns what kind of force structure the Army and the Marine Corps should build for future wars. Army Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, Gates's senior military assistant, argued in a paper this month, "Like it or not, until further notice the U.S. government has decided that the military largely owns the job of nation-building" -- no matter how hard the services have been avoiding it in recent years. "We need to accept this reality instead of resisting it," he wrote.

The next question is how to reshape the force. The Army's answer so far, outlined in a recent speech by Gen. George Casey, the service's chief of staff, is that the Army can handle both conventional warfare and counterinsurgency, provided it receives enough money. Gates has endorsed a proposal to give the Army $3 billion over the next few years to begin recruiting and equipping the extra troops. However, many outside analysts believe that Casey will still have to nudge the Army away from its largely Cold War armor-and-artillery makeup toward a force that contains more anti-insurgent and nation-building units.

Prying the Army leadership away from armor and artillery may prove as difficult as convincing the Navy's 1930s-era admirals that the sea service should de-emphasize battleships in favor of aircraft carriers. (It took World War II to finally change their minds.) "The fundamental problem is that you are asking the subculture that has dominated the Army for more than half a century to step aside in favor of other parts of the Army," Krepinevich says. "My response is, 'I've seen this movie before.' "

One compromise now being debated among defense gurus is a proposal by John A. Nagl, a defense scholar at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, to establish a permanent Army Adviser Corps that would train, equip, and deploy 20,000 combat advisers -- troops dedicated to working with foreign security forces. The corps would develop doctrine for 750 advisory teams of 25 soldiers each, organized into three 250-team divisions. Soldiers would be rotated into the new corps for a three-year tour, one of which would be spent overseas.

Boston University's Bacevich suggests that one sure way to solve the recruitment problem would be to reinstitute a small-scale draft, supplementing the current all-volunteer force with a small cadre of conscripts. One possibility: making military service an option in a broader program in which young people would be required to do a stint in some kind of "national service." "The big question is whether the all-volunteer force still meets the nation's security requirements," he says.

A draft would have its downside, Bacevich concedes. "Generally speaking, draftees aren't as highly skilled -- or as competent -- as volunteers," he says. "A draft would involve a broader spectrum of Americans with the military and would serve as a constraint for policy makers," who wouldn't have as much latitude as they do now to deploy U.S. troops. "But," he adds, "there's a need to begin debating the issue because the heavy lifting for future Iraqs is going to be done by the Army."

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Military cutting orders for costly high-tech weapons

Art Pine — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The 600-foot-long, next-generation warship is a technological marvel, with state-of-the-art multiphased radar, advanced gunnery and missile systems, electric propulsion, and an integrated power-generation package that will pave the way for future use of laser or electromagnetic guns.

The vessel is expected to provide three times as much firepower as today's destroyers. It will have three times the defenses against anti-ship cruise missiles and 10 times the mine-warfare capability of today's ships. It presents a 50-fold reduction in radar cross section, making it appear no bigger than a fishing boat to enemy warships.

As a bonus, the DDG 1000 will sail with a crew that is half the complement needed to operate today's ships its size.

"This is a quantum leap from anything you've ever seen on a surface combatant ship," says Cynthia L. Brown, president of the American Shipbuilding Association, the Washington-based trade group for the nation's largest shipyards.

But the vessel, formerly known as the DD(X), also poses some problems. Depending on the estimates, it now costs between $2.5 billion and $3.8 billion a copy -- about four times the original projection and almost triple the price tag for the DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers now in service.

A wary Congress has cut orders for the DDG 1000 to only two ships in fiscal 2007 and seems unlikely to approve more than five beyond that -- far fewer than the 16 to 24 ships the Navy had wanted. And some analysts worry that the ballooning cost of the destroyers will leave the Navy without enough money to replace other classes of aging warships and to maintain its planned 313-ship fleet of destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and submarines.

The DDG 1000 isn't the military's only budget buster. In a report issued last April, the Government Accountability Office pointed to dozens of other high-tech weapons programs that are so costly that they are obliging Pentagon buyers to cut orders to a trickle, to avoid squeezing other needs.

Included are the Air Force's F-22A Raptor, designed to replace the aging F-15 as an air-to-air fighter; the all-services F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the Army's Future Combat System, a network of advanced high-tech equipment to support the shift to autonomous combat brigades; the Marine Corps's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, designed to speed troops to amphibious landings; the Air Force's Space-Based Infrared System High, a satellite network aimed at gathering intelligence and detecting missiles; and the Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, to be used for satellites.

The GAO report says that the Air Force trimmed its order for F-22As to 181 aircraft, down from the 648 it initially sought, after the cost per airplane skyrocketed by 189 percent.

The Air Force cut back purchases of the EELV from 181 to 138 after costs rose 138 percent, and the Pentagon is ordering only 2,458 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters rather than 2,866, because the price tag has jumped 27 percent. The cost of the Space-Based Infrared System High has ballooned by 315 percent, and the Air Force now plans to buy only three units instead of five.

Cindy Williams, a military analyst formerly with the Congressional Budget Office and currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points to such programs as prime examples of the inherent conflicts stemming from growing demands for costly high-technology weaponry, increased pressures on military procurement budgets in the face of wartime spending, and competition from domestic programs.

The Bush administration is expected to seek an extra $170 billion in supplemental defense spending for fiscal 2007 -- beyond the $447.6 billion basic defense appropriation -- to cover the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to replenish the stocks of tanks, Humvees, and other destroyed or worn-out equipment. President Bush has asked Congress to increase overall U.S. ground forces by 92,000 soldiers and marines over the next five years, the largest buildup since the Cold War.

As spectacular as some of the high-tech weapons are, some military specialists question whether the military really needs them. The most immediate threats facing the military -- from terrorists and insurgent groups such as those in Iraq -- require ground troops capable of house-to-house fighting rather than high-tech aerial fighters and naval destroyers. And even potential threats from China -- dramatized last month when Beijing fired a test missile to destroy one of its communications satellites -- would primarily involve ballistic missiles and submarines; building more-sophisticated fighters or DDG 1000s won't bolster America's defense against such threats, critics say.

"I would argue that most of these big-ticket items, if not all of them, are unnecessary," said Charles V. Pena, a defense analyst with the Independent Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Oakland, Calif. "Almost none of them has killing terrorists as a primary mission."

Andrew F. Krepinevich, a former Army lieutenant colonel who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based research group that specializes in defense issues, agrees. He says the military should build fewer F-22As and F-35s and instead pour more money into increasing the number of Special Forces battalions, designing a new long-range strike aircraft that can spend long periods over the battlefield, beefing up the capability to detect and destroy weapons of mass destruction, boosting production of submarines, and modernizing the nation's aging air-tanker refueling fleet. "What kind of air force does Al Qaeda have?" Krepinevich asks.

Others question whether some of the new weapons are as effective as they're cracked up to be. Winslow Wheeler, a former Capitol Hill defense specialist who is with the liberal Center for Defense Information in Washington, says that the F-22A Raptor has turned out to be so large, so complex, and so heavy that "it's a poor performer, less reliable than its predecessors."

The eye-popping price tags of the high-tech weapons are tied to complex cost structures. In many cases, the defense contractors are working with infant, unproven technologies that require significantly more research and testing before they can be installed. What's more, the armed services often add new missions to a weapon that is already in development or even in production -- sometimes to boost its marketability on Capitol Hill. When specifications change, timetables grow longer and costs grow higher.

The DDG 1000 is a prime example of the Christmas-tree effect. The Navy, initially seeking to build a small, low-cost destroyer that could do well in shallow coastal areas, kept adding missions and technological marvels to the vessel until the cost exploded.

"The DDG 1000 is really a dozen different programs all converging into one warship," says Loren B. Thompson, chief executive officer of the Lexington Institute, a defense research group in Arlington, Va. "It's not so clear why the ship has so many requirements, given the [threat] environment in which we find ourselves."

The Pentagon has done little to rein in the cost of high-tech weaponry. Although former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advocated restructuring the armed forces to focus on countering new threats -- from Islamic terrorists and unstable countries such as North Korea and Iran -- he proved unwilling to slash costly weapons systems to pay for it.

The department's latest policy-setting Quadrennial Defense Review, issued last February, outlined a plan that would leave U.S. forces equipped primarily for traditional warfare, and would not scale back the Future Combat System, the DDG 1000, or the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The GAO says the Pentagon has yet to do what is needed to cut costs on its major programs.

To be sure, not everyone is appalled at the burgeoning cost of programs such as the DDG 1000. William M. Arkin, a former Greenpeace International military analyst and longtime independent national security investigator, says that cost overruns have always plagued big-ticket weapons projects and always will.

He argues that the public shouldn't worry about it. Estimating the cost of new weapons is always a difficult job, he says. And he points out that when officials scale back the orders, the cost per unit shoots up.

"The argument that these high-tech weapons cost too much and aren't going to work is an old-fashioned one that was deflated during the Persian Gulf War," Arkin says. "The numbers may be staggering, but I don't see what the alternative is. We're still spending a lower percentage of our gross domestic product on the military than we did during most of the Cold War, so it isn't that we can't afford it."

In any case, Arkin expects Congress and the Pentagon to do little any time soon to get a better handle on the new technology. "We probably could make an argument that we don't need the best technology attainable to deal with the threats we're facing," he says, "but I don't think we're going to have that dialogue until well after Iraq is past us."

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Navy in search of a fresh strategy for the 21st century

Art Pine — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

For the first time, the sea service argued that it should do more than merely escort convoys across the Atlantic; it should prepare to carry the fight to the Soviet Union's flanks, using aircraft, missiles, and amphibious landings of marines. And it should go after Russian nuclear submarines in the Arctic.

The admirals' bold plans worked beyond their wildest hopes. Almost overnight, the United States broadened its Cold War military strategy to give the Navy a bigger role. The Reagan administration used the document to justify its plans to expand the Navy to 600 ships -- the largest inventory of U.S. warships since the end of the Vietnam War. The strategy also spurred debate over naval tactics and technology.

Today, with the Cold War dead and buried, that strategy is obsolete, and the Navy is searching for a plan to fit the challenges of the 21st century -- from deterring a potential blue-water "peer competitor," which some analysts fear China hopes to become, to launching the kind of small, near-shore expeditionary ventures that seem more likely in the post-9/11 global war on terrorism.

The difficulty is, none of these threats is imminent. Although China certainly could raise such a navy by the mid-2020s, analysts don't know that Beijing has embarked on such a course; today, China's navy is no real match for the massive U.S. fleet. And conducting near-shore engagements against insurgents is primarily a job for ground troops; the Navy's main role would be to provide cover fire.

Moreover, these new missions require warships that are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Deterring a future blue-water Chinese navy would take an array of high-tech aircraft carriers, surface vessels, and submarines. "Littoral" warfare, as near-shore conflicts are called, requires smaller, less-expensive vessels. There's little overlap between the two.

Shipbuilding costs, meanwhile, are skyrocketing. The average price of the proposed DDG-1000, a high-tech destroyer conceived in the 1990s as a low-cost littoral vessel, is now $2.7 billion to $3.8 billion, and threatens to eat up the service's long-term shipbuilding budget. The Navy has 278 warships and is hoping to grow to 313 over 30 years -- a goal that will take an extra $15 billion to $22 billion a year to achieve, depending on the estimate.

Meanwhile, the rationale for an expensive Navy is becoming less apparent to the public. Look at television news coverage of the American military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you won't see much footage of Navy warships. Apart from some use of carrier jets, these are decidedly ground wars. And the soldiers and marines who are fighting them are ferried in by transport planes, not by amphibious landing craft.

"The question is, how do we describe the role of the Navy in an expeditionary age when there's no compelling naval threat?" says Robert O. Work, a retired Marine Corps colonel and an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense-oriented think tank in Washington. "Unlike the Cold War, there's no single threat on which to focus. The kinds of challenges that the Navy will be facing are very broad."

The Navy's leaders are scrambling to resolve its future. Last June, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chief of naval operations, announced plans to draft by mid-2007 a national maritime strategy that would plot the mission and scope of the 21st-century Navy, providing policy makers with a beacon to guide them in planning the size and makeup of the fleet.

The Naval War College in Newport, R.I., is putting together the intellectual framework for the strategy, and once it's finished, the Navy will bring in outsiders -- think-tank wonks and academic experts -- to study the plan and offer advice. Mullen says he wants the final strategy document ready for public release by the middle of June -- a lightning-fast timetable for such a process.

For strategic and budgetary reasons, Mullen says, the new maritime strategy must take a broader view of naval power. He talks about a "national fleet" comprising both the Navy and the Coast Guard, which has the small-boat expertise for dealing with insurgents' threats.

Mullen is also seeking unprecedented cooperation from foreign navies and even from some large merchant shipping lines. Together, he says, like-minded navies could serve as a sort of global "1,000-ship Navy" that could work together to keep the peace.

But the Navy is facing challenging seas. With no Cold War-era pressure and with no single, visible nemesis like the old Soviet Union, there's no national consensus about what the future fleet should look like. Islamic terrorists have no navy and aren't likely to assemble one. Globalization has, however, given terrorists increasing access to sophisticated military technology.

The United States will no doubt maintain a strong naval presence in the Western Pacific indefinitely, both to discourage China from attacking Taiwan and to quell any serious provocations by North Korea. The Pentagon already plans to station another aircraft carrier battle group in the region over the next couple of years. But analysts disagree over how quickly China might become a serious maritime threat.

Accordingly, Mullen wants naval planners to focus not just on threats to the United States but also on the relationship between maritime security and the globalized economy, in which the United States and its allies depend more than ever on ship transport of goods and resources.

The United States takes more than 6 million cargo containers into its ports each year. The Navy hopes that the globalization angle will entice foreign cooperation.

The sharp contrast between the kinds of warships needed for the Navy's likely missions is a major problem for Mullen's strategists. Wayne P. Hughes, a retired Navy captain now at the Naval Postgraduate School, has suggested building a "bi-modal" force with "high-end" ships that could meet any Chinese challenge and "low-end" vessels for near-shore operations. But it's not clear whether that approach would do the job.

Missing from the debate so far is what the Navy may be willing to lose -- that is, what it can cut -- in order to reshape itself to the new maritime strategy. Estimates compiled by Eric Labs, a naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, show that the service's projected budget already seems inadequate to finance the 313-ship fleet that the admirals envision. Any major changes could well widen that gap.

Finally, some worry that launching the strategy in mid-2007 may be politically risky. The U.S. will be nearing the end of a lame-duck administration, Congress is apt to be polarized, and Americans are likely to be even more frustrated over the war in Iraq.

"I can't think of a worse time to publish a national maritime strategy," says retired Navy Capt. Joseph F. Bouchard, who has worked on similar projects.

Ronald O'Rourke, a naval analyst at the Congressional Research Service, is skeptical that the planners can come up with a compelling document that will help build public support for maintaining the Navy's share of the defense budget. The plethora of potential U.S. adversaries "makes it difficult to write a powerful, thematically unified strategy," he says, and "by trying to address everything, you run the risk of winding up with a document that says a lot of interesting things but has no powerful take-away message."

Indeed, Loren B. Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a defense-oriented research group in Arlington, Va., views Mullen's quest as little more than a public-relations gimmick.

"It's hard to understand what sort of intellectual breakthrough can be achieved, given that the service already has devoted a generation to reflecting on this," Thompson says. "The problem the Navy faces is that it's not visible in Iraq, and everyone sees the ground forces and they want to put money there. This is essentially an effort to reacquaint the public with the fact that a big country needs a big navy."

Mullen told students at the Naval War College last year that the service's 1980s document succeeded because "it was a strategy for -- and of -- its time, and it worked, prevailing across presidential administrations, chiefs of naval operations, and varying budget cycles." But as Work points out, that plan was issued at a time of intense naval competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, when it answered a critical need.

Today, the Navy may be a casualty of its own success. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy has helped put its major nemesis out of action and has won control of the seas.

No foreign navy comes close to operating the number of warships in the American Navy, Work argues. "Its fleet is more capable than any other," he says. "One would be hard-pressed to make a case that it's in danger of losing its lead."

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