Government Executive - Authors - Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

The Next War

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The war in Afghanistan is not over yet, but back in Washington the battle has already started over what the next war will be. On one side stands the Army, struggling to reorient itself to a wider world after a decade of all-consuming counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the other stand the Air Force and Navy, tired of playing supporting roles and looking to future conflicts in the Pacific. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, straddles both camps.

Much of this conflict is fueled by perennial service rivalries over funding, whose flames are now fanned high by the prospect of at least half a trillion dollars in cuts coming over the next decade. But there are deep divisions in institutional outlook and serious professional differences among senior leaders as well.

In this war over the next war, the Air Force and Navy have stolen an intellectual march over the Army with their joint AirSea Battle concept. It is a vision of future conflict well-matched to America’s exhaustion with ground wars, its preference for high-tech, long-range engagements and its growing anxiety over the rise of China. AirSea Battle’s presumed opponent is a well-funded and technologically sophisticated nation state—like China or, on a smaller scale, Iran—that seeks to dominate its region. To keep out any U.S. intervention forces, such regional powers are creating what military officials awkwardly call an “anti-access/area denial” system: a layered defense of long-range cruise and ballistic missiles to attack American ships and bases; anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down U.S. planes; and shorter-range weapons ranging from fast attack boats and diesel submarines to naval mines and roadside bombs.

“The price of projecting power is going up,” says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who is the leading civilian exponent of AirSea Battle.

To pry apart these defenses, the Air Force and Navy hint at secretive electronic and cyberattack capabilities that will open the way for long-range precision strikes from drones, stealth aircraft, surface ships and submarines. In this scenario, the Army plays mainly on the margins, providing land-based missile defense and perhaps seizing strategic locations alongside the Marines.

AirSea Battle and the anti-access/area denial threat have come to dominate the debate, with the Army still struggling to respond. The ground force has no grand concept yet to carry its banner in the interservice battle over missions, roles and funding. The Obama administration’s strategic guidance, issued in January, explicitly swears off the kind of “large-scale, prolonged stability operations” that the Army and Marines spent the last decade learning, slowly and bloodily, how to do. Now the Army in particular is wrestling with how to institutionalize its hard-won counterinsurgency skills and justify its relevance in the coming post-Afghanistan world while at the same time rebuilding long-neglected capabilities for conventional war.

The emerging attempt to reconcile counterinsurgency and conventional combat is an idea—not yet a formal doctrine—called “hybrid war.” While AirSea Battle focuses on hostile nation states, the hybrid model predicts ugly alliances of states, guerrillas and criminal groups through which irregular forces will acquire sophisticated weapons once exclusive to conventional armies (hence the term “hybrid”). The paradigmatic case is how Hezbollah bloodied the vaunted Israelis in 2006, when the Lebanese militia best known for suicide bombs instead made skillful use of long-range rockets, anti-tank missiles and even anti-ship cruise missiles, all believed to be provided by Iran.

The United States has plenty of painful experience against guerrillas armed with short-range weapons like AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, but an arsenal such as Hezbollah’s is deadly at much greater distances, said David Johnson, one of the leading hybrid-warfare theorists, in an interview shortly before being named director of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno’s Strategic Studies Group in May: “It’s no longer a 500-meter problem, it’s a 5-kilometer problem.”

Army leaders from Odierno on down increasingly invoke the hybrid buzzword. For today’s Army, the hybrid threat hits an institutional sweet spot. It would require the Army to come up with its own opposing hybrid of its traditional blitzkrieg capabilities—heavy tanks, massed artillery, large-scale maneuver—and its new counterinsurgency skills—languages, cultural knowledge, human intelligence—to root out adversaries who are far better armed than the Taliban but still take cover among sympathetic civilians.

The Army is still thrashing out its concepts for hybrid war even as it fights for a greater role in AirSea Battle. As different as they are, the two visions of future conflict could complement each other instead of simply contradict. They address, respectively, the long- and short-range manifestations of the same problem: the proliferation of smart weapons—once a U.S. monopoly—to a widening range of ever more sophisticated foes. Air Force and Navy AirSea Battle tactics can break down an enemy’s long-range defenses so the Army and Marines can close in to root out the hybrid adversary on the ground.

Perhaps the most fertile soil for defense investment in the lean years to come are those systems essential for both hybrid war and AirSea Battle. Both concepts depend on missile defenses against the global proliferation of long-range threats, ranging from China’s sophisticated ship-seeking ballistic missiles to North Korea’s souped-up Scuds to Hezbollah’s crude Katyusha rockets. Both concepts call for an array of sensors and unmanned systems to detect enemies before they can kill U.S. troops. Above all, both AirSea Battle and hybrid warfare— and, even more so, any overarching concept combining both—require communications networks to link the separate services, from foot soldier to warship to satellite, into a coherent whole. Those networks, in turn, require sophisticated cyber and electronic warfare capabilities to defend them from attack.

Those are the areas of common ground. But even the most sophisticated electronic system requires some kind of platform—a ship, a plane, a tank, a drone, a satellite—to carry it. Those platforms still dominate military budgets and drive the interservice fight. In the long run lives are at stake, as well as dollars. Given the years it takes to develop weapons and the decades the successful ones remain in service, today’s budget battles will determine what U.S. troops use in real battles for a long time to come.

Air Power: The F-35 Problem

As powerful as the idea has proved, AirSea Battle poses one big problem for its Air Force and Navy sponsors: The two services’ largest program, the Joint Strike Fighter, doesn’t actually fit the concept very well. The Air Force, Navy and Marines are committed to buying 2,457 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, also known as Lightning IIs, for an estimated $395.7 billion. It’s the Pentagon’s top procurement program, with correspondingly big problems, making it an epic challenge for program manager Vice Adm. David Venlet to keep on track.

In the even bigger picture, however, the question is the plane’s place in future wars. The F-35 is intended as the radar-evading replacement for a host of nonstealthy fighters. The F-35’s stealth could well be critical in penetrating the anti-access/area denial defenses that are the target of AirSea Battle, although skeptics, especially in the Navy, have doubts that stealth will still work against ever improving sensors. What’s more, given AirSea Battle’s emphasis on long-range strikes, especially over the vast distances of the Pacific, the military is arguably over-investing in relatively short-range fighters and shortchanging long-range bombers —something Krepinevich and his colleagues have repeatedly pointed out.

The F-35 has a combat mission radius —the maximum distance at which it can strike a target and return without refueling—of about 600 nautical miles (not quite 700 statute miles). While the aircraft itself is a small, stealthy, agile target, the platforms from which it must refuels are not: Air Force tankers, aircraft carriers and air bases. As adversaries acquire ever longer-range and more accurate missiles, they can make it increasingly dangerous to refuel short-range fighters within 700 miles of their final target.

To penetrate defended airspace without depending on vulnerable bases or tankers, the Air Force has only recently begun investing in a new long-range bomber, optimistically expected to enter service in the 2020s. Its current bomber fleet is not up to cracking a sophisticated anti-access defense. The venerable B-52 is so slow and unstealthy that it suffered heavy losses over North Vietnam 40 years ago. The B-1 is supersonic but not stealthy. The B-2 is stealthy but not supersonic, and there are only 20 of them.

After much uncertainty, the Air Force has put real money into a Next- Generation Bomber program. “It’s about $5 billion in the next few years, which is enough to design the landing gear, but it’s a commitment to get going,” said aviation industry analyst Richard Aboulafia, tongue only partially in cheek. “I think it’s got some traction at this point.” Total cost is estimated at about $55 billion, most of which the Air Force will have to find at the same time it’s funding full-rate production of the F-35. Even if the current budget climate improves, the service may face hard choices about which program best fits the AirSea Battle concept.

Sea Power: Big Ships, Little Ships and Gators

In the air, the short-range Joint Strike Fighter is a distinctly imperfect fit for the long-range warfare envisioned by AirSea Battle. On the seas, the Navy faces a similar square-peg, round-hole problem with the vessel it plans to buy more of than any other—the Littoral Combat Ship. “These are not large surface combatants that are going to sail into the South China Sea and challenge the Chinese military; that’s not what they’re made for,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, said at a Government Executive event in April. “You won’t send it into an anti-access area” by itself.

Greenert’s candor triggered a cascade of other Navy leaders insisting that LCS was, indeed, a warship. The service has committed to buying 55 Littoral Combat Ships at an estimated cost of $37 billion, and the program already was under fire for cost overruns, schedule slips and construction defects on the first two vessels.

LCS will play a vital role in the future fleet, but a supporting one. Smaller, cheaper and significantly less damage-resistant than the standard Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, Littoral Combat Ships will carry interchangeable weapons and technology packages that service leaders can use to configure the ships for specific missions—to hunt submarines, clear mines and shoot up swarms of fast attack boats, all considered major anti-access threats. But there are no plans to kit out LCS for the long-range strikes at the core of AirSea Battle, a role reserved for the more robust destroyers and the giant aircraft carriers. Indeed, the most survivable strike platform in the face of long-range anti-ship missiles is not a surface ship at all, but a submarine, which the Navy buys at a steady rate of two a year, more than any class of vessel except the LCS itself. But submarines can’t shoot down incoming missiles. So if Littoral Combat Ships go in to hunt subs and clear mines close to the coast of a well-armed enemy, they will need destroyers to escort them.

Indeed, one of LCS’ attractions for the Navy is these cheaper ships will free up destroyers for the Pacific by replacing them in the less demanding theaters of Latin America and Africa, where the threat is drug runners and pirates, not nation states. Anti-access is a high-end threat that is important to prepare for, as were the Soviets during the Cold War. But the Navy spends most of its time in much less dangerous waters: It shows the flag, exercises with friendly nations, assists disaster victims and intimidates Third World despots with gunboat diplomacy. AirSea Battle it ain’t, but these are important missions for which the LCS is well-suited.

Those are also the main missions of the Gator Navy, the Navy’s 35 amphibious warfare ships of various sizes and their associated landing craft, which carry the Marines ashore. After years of operating from fixed bases far inland in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Marines are eagerly returning to their roots as a ship-borne rapid intervention force.

The Army also wants to prove its ability to act in countries where the United States does not already have an elaborate infrastructure built up. The Army War College’s annual wargame in May showed new interest in amphibious operations alongside the Marines, in the Army’s long-disused airborne capabilities and in the general logistical challenge of supporting U.S. forces in austere locations.

One problem: The sheer weight of armor U.S. ground forces have accumulated since Sept. 11 makes them physically harder to deploy. Every vehicle from the humble Humvee to the massive M1 Abrams tank has been uparmored against the threat of roadside bombs.

Ground Forces: The Uparmor Dilemma

It is the ground forces that have changed the most since Sept. 11, suffered the most and grown the most. As budgets tighten and troops come home, they must change again—and shrink. Already the Marines are slated to cut 20,000 personnel, the Army 80,000. But their procurement programs are under stress as well.

The Army has no program to rival the Joint Strike Fighter for size or for political momentum. Ever since 9/11, even as money poured into the ground forces, Army modernization programs were being canceled: The Crusader artillery vehicle, the Comanche and Armed Reconnaissance helicopters, and above all the Future Combat Systems, an overly ambitious attempt to build a highly deployable brigade of high-tech, lightweight tanks. The Marines, meanwhile, lost their Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a kind of amphibious tank. The closest thing the Army has to a flagship procurement program today is the Ground Combat Vehicle, a heavily armed and armored troop carrier, but it will not enter production until 2017 if that too isn’t canceled.

Instead of fielding new vehicles with new technology, service leaders installed more armor on the vehicles they already have and buy off-the-shelf stopgaps to create MRAPs, mine-resistant ambush-protected trucks. But even the lightest, most mobile MRAP variant, the M-ATV (MRAP all-terrain vehicle), weighs in at more than 12 tons, more than twice an uparmored Humvee. Other, heavier MRAPs can hardly operate off-road: problematic but tolerable in highly urbanized Iraq, painfully limiting in rugged Afghanistan, and potentially crippling for future rapid-intervention missions around the world.

Now the Army and Marine Corps want a truck that’s much more maneuverable cross-country than an MRAP, yet much less vulnerable than the old Humvee. But their proposed solution, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program, faced cancellation threats in Congress and already has been rebooted to control its rising costs. The Army likewise revamped its Ground Combat Vehicle after initial proposals came in at 50 to 70 tons, startlingly heavy even for what is essentially a tank.

The basic problem is it is always easier to add more explosives to a roadside bomb than it is to add more armor to a vehicle. Krepinevich argues this is a losing battle the United States shouldn’t even fight. “In the absence of a major breakthrough in vehicle defense technologies, spending large sums on new systems seems ill-advised,” he said at a March event, “and we couldn’t identify a prospective breakthrough.”

Holding off on big investments until new technologies arise is a politically attractive argument in tight budget times. And if long-range AirSea Battles waged by missiles, ships and planes are the face of the future, then ground force equipment is a low priority. But if the world is really headed into hybrid wars, then armored vehicles of all kinds are essential and the current fleet is hardly adequate. That is the enormously expensive question policy- makers have yet to answer.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. is deputy editor at AOL Defense. Previously, he spent 13 years at National Journal, Government Executive’s sister publication. He also runs an oral history project with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq called Learning From Veterans.

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For soldiers, coming home can be as hard as leaving

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Going off to war is hard. All too often, so is coming home.

The total number of American troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq has finally started to come down. But from on-base counseling offices to the White House, the realization is growing that the strain on military families does not end when the warriors come home. Problems as severe as post-traumatic stress disorder and as mundane as who pays the bills can make reintegration after the deployment as difficult as the separation during it.

Matthew McCollum's brother, a marine, died in Afghanistan. When Matthew, an Army major, later deployed to the Afghan war, his wife, Angel, held herself and their two sons together during the year apart. "I kept saying, 'Your Uncle Dan is your Daddy's angel; he'll watch over him, I promise,' " she told National Journal. She even managed to move the family from one base to another in anticipation of her husband's transfer to a new unit. Finally, in the first days after Matthew's return to the United States, while he was still at his old base dealing with post-deployment paperwork, the dam broke.

"I called him one evening and it was, like, 9:30 to 10:00 at night, [and] he didn't answer, and I immediately got panicked," Angel said. "I kept on calling and calling.... By 11:30, I was ready to call the front desk to have them key into his room to make sure he wasn't dead." When Matthew finally got in and called his wife, he chided her for overreacting. Angel's response could serve as a credo for those whose war is on the home front:

"Did you pray for me every single night that you were gone that somebody wouldn't shoot me or blow me up or kill me or drag my body through the streets?... Did you pray for me every night that I wouldn't have a heart attack from the stress?" she asked her husband. "Matt, I have been holding your vigil.... Until you've rocked your sons to sleep and assured them as they were crying that Daddy would be OK and things were going to be all right, you have no right to tell me I've overreacted.

"And that's the only argument we had," Angel finished with a laugh.

The McCollums talked it through and stayed together -- and he stayed in the Army. But not every military family makes it.

In the most recent issue of National Journal, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. looks at the challenge of coming home after war.

Click here to read the full story.

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Observers debate role, authority of intelligence chief

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced his resignation, effective May 28, amid reports that he had clashed with the White House and, particularly, the politically ultra-connected CIA director, Leon Panetta.

Prominent members of Congress, including Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and two contributors to this blog, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, immediately expressed their skepticism about Blair's ouster. Some observers suggest that Blair is being held accountable -- or scapegoated -- for the intelligence community's failures in the Christmas Day and Times Square bombing attempts. Others argue he overreached his authority as DNI -- if anyone could agree what the DNI's scope is in the first place.

Like the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created as a highly visible solution to the problems of 9/11 and has struggled ever since. Whatever Blair's personal problems as DNI, the role is inherently awkward, the product of a quest to improve security by redrawing organizational charts. Blair is the third person to hold the office in the five years since it was created. So was Blair just the wrong guy to be DNI?

Whoever holds it next, does the office need new powers and another reorganization of the intelligence community? Or should there even be a DNI at all?

Click here to view feedback from the experts.

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Army modernization project faces uncertain future

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

If the Army must be ready for both high-intensity combat and low-intensity counterinsurgency, what is to become of the service's main modernization program, the awkwardly named and hugely expensive Future Combat Systems?

With a new administration and a worsening economy, there is unprecedented pressure to trim the complex program -- originally envisioned as an integrated set of armored vehicles and aerial and ground robots, plus a mobile computer network with 95 million lines of code to coordinate their operations.

The idea was first outlined by then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki in 1999. The problem then to be solved was how the Army could deploy heavy forces in time to stop, say, Iraqi aggression in Kuwait in 1990 or Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, both situations in which hostile nation-states with Soviet-built tanks were able to move faster than the Pentagon could.

Gen. Shinseki sold the FCS as a rapidly deployable replacement for the Army's main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, which was too heavy to be flown in large numbers to a crisis spot.

The FCS would use advanced technology to cram all of the firepower and protection of 70-ton heavy tanks into 20-ton vehicles light enough to be airlifted en masse to trouble spots worldwide.

Slow, grinding wars against elusive guerrillas were not on the FCS agenda. But the original vision got one critical part of the future right: Watching urban sprawl envelop the planet, Army planners predicted that the FCS would have to fight its battles in cities. So they outlined an FCS brigade structure that incorporated not only long-range precision weapons to kill enemy tanks but also additional foot soldiers to fight house-to-house, armored personnel carriers to get them to the target under fire, and abundant unmanned systems -- flying drones, crawling robots, and static sensors -- to scope out hidden enemies, with a computerized communications network to coordinate it all.

Those same four components -- armor, infantry, drones, and networks -- have proved vital in city fighting in Iraq. So it might seem that the FCS would be perfect for hybrid warriors.

The problem, however, is that for years the Army has played chicken with Congress over the $160 billion -- some say $200 billion -- FCS program. Capitol Hill chafed at the Army's insistence on treating the array as a single program: a single line item in its budget with a single contract. Lawmakers were also unhappy that the FCS was aimed not at modernizing existing Army units but at creating "FCS brigades" equipped for the most part with Future Combat Systems hardware.

The Army argued that the program's 17 components were too interdependent for legislators to pick and choose and that because the FCS made up so much of the Army's modernization budget, the service had no alternative plan. To put the Army's argument bluntly: Future Combat Systems is too big to fail and too tightly integrated to pick apart, so let us do what we want.

"If FCS were canceled, the Army does not really have a plan for the future, and it was so thoroughly integrated you couldn't kill any one piece of it because the whole thing would collapse," said Loren Thompson, a Lexington Institute analyst and a consultant for major defense firms. "That approach has turned from a form of protection to a liability. It simply isn't executable. I suspect the service will have to disentangle those elements."

Congress has proved increasingly willing to call the Army's bluff. In 2007, legislators forced the service to list one of the eight planned variants of the FCS's armored vehicles as a separate line item in its budget. Last year, the Army on its own announced it would accelerate some of the less ambitious robotics and buy them for existing light infantry units. In recent months, under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to control costs, the Army has hinted that it will cherry-pick the most promising of the eight FCS manned vehicles and use them to modernize existing heavy armored units. Instead of a "pure" FCS brigade, one congressional staffer said, "it sounds like they're headed for a future heavy brigade with a mix of FCS vehicles, current vehicles, and Strykers," an armored vehicle with huge tires that has been effective in Iraq.

As for the sprawling FCS program, it should be divided into three parts, like Gaul, the staffer said, voicing a sentiment not uncommon around Washington. "You could pursue the vehicle variants under one R&D program because you have a common chassis," he argued. "The [computer] network, I think, just needs to be a separate program. [And] the robots and such, those could be separate programs. If they end up being useful, great, buy them for the entire Army. I think they could stand or fail on their own."

As for the FCS's brigade design, applying it to current armored units would give them almost 20 percent more foot soldiers -- the truly decisive weapon in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The Army's program makes sense in both the organization and the equipment," Frank Hoffman, a retired marine with no dog in the Army's fight, said of the Future Combat Systems. "I think the Army's right for the wrong reasons. They may have thought this thing was designed for high-end warfare, but it turns out to be the best posture for the medium."

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Analysts debate feasibility of Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In 2002, a little-known Illinois state senator named Barack Obama launched himself onto the national stage by opposing the invasion of Iraq. As a presidential candidate, Obama laid out a 16-month timeline, starting on Inauguration Day and ending in summer 2010, to withdraw major combat forces from Iraq. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has insisted on a Status of Forces Agreement calling for a U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2011.

But the Iraqi government consistently slips deadlines, and Obama's plan is full of caveats. Is it realistic that all combat brigades will be out of Iraq in 16 months? If not, what might be a more realistic timetable -- shorter or longer? Do you have an estimate on how many troops might still be in Iraq 16 months after inauguration? And what are the factors -- political and military, in the U.S. and in Iraq -- that will shape Obama's choices on how quickly to draw down?

In NationalJournal.com's Expert Blog on national security, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. posed these questions to a series of national security specialists.

Click here to see their responses.

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Candidates have not tipped their hands on defense spending

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from a National Journal story exploring how much of a difference the next president will be able to make in a number of policy areas.

Nine years ago, an up-and-coming presidential candidate named George W. Bush staked out a bold position on national defense, calling for a high-tech "transformation" of the U.S. military in a speech at the Citadel, the military academy in Charleston, S.C. Once in office, however, in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush and his hard-driving Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, discovered just how difficult it is to shift the Pentagon -- even during peacetime, even for an administration publicly committed to defense reform.

There has been no Citadel speech in the 2008 campaign. Neither John McCain, R-Ariz., nor Barack Obama, D-Ill., has publicly staked his prestige on a particular vision of national defense the way that Bush did in 1999. For all their differences over the Iraq war, the two nominees do not disagree with the current conventional wisdom, let alone each other, on how to run the Defense Department. Both support the ongoing addition of 92,000 ground troops to the Army and Marine Corps; neither has explained where the money for all of this manpower is going to come from. So, with no clear agenda from the next president, whomever he may be, the momentum of what is sometimes called the "military-industrial-congressional complex" will carry the Defense Department forward on its current course.

It is not that the next administration does not have some hard choices to make. Official modernization plans by the four services outstrip any plausible budget scenarios. Equipment procured in the 1980s and 1990s is wearing out. The Army in particular is fraying from repeated deployments to Iraq. In 2009 alone, critical decisions will have to be made on major weapons purchases, including rebidding the Air Force's much-deferred refueling tanker; extending the $63 billion F-22 fighter program; and beginning low-rate production for parts of the Army's $128 billion Future Combat System. But if either candidate has a considered position on any of these programs, or the larger dilemmas of defense reform, he has so far not tipped his hand.

In the Senate, McCain has been the bane of Boeing, which tried to lease aerial tankers to the Pentagon. But his actions were part of his larger campaign against pork-barrel spending and insider-driven contracts rather than a result of a policy agenda on either the tanker specifically or defense procurement in general. McCain certainly has a habit of taking strong stands on particular programs, a propensity that his admirers call maverick and his critics call capricious. But his senatorial track record does not suggest an overall strategy on military spending.

As for Obama, he has an understandably short track record, if that, on general defense spending other than the Iraq war. That leaves would-be defense prognosticators with one candidate who is largely unknown and one who is well known for being unpredictable. The genuinely telling moment will come not during the campaign but during the transition, when the winner decides on a secretary of Defense. If strategic change, instead of drift, is to come for the Pentagon in the next administration, it is up to the secretary to make it happen.

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Army struggles toward goal of wi-fi infantry

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

FORT BLISS, Texas -- You can hear the robot coming. It buzzes across the ground like an overgrown toy car, which in many ways it is, down to the Xbox-style remote in the hands of the young soldier operating it. Visiting reporters and Army officers, packed close on a rooftop, lean over to watch as the little robot running on tank-like tracks--formally a "Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle," or SUGV -- trundles into a mock village built for urban-warfare training in the scrublands of West Texas.

As the 30-pound, knee-high bot scoots from one building to the next, it swivels its mechanical neck and looks around with a set of cameras, feeding live video to its operator so he can scope out potential ambush sites before his squad advances on the simulated enemy.

Conveniently, the cinderblock structures in the training area don't have doors, just gaps in the wall. Later, examining the robot up close, one visitor asks how it could get into a building with doors that actually shut. The only answer is a soldier's wry chuckle. (The Army declined a request to discuss the door-opening capabilities of the SUGV.)

Bomb squads in Iraq and Afghanistan have used somewhat larger robots to check out potential booby traps, and the machines have indeed saved some lives. The Fort Bliss demonstration was meant to make the case for the robots in a much more challenging scenario: an infantry assault against living, breathing enemies who would presumably notice the bizarre mechanical apparition at their door, even if they didn't hear it coming. An attentive enemy might simply shoot the bot -- or, worse, hide from its slow-swiveling sensors and set an ambush for the Americans following its path.

While soldiers wrap up the mock SUGV assault, a colonel and a general trade anxious murmurs about the second scout robot to be demonstrated that day: a 14-inch-wide flying machine called the "Micro Air Vehicle," which looks less like a tiny helicopter than a militarized ceiling fan. As soldiers struggle to get the robot to take off, an officer from the unit running the field test explains, "It's run by GPS satellites, and the cloud cover is affecting the link." A public-affairs official leaps in to emphasize that the vehicle is just a prototype and that the next iteration will have a more robust uplink. Eventually, soldiers get what they call the "flying beer keg" into the air. It buzzes overhead, clearly audible and visible from the ground, as the operator shows it off. But even at a low altitude it would be a difficult target for an enemy rifleman. The commander of the field-testing task force, Col. Emmett Schaill, remarks admiringly, "If I'd had that thing, I probably wouldn't have gotten shot."

When Schaill served in Iraq in 2005, he had far greater access to reconnaissance drones than most soldiers did at the time: He was the deputy commander of a Stryker brigade, the Army's most high-tech combat unit. Nevertheless, he could watch live feeds from his drones only at a dedicated ground control station. On the move in their Humvees, Schaill and his soldiers did not have unmanned aerial vehicles small and numerous enough to take with them, and the UAVs the brigade had could not even send them timely still images. Schaill said that it took him "hours" just to get photos and other critical intelligence from one part of the brigade to another.

So when the colonel and a small group of soldiers, on their way to visit the Iraqi police chief in Tal Afar, heard a car bomb explode, they could not send a robot to scout ahead. Going to investigate, they ran into insurgent gunmen. Schaill was shot in the arm. Today, he says he has recovered 90 percent of the nerve and muscle function. Having a "flying beer keg" along would hardly have guaranteed that Schaill and his soldiers would have spotted the ambush in time, but it would have given them a better chance.

A Skeptical Congress

The field test that Schaill's task force ran in late July and early August at Fort Bliss, uncharacteristically cool and green from recent summer rains, was part of the Army's all-out push to show that its high-tech, high-cost Future Combat System is relevant to the grueling guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. The FCS, as it is invariably called, is a massive effort to develop a suite of equipment for Army brigades. The official (and optimistic)estimate of its total cost in 2008 dollars is $128 billion. At last count, the repeatedly revised list of FCS equipment consisted of the two mini-robots; four larger ones (three on wheels, one in the air); eight armored vehicles built on a common chassis; an outhouse-sized missile launcher nicknamed "rockets in a box"; and an array of sensors that look rather like photographers' tripods with no camera on top.

This kitchen-sink approach makes it almost impossible for the Army to explain the FCS in less than an hour of PowerPoint slides. Bundling so many systems together also complicates the oversight of any particular component--and that only adds to Congress's anxieties about the program. "They want to look at it as one great big glob, and the truth of the matter is, it's a lot of separate capabilities," said Rep. Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. "I don't know why they lump it all together into one thing."

The Army argues that only this all-in-one "system of systems" approach can ensure that all the individual gadgets work together. Yet, ironically, electronic communications capabilities essential to linking the different FCS components are being developed outside the program by three other independent programs. Meanwhile, under congressional pressure to show near-term results, the Army has committed to fielding individual elements of the FCS piecemeal as each technology matures. So although the manned vehicles will not enter service until 2015, many unmanned systems are scheduled to be battle-ready in 2011.

In June, the Army announced the latest restructuring of the program: Instead of sending the first subset of FCS technologies to heavy armored units, the program would now focus on equipping the light infantry, which has suffered the worst casualties in Iraq.

Military officials touted this restructuring as an "acceleration." Engineers did indeed accelerate development of the two mini-robots on display at Fort Bliss, making them part of the 2011 deadline. (Early versions of both are already being used in Iraq.) But the Army delayed indefinitely two other program components: new electronics for its mainstay armored vehicles, the M1 Abrams tank and the M2 Bradley infantry carrier. Officials insist they pushed back these upgrades to the big tanks so they could focus resources on the light infantry. Key congressional staff members suggest that the Army simply could not get the systems for the armored units to work.

Whatever the reason, this summer's field test was downgraded from a rigorous formal assessment, run by the independent Army Test and Evaluation Command, to a "preliminary limited user test" that was overseen by the FCS program itself; the results, good or bad, will not be factored into the official Defense Department process to decide whether to keep funding the FCS. The test that counts has been postponed more than a year, to August 2009.

"This thing gets more bizarre by the day," fumed Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, who chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees the FCS. "They're delaying the test by a year -- how the hell is that an 'acceleration'?"

The program has already spent $15 billion on research and development, according to Abercrombie. "You'll have to make your own judgment as to whether you see $15 billion worth of modernization that will have a practical value for the Army," he said. "The only thing they have to show is stuff like the little robot. Kids do that -- I've seen them do it with little boats in the pond down at the park." What the Army really needs to make work is the invisible electronic web that makes the individual FCS projects more than the sum of their parts. Abercrombie emphasized, "The key to all of this is the network."

Mobile Networks At War

The real heart of the ambitious FCS is not, in fact, the robots that were put through their paces at Fort Bliss. It is not even the controversial lightweight armored vehicles that account for most of the Future Combat System's cost and whose first prototype, a self-propelled howitzer, debuted on Capitol Hill in June.

All of this individual hardware depends on something hidden inside the cargo bay of a Humvee idling at the Fort Bliss test site--a series of unremarkable olive-drab boxes that hold the linchpin of the Future Combat System. The circuitry inside the boxes updates a flat-screen display jutting awkwardly from the dashboard of the already-crammed vehicle. Unlike the adorable and intermittently functional robots, these electronics are not photogenic. In fact, the computer screen, which looks like a militarized version of Google Maps, is off-limits to photography.

But if -- if -- the Army can get the technology to work, it will give every single squad what Schaill lacked on the day that he got shot: the capability to receive pictures, and, theoretically, even video, across a high-speed mobile network. The objective of the Future Combat System is not simply to give the Army more drones, each feeding video to a single operator and whoever happens to be looking over his shoulder, which is the current state of the art. The goal is to let every soldier in the field get real-time reconnaissance imagery from any drone or human comrade who is on the network.

"The kids here in the United States think it's their God-given right to have a cellphone that can take pictures," said Rickey Smith, a retired colonel now working on the FCS for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. "But the line soldier today does not have a cellphone capability. I can't take a picture and send it to my buddy."

It may seem strange that American soldiers lack the kind of mobile networks that American civilians with their iPhones and BlackBerrys increasingly take for granted. But all of our on-the-go conveniences depend on a multibillion-dollar infrastructure that is very much fixed in place. The only reason your cellphone is small enough to slip into your pocket is that its low-power transmissions are relayed by a system of repeaters and cell towers all over the country. The only reason your laptop can go online from your table at Starbucks is that its wireless signal has to carry only a few yards to the Wi-Fi access portal built into the wall.

In a war zone, that kind of fixed infrastructure is unavailable. The military equivalents of cell towers and wireless hubs have to be compact enough for soldiers to haul across the battlefield, which drastically limits the amount of data they can transmit and receive. As a result, a soldier's radio "must radiate 10 to 20 times the amount of power as a normal cellphone," said Chris Brady, a vice president in the military communications division of General Dynamics, which is developing the handheld version of what the military calls its new "Joint Tactical Radio System." Moreover, Brady said, the radios "don't have the benefit of a strong transmitter on a tower, so the 'receive' side of the radio must have a significant amount of processing power to interpret signals off a small antenna."

The larger, vehicle-mounted versions of the new mobile networking equipment also pose technical problems. The Army has successfully installed a prototype FCS network on the Humvee, a relatively roomy cargo hauler. But the M1 Abrams and, especially, the M2 Bradley infantry carrier are already packed with electronics that have been added piecemeal during their 27 years in service. These vehicles, originally designed in the 1970s, have only so much available capacity for electricity-hungry upgrades such as jammers to deactivate roadside bombs. In certain configurations, Bradleys actually suffer brownouts, forcing soldiers to turn off some systems before activating others. Once the FCS network gear is added to the Bradley, Schaill said, "it's on the edge."

It is these network upgrades to the Bradley and the Abrams that the Army postponed when it "accelerated" the FCS program this summer. Officials have not released a revised timeline for the enhancements.

The official date for fielding the complete package of FCS equipment, including the new hybrid-electric tanks and the full-up network, is 2015. The technological challenge is immense. A hundred different contractors are working on the estimated 95 million lines of computer code, four times as much as needed to operate other large weapon systems, such as the Air Force's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Overall, the FCS involves some 44 "critical technologies"; 26 of those are directly related to the functioning of the network, and the Government Accountability Office rated only two sets of technologies "fully mature" in March 2008.

Yet the Army has staked its future on the Future Combat System network. For a generation, the service struggled to bring rapidly evolving information technology to the battlefield. Since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars began, soldiers have seen real benefits -- and real limits -- in the current generation of technology. The Army's bid to maximize those benefits, and surpass those limits, is what the FCS is all about.

Blue Force Tracker

Starting in the 1980s, the Army developed multiple networks, each designed to operate over limited bandwidth for a specific, narrow purpose. Separate systems transmitted intelligence reports, artillery target coordinates, and supply requests, with no easy way to share data between one system and another. And the fundamental battlefield function of figuring out what units are where and where they should go next was not automated at all.

"You've got a leader who's thirsting for information so he can devise the best tactics, and he's struggling with a paper map," said Col. James Riley, an Iraq war veteran who works on mobile networks at the Army's Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Ga. At headquarters, he went on, "you're trying to use little stickies, little map pins, to plot the locations, and the only way to get the information is to call and say, 'Where are you'?" -- a slow and error-prone process.

By the 1991 Persian Gulf War, troops were carrying handheld Global Positioning System locators into the field, but they still had to translate the coordinates into their actual position on a paper map and then verbally relay that information to headquarters by radio. If two units were out of radio range or simply belonged to different formations using different frequencies, they had no information about each other.

"I was a company commander in Desert Storm," Riley said. "I remember one particular day when, just over a small rise in the terrain, it sounded like all hell was breaking loose. I had no idea what was going on over there. We had no real idea of what the enemy might look like, and only some idea of what the formation right next to us might look like."

By the time Riley went back to Iraq for his second war, however, a revolution in military communications had taken place. On the eve of the 2003 invasion, select Army and Marine Corps units were issued a new mobile network called "Blue Force Tracker." Linked to GPS satellites, Blue Force Tracker gave each user a computerized map display that showed not only his own current location -- in itself a huge help in navigating across unfamiliar and unfriendly territory -- but also the position of every other friendly unit ("blue forces," in Army jargon) that was equipped with the system. Troops could even use the network and its satellite uplink to send text messages when conventional radio communications were blocked.

"You went from a paper map to a computer map that moved with you down the road," said Maj. Bill Venable, who fought in Iraq in 2004 and now works as a liaison between the FCS program and Fort Benning. "My higher headquarters was able to track where all of my vehicles were, and rather than having to take time out of the operation to ask each of the platoon leaders, 'Where are you?' I could see that at a glance." With Blue Force Tracker, Venable said, "I was able to conduct operations 40 to 50 miles away from my headquarters and still stay in contact."

Blue Force Tracker and a more sophisticated cousin called FBCB2 became high-demand items in Afghanistan and Iraq. Originally reserved for commanders' vehicles, the systems are now commonplace in Humvees on routine patrols. Troops use the network to see which roads go where and which are relatively safe from roadside bombs. "Intel is constantly updating," said Petty Officer 2nd Class Elizabeth Lopez, a seabee in the Navy Reserve who served as a Humvee gunner escorting convoys in Iraq. "Sometimes you're on a road that's 'green,' and five minutes later it's 'red' because somebody got hit."

But the current networks have limits. The most obvious is that they cannot transmit reconnaissance pictures from aerial drones, or even photos from the digital cameras that troops routinely use to take snapshots of suspected insurgents or potential targets. "That was definitely a shortfall," Venable said. On one raid against an insurgent safe house, he recounted, "I was told to go to a certain grid coordinate to a yellow two-story house with a wall around it and a blue gate. When I got to the neighborhood, even in the proximity of the grid coordinate, there were several yellow houses and more than one blue gate. Other operators had driven by the house and taken pictures earlier in the day, but that wasn't available to me. What I had to do was cordon off that entire area." Each extra house the soldiers had to check meant more time, more exposure to danger, and more innocent Iraqi families alienated by foreign troops searching their home.

Blue Force Tracker simply has too little bandwidth to handle digital imagery. It can perform only one specialized function at a time, just like the other networks that the military uses. A typical Army brigade has at least three other systems to handle logistics, intelligence, and artillery. The core of the Future Combat System is a single, integrated network with enough bandwidth to perform all of these currently separate functions plus the ability to transmit still images or even video.

Land Warrior

Blue Force Tracker's deadliest weakness however, is something that the Future Combat System program, as originally conceived, did not address. Both systems have power and weight requirements that restrict their use to vehicles: As soon as troops get out on foot, they drop off the network. The military issues far more handheld radios than it did before 2003, but even so, foot soldiers still have to coordinate their operations the old, slow, error-prone way, with voice communications and paper maps.

The chaos of boots-on-the-ground combat, especially in mazelike urban neighborhoods, can be lethal. In one "friendly-fire" incident, Riley recounted, "the squad leader had his lead team enter the building, but unfortunately what [they] did not realize was, another squad from the platoon had already entered that building from another direction." When the first soldier went through the door, weapon at the ready and steeled for a potential ambush, "the first thing he saw was the muzzle of a rifle," Riley said. "He engaged--and unfortunately he shot another U.S. soldier."

Since the 1990s, a chronically troubled Army program called "Land Warrior" had been struggling to develop a high-tech kit for individual foot soldiers. The proposed gear was too expensive and too heavy, however, adding 17 pounds to soldiers already overburdened by ammunition and body armor. In 2007, the Army officially canceled Land Warrior, but it is now resurrecting the program under the less romantic name "Ground Soldier Ensemble."

Before the cancellation, some 450 prototype Land Warrior sets had been issued to the Army's 4th Battalion, 9th Regiment, a Stryker unit headed for Iraq. After awkward initial experiences in training, said Col. Bill Prior, the battalion's commander, "we took some of our noncommissioned officers -- platoon sergeants, squad leaders -- and sat them around the table with some of the Land Warrior folks and the industry guys, and took it apart piece by piece." The ad hoc effort stripped off 7 pounds. Out went an extra battery; a loose cable; and a much-touted digital camera, mounted periscope-like on the rifle barrel, meant to let soldiers see around a corner without exposing themselves. In fact, the battalion nixed Land Warrior altogether for most of its infantrymen. It kept only the mobile networking features, and reserved those for leaders: commissioned officers, sergeants, and corporals leading at least three other soldiers.

The stripped-down Land Warrior gave foot soldiers what they had already come to appreciate from Blue Force Tracker in their vehicles: a digital map displaying the location of the wearer and friendly units. (Land Warrior also had limited text messaging.) The map was displayed on an eyepiece that flipped up onto the wearer's helmet when it wasn't in use. A handheld controller let the soldier designate locations digitally with a quick click--a "digital chem light" added at the insistence of the battalion's veteran sergeants.

Lt. Daniel Lowe found that function particularly useful one night in the Iraqi town of Baquba in 2007. Another unit had been raiding an insurgent safe house when the booby-trapped building blew up, killing one American soldier. Lowe's platoon, about 35 men on foot with 15 Land Warrior systems among them, moved out to help. But as they came around a corner, insurgents opened fire and Lowe's men took cover -- the lead squads on one street, the rearguard on another, the two groups unable to see each other. Meanwhile, Iraqi police at nearby checkpoints heard the fighting and opened fire indiscriminately.

"We're stuck in the middle; the Iraqi police are shooting at us, as well as the insurgents. We're separated in two different elements, and we don't really have radio communications," Lowe recalled. "But I'm able to see [the other half of the platoon] on Land Warrior." The buildings between the two groups garbled their voice transmissions, but the relatively small bursts of data to update their digital maps got through. "I dropped a blue icon on a road just south of our location," Lowe went on, "and that was our linkup point." Both halves of the platoon converged quickly on the rendezvous -- without shooting each other by accident in the dark -- and then went on the offensive.

Such success stories are why the Army is ordering more than 900 additional Land Warrior kits for a brigade headed for Iraq. Just as Land Warrior shares Blue Force Tracker's advantages, however, it also shares its glaring limitation: the inability to transmit imagery. "That's something we really wanted," Prior said. The Land Warrior program kept upgrading the battalion's equipment based on such feedback; eventually, "we did get the capacity to send still images, but we got it fairly late, about a month before we redeployed" out of Iraq, the colonel said. Giving digital imagery to troops on foot is one of the major goals of the revived program.

Four Programs, Many Problems

Ultimately, military leaders envision a network that will connect command posts to foot soldiers and vehicles in the field. But the Army has complicated this technological challenge with a largely self-imposed organizational muddle. The service has four different programs developing equipment critical to making this networking vision a reality--and each operates under its own management and on its own schedule. At some point, the Army must synchronize all four.

The first of the four is the Future Combat System program itself, which is by far the largest single chunk of the Army's modernization budget. But the FCS office is developing the network kits for vehicles only. Extending the network to troops on foot is up to the Ground Soldier Ensemble office, which remains an independent entity.

Both the FCS and the Ground Soldier Ensemble, in turn, rely on a third independent program, the Joint Tactical Radio System, to produce the radios that soldiers will use. Inauspiciously pronounced jitters, the JTRS program has been repeatedly delayed, restructured, and scaled down since its inception in 1997. The Fort Bliss task force currently is working with a set of proto-prototypes, literally hand-built, that fall far short of what the FCS requires in range and encryption. Yet without the high-bandwidth, all-digital radios that JTRS is meant to produce, there is simply no way to transmit the vast amount of data that the new networks will require.

Finally, the independent Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or WIN-T, is developing the connections between the FCS-equipped brigades in the field and higher Army headquarters. An early, ad hoc version of WIN-T built from commercially available equipment is already in service in Iraq, but these systems are in such demand that the Fort Bliss task force does not yet have one to experiment with.

And it is only at Fort Bliss that the products of all four programs come together in the hands of soldiers tasked with making them work as an integrated whole. "When you put the formation out there," Col. Schaill said, "and it all starts working together in the network, you find things that you don't find in the lab."

That, Schaill and his comrades say, is the reason the testing task force was created in the first place. With 60 percent of its personnel having experience in Iraq or Afghanistan, the task force is testing the new equipment under field conditions with real soldiers -- and combat veterans, at that -- to give the developers swift feedback on the prototypes. The reported problems, the Army insists, are simply the result of tougher scrutiny at an earlier stage than comparable programs ever dared to risk in the past.

Can the Army fix those problems in time for the formal assessment in 2009? Next year is a year of reckoning for the Future Combat System, Rep. Abercrombie warned. "This go/no-go is coming up very rapidly," he said, "and the Army has to decide where its priorities are."

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Pilot program may overhaul treatment of veterans

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The influx of wounded troops from Afghanistan and Iraq has burst the seams of the military health care system.

The much-publicized scandal in 2007 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which kick-started reforms, has proved to be only the tip of a large and ugly iceberg.

The problem is not just about organizations and processes, but about mind-sets.

Although most people in the Defense Department go above and beyond to take care of their wounded, others can still lapse into an attitude of "shut up, shape up, and soldier on"--especially toward those troops who suffer subtle but deeply disabling mental problems rather than obvious physical wounds. Yet it is precisely the hard-to-diagnosis cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and "mild" traumatic brain injury that have become the distinctive injuries of this war.

This fall, however, the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs will decide whether to expand a pilot program that has the potential to dramatically change the treatment of those disabled in the line of duty. Started in November and currently limited to the Washington metropolitan area, the program takes aim at a bureaucratic redundancy that has long bedeviled injured troops leaving the armed forces. This is the double take in which--before discharge--the Army, Navy, or Air Force first conducts an exit exam of a departing service member to assess any conditions that might trigger military disability benefits, and then--after discharge--the VA conducts its own entry exam of the same individual for the same conditions to determine eligibility for VA benefits.

Rarely do the two departments agree on just how disabled a departing service member is. Even when they do, they pay compensation at different rates set by different statutes. What's more, under federal laws banning "concurrent receipt" of both benefits by the same person, a disabled veteran will often discover his monthly check from the Defense Department is reduced by an amount equal to some or all of the value of his VA benefit. Because the VA is usually more generous, this offset can cut the payment from Defense to nothing. The whole system is a source of endless confusion and complaint.

"The biggest criticism was the redundancy, the complexity," said Samuel Retherford, a retired Army colonel who oversees the pilot program as the Pentagon's deputy director for personnel management policy. "They had to re-explain their case, fill out forms over and over, and [re]state the same thing."

So, in the pilot program, the Defense Department is essentially subcontracting much of its disability assessment system to the Veterans Affairs Department. VA doctors will conduct one set of physical exams, and VA specialists will determine one set of disability ratings, which both departments will then use. This reform should go a long way toward eliminating the disparity in which the military has historically rated the exact condition in the exact same patients as less disabling, and therefore worthy of fewer benefits, than has the VA.

"There's this presumption of guilt that has pervaded the [military] system for years," said a veteran who works on Capitol Hill. "Good soldiers got screwed. The system never worked. It was dysfunctional in peacetime--but now it's an absolute disaster."

Last August, a government-ordered study by CNA, a nonprofit research group, compared 31,473 individuals who had been assessed by both systems for the same condition. According to the study, the VA ratings were, on average, 8.6 percentage points (out of 100) higher than the Defense Department's. On mental disorders, the military rated disabilities much lower than did the VA: 11.9 percentage points lower for traumatic brain injury, 24.5 points lower for severe depression, and 32.8 points lower for PTSD.

Mental problems have been a major focus for the VA since Vietnam. In the military, they are still widely stigmatized or ignored--and given lowball ratings from official disability assessment boards. Take Wendell McLeod, an Army specialist mentally impaired after a 2005 accident in Kuwait. "He has to be reminded to do the simple things in life," said his wife, Annette, who has testified before Congress. "He hasn't started driving yet." Even as a passenger, she said, "he grabs the steering wheel now at the least little thing. He doesn't comprehend that just because there's a bag in the road, that doesn't mean it's an IED [improvised explosive device]."

Spc. McLeod is being treated by the VA, which assessed him as 100 percent disabled. But military raters initially declared his problems a case of mental retardation that was unrelated to and pre-existed his military service; they pointed to his receiving Title I remedial education in elementary school and denied him benefits. Annette McLeod had that ruling overturned through appeals, but she is still struggling to get a military board to reconsider an interim rating of 50 percent. "Hopefully, this will be the last battle with the Army," she told National Journal. Because of their case's high profile, she said, "for us it's a little bit easier this time around. But some people I've talked to, they're still bogged down in the system."

Dubious ratings like those given to Spc. McLeod have become distressingly common since the invasion of Iraq. "About a year and a half ago, we were getting anecdotal evidence that the Army's system was severely underrating cases," said Kerry Baker, a staffer who works on veterans appeals for the 1.4 million-member Disabled American Veterans. "What we found was just atrocious." In one case, Baker went on, "we found a kid with several penetrating skull injuries, a couple of different craniotomies, major seizure disorder, major migraines on a daily basis, and a cognitive disorder so severe his mother was appointed as his guardian." The VA rated the young soldier as 100 percent disabled; the military, 10 percent.

The cause of such discrepancies goes back to the birth of the Republic. Since the American Revolution, the military has had a medical corps to keep troops healthy before battle and to patch them up after--focusing on the collective fighting power of the force and discharging any individual no longer fit to fight. By contrast, federal veterans facilities--authorized by law in 1811--have always focused on care for people who were no longer serving a military purpose, but whose injuries, poverty, or both affected the conscience of a grateful nation.

Over time, however, the two systems have come to overlap in one area: the population eligible for benefits from both--military retirees. Most of these beneficiaries are commissioned officers and senior noncoms who served a full 20 years, but they include those who were so disabled in accidents or combat while in uniform that they were medically retired from military service and therefore eligible to use military hospitals as well as VA facilities for their care.

From 2003 through '07, the Pentagon medically retired more than 22,000 such disabled troops, who will receive military-subsidized medical care and monthly pension checks for life. Another 57,000 troops have been "medically separated," discharged as unfit to serve but with lesser degrees of disability, which entitles them to only a onetime severance payment. All 79,000, both the medically retired and the medically separated, also count as disabled veterans who may qualify for VA health care and disability checks. Because the law often entitles the same person to two benefits, one from the Defense Department and one from the VA, each department must determine a disability rating.

Ostensibly, the two departments have used the same standard schedule, written by the VA, to rate each disabling condition, from 10 percent for a bullet through the foot to 100 percent for blindness in both eyes. But for years, the military "supplemented" the schedule with layers of regulations that effectively altered it beyond recognition--until Congress banned the practice last year. The 2007 "wounded warrior" reforms forced all military disability raters to use the VA schedule, without alterations, and ordered the pilot program combining the military and VA assessment systems.

Under the pilot program, the military uses not only the VA-written schedule of ratings but also VA doctors and VA ratings specialists to assess each service member. Military personnel still make the critical decision on whether a given individual is unfit to serve or can return to duty. The Defense Department and the VA provide different kinds of benefits, determined by different laws and regulations, for the same individuals. But the often-bizarre discrepancies in how the two departments rated the same condition in the same individual will no longer exist.

By the end of June, 461 service members had entered the pilot process, of whom just 61 had been discharged from the military (13 medically separated, 48 medically retired). The Washington area benefits from an unusually rich cluster of military and veterans medical facilities, which makes coordination easier here than elsewhere. In late August, the Pentagon and the VA will begin considering a second location, probably an underserved and relatively rural area where implementing the pilot program will be distinctly harder.

Even if the expanded pilot program succeeds, wholesale adoption of the reforms is at least a year away. As the casualties keep coming in, the pressure on the disability system will continue to mount.

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Former Clinton Navy secretary discusses post-Bush defense policy

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

After Richard Danzig served as a Pentagon civilian from 1977 to 1981, President Bill Clinton named him undersecretary of the Navy and then Navy secretary. Since 2001, he has acted as a consultant to the Defense Department on biological warfare. He is now one of Barack Obama's top advisers on defense policy.

NJ: If Senator Obama is elected, won't his promise to pull combat forces out of Iraq put tremendous pressure on him to cut defense, especially by doing away with supplemental spending bills?

Danzig: Withdrawal from Iraq generates some savings, but it also generates some costs, [for example] the refurbishment of equipment -- the so-called reset of the Army and Marine Corps. Supplementals have not only been used to deal with unexpected contingencies in the operating budget, like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq; they've also been used to smuggle in items that should be part of the base budget. One of the problems any new administration is going to have to deal with is this bad budgeting technique.

NJ: How do you tame the defense budget, given the huge and increasing costs of long-deferred equipment modernization programs?

Danzig: There's a persistent problem with cost overruns. The recent performance of the Pentagon has been unusually bad. It's very difficult, but I think we can do a lot better than we've seen from this administration. This administration got off to a very bad start when it put $10 billion into missile defense and took it out of the normal acquisition process. It compounded that when it made it apparent that it didn't like bad news, and you had turnover in the heads of [the Pentagon Office of] Program Analysis and Evaluation. You have to create an atmosphere of honesty and candor.

NJ: But where do we cut spending?

Danzig: That's a very appropriate question. The Hindu religion has a goddess, Kali, who is the goddess of destruction, and we need a Kali: We need some creative destruction. We need the ability to recognize that some programs shouldn't be pursued and some pressing expenses need to be cut back. The answer to that isn't ideological; it's got to be based on a one-by-one look at the programs. I would say the Obama watchword is pragmatism.

NJ: There's no Obama equivalent to George W. Bush's Citadel speech in 1999, no grand vision of military transformation, no pledge to spend 4 percent of GDP on defense?

Danzig: I don't think there's an ideology that says, oh, we're going to lay this magic dust over the situation. In a sensible world, there's serious back-and-forth discussion with the military and civilian professionals in the Pentagon before we arrive at conclusions. It doesn't admit of some formula. I'm not a fan of 4 percent of GDP or some arbitrary number. The budget and the program have to be unpacked, and I think you have to do that piece by piece.

NJ: Obama does endorse the addition of 100,000 personnel to the Army and Marine Corps; isn't that an expensive proposition?

Danzig: The military is overstretched at the moment, it needs more resources, and those resources begin with people. Financially, that can be accomplished. For me, the crucial question is in fact quality. It has to be done in a way that's consistent with our historical standards for initial entry, and historically that standard has focused on, among other things, a 90 percent high school graduation rate.

NJ: Many analysts have said that President Bush represents a deviation from a bipartisan mainstream, and that McCain and Obama are much closer to each other than either is to Bush. Is that true?

Danzig: The Bush second term is noticeably different from the Bush first term, and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is noticeably different from [Donald] Rumsfeld. So even the Bush administration, to some extent, is at odds with the Bush administration.

One of the characteristics of the Bush administration has been this division of the world into we and they, and the strong view that you're with us or against us. That same intense, even angry, division of the world characterizes Senator McCain's approach. You see that in McCain's view that we ought not to be talking to Iran. He says he'd be multilateral, and then he'd throw Russia out of the G-8.

Another characteristic of this administration has been unwillingness to listen, and then a kind of angry rejection of anyone who offers a different view. I see in Senator McCain a similar tendency to arrive at a conclusion and then angrily reject the views of others that might contradict that conclusion. I don't think it's a good characteristic in a president.

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McCain, Obama share some views on security

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In the shadows of the debate over Iraq, a remarkable convergence is under way between the candidates on other critical issues of national security.

It is a convergence born of a common rejection, by Barack Obama and John McCain alike, of much of what George W. Bush did, especially during his first term and Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as Defense secretary.

On foreign policy, Bush disdained traditional alliances and arms control agreements.

Obama and McCain have been enthusiastically multilateralist, not just in their rhetoric but to a large extent in their Senate records as well. On defense policy, Bush favored a "transformation" of the military, emphasizing long-range strikes, and for years he opposed any increase in old-fashioned manpower. Obama and McCain both endorse the ongoing addition of 92,000 ground troops to the Army and Marine Corps.

There is no pacifist in this race, no new isolationism on the rise, and no peace dividend in the offing, no matter who wins in November or how far the United States draws down its troops in Iraq. Both candidates support a robust military employed in a forceful, and force-wielding, foreign policy. On Sudan, for example, both have advocated a more assertive approach than that taken by the Bush administration.

Even as they reject many of Bush's tactics, however, Obama and McCain struggle with the world that Bush and Osama bin Laden have made. Both candidates accept the post-9/11 consensus of a global struggle against violent extremism within Islam. McCain preaches with far more passion about what he calls "the transcendent challenge of our time," but Obama, too, has adopted the rhetoric of "the long war."

"Obama as much as McCain buys into the paradigm of a global war on terror," lamented Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and Boston University professor, who was a leading critic of the "new American militarism" in both political parties long before his son, an Army lieutenant, died last year in Iraq. When Obama advocates fewer troops in Iraq and more in Afghanistan, Bacevich explained, "he disagrees that the Iraq war is the central front, which has become Senator McCain's position; but it's a difference in operational priorities, not a difference in strategy."

Even accepting the framework of global war, however, those differences in priorities can be dramatic, much as moderate Democrats and Republicans sharply disagreed on how to conduct the Cold War they both believed in.

Obama and McCain converge on national security only up to a point. Their rhetoric on the campaign trail and, even more important, their track records in the Senate show where they diverge, above all on three issues whose importance is all too often overshadowed by Iraq: nuclear weapons; Pentagon spending; and policy toward the war in Afghanistan and the shadow war in next-door Pakistan.

No Nukes?

Especially in his first term, Bush showed little patience for the kabuki of formal arms control negotiations. Instead, as Bush said in 2001, he met with then-President Vladimir Putin of Russia, "looked the man in the eye," and proposed that each side simply slash its arsenal unilaterally. But without a binding, formal pact, no mechanisms were in place to verify the cuts or to prevent backsliding.

"Bush came in against arms control treaties in general and has resisted the trust-but-verify enforcement system that was developed during the Cold War," said Graham Allison, director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a key figure in the Clinton-era dismantling of ex-Soviet nukes. "McCain has made it quite clear he's back in the mainstream of Republican and Democratic policy."

Although it's no surprise that the liberal Obama has talked up his support for arms control, McCain has expressed a remarkable fervor for multilateralism. McCain has not only joined his Democratic rival in endorsing a world free of nuclear weapons as a long-term goal, he has also promised a host of near-term initiatives: strengthening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, boosting Cooperative Threat Reduction aid to Russia and other countries, and negotiating a new fissile material cut-off treaty to limit global production of uranium and plutonium. McCain has even pledged to reconsider his 1999 vote against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty--provided that he could include adequate provisions for maintaining America's nuclear arsenal.

But significant caveats punctuate McCain's bold rhetoric on arms control. When Democrats, including Obama, tried to restrict research into new types of nuclear weapons, McCain voted repeatedly against them in the Senate. When just 26 senators, including Obama, tried to make India stop producing weapons material as a condition for a deal with the United States on civilian nuclear power, McCain voted with the majority to put a potential alliance with New Delhi ahead of nonproliferation concerns.

Likewise, Obama has supported cutting missile defense to fund additional anti-proliferation initiatives, but McCain has consistently supported the program--including anti-missile sites in Eastern Europe to which Moscow has strenuously objected. McCain has even called for kicking Russia out of the G-8 group of industrial democracies, a punishment for Putin's creeping authoritarianism that would hardly encourage Russian cooperation on arms control. Both McCain and Obama contend they would do far more to limit nuclear weapons than Bush has--but McCain has made it clear that, for good or ill, he has higher priorities.

Showing the Money

In 1999, then-Gov. George W. Bush pledged to "transform" the U.S. military into a leaner but radically higher-tech force during his presidency. The Bush-Rumsfeld reliance on smaller forces with more-sophisticated weapons has been thoroughly repudiated in Iraq--where McCain advocated deploying additional ground troops long before the administration came around. Bush also finally conceded to enlarging the Army and Marine Corps, a program that both parties and White House candidates endorse: Obama wants to add 92,000 personnel (the current plan), McCain 250,000.

McCain is no soft touch for defense interests, however. He has fiercely criticized high-priced programs, he regularly rebukes his fellow legislators for inserting pork-barrel projects into the defense bill, and he consistently blocked such earmarks on the subcommittee he led.

"The candidate who's most bullish on defense spending is also most likely to make life miserable for defense contractors," said Richard Aboulafia, an industry analyst with the Teal Group based in Fairfax, Va. In fact, many in the industry are bitter over what they consider McCain's capricious grandstanding at their expense. "He makes an issue out of ideas that conventional wisdom endorses, like multiyear procurement contracts," Aboulafia fumed. "It implies a preference for populism over good policy."

By contrast, Obama's relative sparse track record is almost comforting to contractors: With only three years in the Senate and zero time on defense committees, he lacks the stature to challenge defense interests as McCain has done. In his campaign, moreover, Obama has turned to reassuring figures from the Clinton administration's Pentagon. "If you look at what we did in the Clinton years, the defense budget, particularly in the late '90s, expands ahead of inflation," said Richard Danzig, Navy secretary under Clinton and a top Obama adviser. On defense, Danzig said, "the Obama watchword is pragmatism."

McCain's reputation for standing up to defense contractors isn't always as cut and dried as it appears, meanwhile. He has refrained from using his full Senate powers--filibusters, holds on bills, parliamentary delays--to force pork to be excised from defense bills, as Winslow Wheeler, then a Hill aide, pointed out in a 2002 paper titled "Mr. Smith Is Dead." And although he chastises the industry on some issues, McCain has championed it on others. Boeing, for instance, may resent the Arizonan's attacks on its tanker proposals for the Air Force and its Future Combat Systems program for the Army; but it also owes him for fighting protectionist limits on the corporation's ability to import specialty metals and other foreign-made components for U.S. defense systems.

"It's always a fight with the Senate, and he's been very active," said Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who has led the House in repeatedly passing measures to protect U.S. defense jobs, only to see McCain and other senators shoot them down in conference. That said, Hunter went on, "John has some very strong points that vastly outweigh what I view as the wrong position on trade."

Hunter and other advocates of higher defense spending know that, whatever gray hairs McCain may give them over particular issues, he will surely do better by them than any Democrat might. "Having Obama as president would be more congenial, but ultimately detrimental to the bottom line," said Loren Thompson, a Lexington Institute analyst and consultant to top defense contractors. "Weapons spending goes down when Democrats control the Senate and the White House, and it goes up when Republicans do." Neither Obama nor McCain is likely to break that rule.

Afghanistan and Pakistan

Obama has hammered the Bush administration--and, by extension, John McCain--for focusing on Iraq at the expense of rooting Al Qaeda and its allies from their hideouts in Afghanistan and the lawless borderlands of neighboring Pakistan. In August 2007, however, what had been one of Obama's most reliable rhetorical weapons burned his own hand, when he said he would order unilateral strikes on targets in Pakistani territory without Pakistan's consent if Islamabad refused to act. Surrogates for both McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton leapt to accuse Obama of recklessly rattling his saber at an essential and fragile ally.

But the "bomb Pakistan" contretemps is less a profound policy debate than one of those teapot tempests that bedevil every presidential campaign. When pressed, the critics admit that any president of either party would strike unilaterally if national security were at stake--but insist that Obama shouldn't have said so out loud.

"Obama came under heat because he said, 'Of course we'll reserve the right to bomb things unilaterally,' " said Christine Fair, a Rand scholar who has traveled repeatedly to Pakistan. "But that's no different from what the Bush administration has been doing. We don't trust the Pakistanis, so we do it ourselves."

The candidates' real difference on Pakistan is subtler but more substantive. As a neophyte member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama has enthusiastically adopted many initiatives of his chairman, Democratic elder statesman Joseph Biden of Delaware, including Biden's plan for Pakistan. Both Democrats called for cutting off military assistance to Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf after he declared a state of emergency and assumed near dictatorial powers; when Musharraf finally allowed free elections, the two called for ramping up nonmilitary aid to Pakistan. McCain, by contrast, went out of his way to call Musharraf "honest" and "legitimately elected." His praise for Musharraf, however, plays little better in media-savvy Pakistan than does Obama's talk of air strikes.

For more information on McCain's views and record on security, click here. For more on Obama, click here.

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Veterans groups seek funding in advance

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Veterans benefits are one of the most popular causes in Congress. But Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics are routinely buffeted by the annual uncertainties of the increasingly dysfunctional budget process on Capitol Hill. Now veterans advocates have proposed a controversial fix.

For years, veterans groups have argued, in vain, for making veterans health care funding automatic, as it is for Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. In recent months, however, a coalition led by the 1.4 million-member Disabled American Veterans has switched tactics. Instead of seeking politically unpalatable mandatory funding, the group is proposing that VA health care be funded through an obscure legislative mechanism called "advance appropriations."

In contrast to mandatory or entitlement funding, the advance-appropriations process does let Congress vote on funding levels--but it does so a year in advance of the regular budget cycle. So while Congress debates most programs' appropriations for fiscal 2009, it is setting aside almost $30 billion worth of advance appropriations for 2010. This money funds an eclectic mix of programs ranging from Section 8 housing subsidies to education grants to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No matter how delayed or disrupted funding may be for the rest of the federal government, these advance-appropriations programs are guaranteed to get their money on time, at the start of each fiscal year. "The VA has had a hideous problem for a decade" with tardy funding bills, said John M. Bradley, a longtime Hill staffer who is now with the Disabled American Veterans. "Advance appropriations are a very attractive potential vehicle."

To veterans groups, this work-around is legislative genius. To budget hawks, it's brazen gimmickry. "That is not how we should do budgeting," fumed Maya MacGuineas, president of the New America Foundation's Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "The whole point about doing budgeting on a regular basis is to keep reassessing priorities," she said. "But you have a very large constituency for not coming to terms with the real cost of the budget, and there has been huge growth in advance appropriations."

Advance appropriations began in 1967 as a way to insulate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from congressional criticism of its programming. Congress slowly added other appropriations in ensuing years; as late as 1996, however, the total sum was less than $3 billion. Then appropriators seized on the mechanism as a way to bypass budget caps. Over the next five years, advances increased 800 percent. For fiscal 2001, budgeteers stepped in to limit advances being slipped into the budget to $23.5 billion. That figure is expected to hit $28.9 billion in fiscal 2009. If the veterans groups manage to move most VA health care accounts into the advance-appropriations process, the total would more than double, to approximately $70 billion a year.

Such a large sum speaks to the central irony of the whole debate. Activists are generally happy with the amounts that Congress is voting for VA health care. The problem is with how long it takes Congress to vote. Congress last managed to enact veterans funding on time in 1996, when it passed the 1997 appropriation just four days before the beginning of the fiscal year, which begins on October 1. It has been late every year since, never by less than 19 days and, on average, by more than two months. The appropriation for fiscal 2008 was passed the day after Christmas, 86 days late.

To keep federal agencies operating in the no-man's months after one year's funding has expired and before the next year's is appropriated--and to avoid a politically costly government shutdown such as 1995's--Congress passes "continuing resolutions" that keep programs at last year's spending levels. (In an unprecedented departure, a fall 2007 continuing resolution did give the VA an increase.) This stopgap is awkward for any department or agency. It is especially problematic for the VA, which has to keep 153 hospitals and 732 clinics running day in, day out, for a patient population that continues to grow rapidly--from 4.2 million in 2001 to 5.7 million today.

The VA has come up with a host of stopgaps to keep the lights on and the patients cared for. "It's not like delaying the building of a highway," said Art Klein, former chief budgeteer for the VA's health care arm, the Veterans Health Administration. "Normally the federal budget is giving grants for something to happen; but in this case, it's a direct provision of health care: thousands of patients in beds, millions of outpatient visits."

To keep paychecks coming for nurses and doctors, VA administrators routinely put off buying equipment, doing maintenance, restocking inventories, and even hiring staff until later in the year. When appropriations finally do arrive, they often trigger a scramble to cover backed-up needs and to spend money that, thanks to congressional generosity, is well in excess of what the VA had planned for. Such a cycle of famine and feast encourages inefficiency, hampers planning, and can make hiring in certain medical specialties almost impossible.

Advocates have long argued that making veterans health care funding automatic--as veterans disability payments already are--would guarantee the VA the funds it needs, when it needs them. Veterans groups are still backing mandatory-funding bills by Democrats Tim Johnson of South Dakota in the Senate and Phil Hare of Illinois in the House. "We have to suck it up and keep the promise that we made," Hare told National Journal. "I put it up on par with Social Security and Medicare."

Most legislators, however, are loath to move any more programs from the discretionary side of the budget, where they can vote funding levels every year, to the entitlement side, where spending is set by statutory formulas and increasingly runs out of control. And veterans groups are giving up hope that Democratic control of Congress might soften this resistance. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., "herself has said positively that she wants mandatory spending for VA health care, but we can't get any traction," said Bradley of the Disabled American Veterans. "So our thinking for the past year has been directed to looking at an alternative approach, and we stumbled upon this advance-appropriations technique."

The idea originated with a June 2007 memo from a consultant to the Disabled American Veterans, Marsha Simon, who was a clerk on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee covering the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services when they dramatically expanded advance appropriations back in the 1990s. It took some effort to explain the arcana of advance appropriations to the veterans advocates, but as the prospects for mandatory funding grew increasingly dim, veterans groups seized on Simon's proposal. The Disabled American Veterans are now working with sympathetic lawmakers with an eye toward introducing legislation sometime this summer. "We will [still] take mandatory spending in a heartbeat if they enact it," Bradley said, "but we're trying to spread the word that this is the new direction."

The House and Senate Budget committees are likely to be the first line of resistance. "We appropriate annually for a reason," a staffer said. "We set priorities, and we make programs compete against each other annually. They would like not to have to compete."

Appropriators are skeptical as well. "There's 100 percent agreement with the veterans organizations that we must pass VA appropriations on a more timely basis," said Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee panel that covers the Veterans Affairs Department. "There may be honest differences on the means of getting there. The easiest, simplest, cleanest way to solve the problem is for us to start passing VA appropriations bills on time. If that proves to be an impossible task, we'll just have to look at the other options."

Democrats like to blame tardy appropriations on President Bush's intransigence--but the delays began during the Clinton years. It is hard to ask veterans, or any constituency for that matter, to sit tight and have faith that Congress will get its act together soon.

"What this highlights is how dysfunctional the budget system has become," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, "and I don't blame them for looking for alternative ways." But the more that programs sidestep the annual logjam by getting mandatory or advance funding, the worse the problem becomes overall--which only increases the pressure on Congress to create more special cases for special interests. "Because there's a lot of attention on veterans these days, if anybody can do it, they might have the strongest case," Bixby said. "But I think you'd find a lot of other folks coming out of the woodwork saying, 'Hey, what about us?' "

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Marine Corps seeks return to its role as a naval force

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

At the end of April, a squadron of the Marine Corps's new V-22 Ospreys returned from the aircraft's first overseas deployment, a seven-month tour in Iraq. The Corps trotted out pilots and ground crews to talk up the $67 million machine, a hybrid of helicopter and propeller plane whose revolutionary tilt-rotor technology took 25 years to develop and claimed 30 lives in crashes along the way.

Largely overlooked in the coverage and the controversy over the V-22 itself, however, is the fact that the aircraft was never meant to stand, or to fight, alone. The Osprey is simply the single most expensive element of an ambitious plan to re-equip the Marine Corps to execute a new kind of sea-based blitzkrieg.

Marine officers began to develop the concept, often called "operational maneuver from the sea," a quarter-century ago at the height of the Cold War, when the rise of advanced anti-ship missiles was already threatening any fleet massed for a conventional, large-scale landing in the style of Iwo Jima. Today, the V-22 and key technologies like it are finally entering service in a world radically different from the one in which they were conceived--a world in which some of the weapons that the Soviets developed 25 years ago are now in the hands of guerrillas and terrorists in developing countries.

For the Marine Corps, looking forward to a large-scale pullback from Iraq even as it takes on a new mission in Afghanistan, the vision is not merely about new technology. It is about returning to the Corps's historic role as a shipborne rapid-reaction force after five years of grueling ground warfare alongside the Army.

"We're not a second land army," said Maj. Gen. Thomas Benes, the director of expeditionary warfare on the Chief of Naval Operations' staff. "We can always be used to complement the [Army's] mission on the ground, and we don't shy away from a fight," he emphasized. "But our real traditional role of being a naval force is what we want to get back to."

To carry out this old role in a new way with new equipment, however, will be expensive. Like the Army, the Marine Corps has worn out in Iraq much of its inventory of weapons, aircraft, and vehicles, most of which were bought during the Reagan-era buildup. Unlike the Army, which has packaged its main modernization programs into a single, high-profile, hard-to-explain and heavily criticized Future Combat System, Marine modernization is scattered across a half-dozen programs, some small enough to fly below most media and congressional radars. What's more, because the future Marine force will be carried into battle on Navy ships built with Navy money, about a sixth of the total cost to realize the Corps's vision will not be counted in the Corps's budget.

Adding up all of the major elements--the new ships, the V-22, a host of upgrades to conventional helicopters, and a kind of tank that swims called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle--the bill comes to about $100 billion. (This total doesn't include the Marines' share of the nascent multiservice F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.) That is close to the $129 billion estimate for the Army Future Combat System and well above the cost of the media's favorite poster child for overpriced weapons systems, the $63 billion F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

Tight Budgets

Although the Marine modernization cost is spread over many years, it is still busting the budget of what has always been the smallest armed service in the Defense Department. "It's horribly tight," said Kevin McConnell, a retired Marine major now serving as a planner with the Corps's Combat Development Command, based in Quantico, Va. In the long-range forecast for the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, for example, "the investment in EFV alone exceeds, yearly, what we would normally think of as the procurement [budget] for the entire Marine Corps," McConnell said. And in the near term, "we're fighting a war that's beating the heck out of our equipment. So I will very much go after supplemental [budgets for Iraq and Afghanistan] as long as they're available--not only to sustain the force in-theater but to help us modernize. If those supplementals don't come through, the next decade's going to be kind of tough."

The Marine Corps has already made hard choices. For the past two decades, the Navy continued to buy fighter planes and helicopters, but the Marines mostly held onto aging and increasingly hard-to-maintain aircraft while waiting for the V-22 and their version of the F-35 fighter, now expected to enter service in 2012.

"There were a lot of arguments for and against the V-22," said Robert Work, a retired Marine colonel who is an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Five years ago, I was not a fan. But the bottom line is, now there really is no other option. The war has essentially worn out the Marine Corps helicopter fleet. The V-22 is the answer we're going to make work."

Other expensive aspects of the Marine Corps plan are not yet set in stone--above all, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which has been cut from a planned purchase of 1,000-plus EFVs to fewer than 600, even as the cost rose to $16 million per vehicle and the development schedule fell four years behind. "There's still a lot of debate over the EFV," Work said. "Do you really even need it? Could you do it a lot cheaper?"

Answering these questions requires going beyond the problems of specific programs to look at the Marine Corps's overall vision of its future--and, ultimately, at the basic mission of the Corps.

"Who is this force supposed to be used against?" asked Dave Baker, an analyst and author who served in the Office of Naval Intelligence. "Who are we going to invade?"

Big Wars, Small Wars

For 200 years, the Marine Corps has had a split military personality. Even the lyrics to the Marine hymn declare it. "From the halls of Montezuma"--a major 1847 land battle in the Mexican-American War--"to the shores of Tripoli"--a presidentially ordered police action against North African pirates in 1805--the Corps has swung back and forth between augmenting the Army in prolonged ground combat and serving as a global fire brigade launched from Navy ships.

The split between major war and crisis response goes back to the founding of the Republic. "In the Constitution, Congress has the authority to 'maintain' a Navy but to 'raise' an Army," explained D. Robert Worley, a former marine and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Institute of Government. "The Department of War was there to mobilize an army when Congress declared war. The Department of the Navy, on the other hand, was a standing organization the president could use without going to Congress." Combat troops who embarked on Navy ships--marines--carried gunboat diplomacy ashore in what a landmark 1940 operations manual codified as "small wars." Even the massive conflicts of the 20th century, which led to the merger of the War and Navy Departments into the Defense Department in 1947, never drew the Marine Corps entirely away from its classic crisis-response role, as in Haiti in 1915 and 1994, or the Dominican Republic in 1916 and 1965.

"World War I, World War II, those are anomalies," said Col. Douglas King, a senior planner at the Marine Corps's Combat Development Command. King and other marines emphasize that the Corps must be prepared for wars big and small, and that the popular imagination still thinks of the Marines in terms of massive seaborne invasions such as the 1945 attack on Iwo Jima. But the Marines conceived of those tactics in the 1930s, perfected them during World War II, reprised them one last time at Inchon in 1950 during the Korean War, and have never undertaken such an assault again.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the threat of a Marine landing kept much of Saddam Hussein's army along the coast while the U.S. Army outflanked it inland, but Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Desert Storm commander, never sent the Marines ashore for fear of heavy casualties. By contrast, King said, "since the end of the Cold War, we've conducted about 85 responses to crises, anything from raids to humanitarian operations."

Many of these missions are disaster relief. But the Marines must often go ashore in war zones to serve as peacekeepers or to evacuate U.S. citizens. "Noncombat" can turn into "combat" in a lethal hurry, and the proliferation of powerful weapons in the hands of insurgents and rebel groups around the world only increases the risks. In 1983, a single truck bomb in Beirut killed 241 U.S. peacekeepers, almost all of them marines. In 2006, the Corps returned to Lebanon to extricate 14,000 American nationals from the crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah. Neither side attacked the marines, but the potential danger was underscored by Hezbollah's use of anti-tank and anti-ship missiles against the Israelis, weapons that were once deployed only by the militaries of nation-states. Hezbollah was able to fire a missile that crippled an Israeli corvette sailing 10 miles offshore.

Such weapons could make a traditional massed landing in the manner of Iwo Jima look like the Charge of the Light Brigade on water skis. The classic tactic is to bring Navy amphibious assault ships within sight of shore to disgorge the landing force, which struggles through the water to seize the miles of gently graded beach necessary to land a sizable force and its requisite supplies. Only then could the marines move inland to pursue their actual objectives.

At Iwo Jima there was only one suitable beach, and the Japanese defenders knew it; coming ashore this way was bloody even in 1945. Against Iranian or North Korean forces with shore-launched cruise missiles, shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets, and abundant mines on land and in the sea, such a landing would be suicidal.

The marines' solution was to bypass the beach. Instead, they would keep the fleet well out at sea, with plenty of maneuvering room, and then launch a sudden, savage, high-speed attack that would come ashore at multiple points--seeking narrow gaps in enemy defenses instead of a single large beach--and keep moving inland without stopping to build up a single, vulnerable beachhead. The only problem with this plan was that the Corps's existing equipment could not pull it off. So the service set out to build such a capability.

High-Tech Ambitions

Developing technologies to execute the Marine Corps's new tactics has been a 25-year-long ordeal. The V-22 Osprey program began in 1982 and first deployed to Iraq last fall. The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, still at least seven years from fielding, officially began in 1995 but is the successor of two amphibious armored vehicle projects that were abandoned. "This is the solution they came up with 20-plus years ago and have been trying to field ever since," said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel who wrote an iconoclastic book, The Sling and the Stone, on how low-tech foes can defeat expensive American hardware.

The Corps suffered through all of the classic difficulties of complex military weapons purchases and through painful budget cuts in the 1990s. But its fundamental problem was the revolutionary nature of what it wanted to build. Both the V-22 Osprey and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle are hybrids, whose machinery must be physically reconfigured to operate in two distinct modes.

The V-22 tilt-rotor, as the name implies, uses gearboxes and hydraulics to tilt its rotor blades at different angles, allowing it to take off and land like a helicopter but fly long distances like a turboprop airplane. The EFV transforms from ground vehicle to water vehicle by folding up its suspension, retracting its tank-like tracks, deploying stabilizer fins from its back and sides, extending a metal bow plate to better cut the waves, and revving its engine to 2,700 horsepower, which kicks the 40-ton machine bodily out of the water to skim across the surface at about 30 miles per hour. "It's not just a swimming tank," Hammes said. "It's a water-skiing tank."

It's no wonder that getting such machinery to work takes money, time, and--in the case of the V-22--lives. The Osprey's worst crash came in April 2000, when a Marine pilot brought his aircraft down so steeply--dropping much faster than he was moving forward--that one rotor descended into its own downwash of turbulent air and stopped providing lift (a phenomenon called "vortex ring state" or "power settling"). Because the V-22's test pilots had released the aircraft to operational Marine squadrons to try out new airborne tactics, the crash killed not only the pilot and co-pilot but 17 young riflemen riding in the back.

Whether the V-22's unique design makes it more or less vulnerable to this particular kind of accident than a traditional two-rotor helicopter is an opaque technical debate. But another crash, in December 2000, began with a leak in the aircraft's hydraulics system that turned deadly because of a glitch in the flight software--and both of those systems are unusually complicated in order to handle the aircraft's transition between two modes of flight.

"The Osprey is a wonderful concept," said Philip Coyle, a former Pentagon chief of operational testing who oversaw the aircraft's trial flights, "but in practice it has introduced all kinds of new issues that I don't think the designers appreciated or even contemplated. It has lots of reliability failures. The Marine Corps will tell you that all new aircraft development programs have problems. Not like this, and not after 20 years of development."

Coyle cites news reports and a leaked Marine Corps memo on the Osprey's more recent problems: landing gear that failed to deploy, engines that wore out prematurely, and even a poorly sealed filter that clogged easily and will cost an estimated $54,500 per aircraft to correct. The Marine Corps insists that fixes are in place or under way and cites figures showing that the Osprey's maintenance demands and breakdown rate compare favorably with the less complex but often geriatric helicopters it is slated to replace.

The Swimming Tank

The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, meanwhile, is years behind the V-22 in solving its mechanical problems. In a 2006 test, the main gun jammed, hydraulics leaked, electronics froze up, struts cracked, and the prototypes completed only three out of more than 20 planned events.

"I didn't have a smoking gun," said Marine Col. John Bryant, who took over as program manager in the demoralized days after the '06 test. "I didn't have one or two things I could fix. I had a very complex platform with failures spread throughout. There were a significant number of failures in the hydraulics system"--used to extend and retract the EFV's assorted flaps, bow plate, and tracks--"which is pretty much unique, but the single largest source of failures was the gun turret. We know how to make turrets."

In part, the Marine Corps was paying for decisions made earlier in the program, when budget cuts forced the Corps to focus on the critical challenge of getting a 40-ton armored vehicle to skim the water like a speedboat and skimp on the more-mundane reliability work. In part, the sheer complexity of the machine overwhelmed the management skills of the smallest military service, which historically relies on the Navy to develop its aircraft and on the Army to develop its ground vehicles.

"For the most part, in the past, the Marine Corps was not in the developmental business; they were in the procurement business," said Col. William Taylor, a Marine acquisition official widely credited with helping to overhaul the V-22 program. "We're in a transition phase where the pace of the Marine Corps's developmental efforts is slightly out ahead of their capabilities."

Since the 2006 testing flop, the Marine Corps insists it has gotten religion on reliability: The service accepted a four-year delay to do a top-to-bottom redesign and set up its first acquisition office, headed by Taylor, dedicated to overseeing ground-vehicle programs. The revamped EFV will go before the Pentagon's Defense Acquisition Board in late May; if it is approved, the Corps will issue contracts for a new set of prototypes.

Skepticism remains in powerful places. "We've seen a real embarrassment," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has made the EFV a particular target. "It's hard to be very confident after looking at the history of this tank."

Even the EFV's top supporters on the House Armed Services Committee, Mississippi Democrat Gene Taylor and Maryland Republican Roscoe Bartlett--who head the panel overseeing Marine procurement--have leaned hard on the Corps to consider major redesigns of either the hull or the engine to better protect the vehicle against the kind of improvised land mines that have proved so deadly in Iraq. "Everybody's committed to the vehicle," Bartlett told National Journal. "[But] the Marines are going to be living with this for 30 years, and we feel it's worth a little effort now to make sure we've got it as good as it can be."

So what does all of this effort, expense, and mechanical complexity actually do for marines in combat? And considering the Marine Corps's varied operations, exactly what kinds of conflict are the V-22 and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle suited for?

Seaborne Blitzkrieg

The V-22 Osprey was conceived at the height of the Cold War for sweeping, high-speed maneuvers from the sea. It entered service 25 years later in Iraq, an all-but-landlocked country where U.S. troops are slogging through a long, slow fight, one neighborhood or village at a time. Some of the expensive capabilities that the Osprey provides are simply irrelevant to Iraq--but by no means all.

The V-22's advantage comes from its hybrid flight. There's an old joke among aviators that helicopters don't actually fly, they just beat the air into submission. The ability to take off and land vertically, without the need for a runway, comes with a price: Helicopters perform poorly in long-distance flight compared with fixed-wing airplanes. By tilting its rotors at different angles, the V-22 can dispense with an airstrip and still fly faster, higher, and--because airplane-style flight is much more fuel-efficient--farther than conventional helicopters.

The Osprey's speed and range are arguably overkill for Iraq, where most missions are short-range hops in and out of the many U.S. bases. Its aptitude for altitude, however, has already proven useful: Insurgents have shot down conventional U.S. helicopters with machine guns, but the V-22 can climb to 13,000 feet, too high to hit with small-arms fire. Insurgents have occasionally used shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, which can reach higher targets, but flying higher than conventional helicopters gives Osprey pilots more reaction time to drop flares and evade.

A rumored deployment of V-22s to Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are spread thin over vast distances and at high altitudes, should be a better test of the V-22's performance. But where the Osprey really shines is at even longer ranges. When the marines first deployed from their ships to Afghanistan in 2001, for example, they had to move in laborious stages from the Indian Ocean with the help of landing areas in Pakistan. With the V-22, the same force could have flown over Pakistani territory and hit the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in two hours.

Over such distances, however, the V-22s can move only marine riflemen, their personal gear, and small loads of vital supplies. (Work is progressing on a mini-jeep that can fit into the Osprey as well.) The larger loads needed to sustain a robust fighting force--bulk supplies, artillery pieces, Humvees--still have to be slung under hulking heavy-lift helicopters, the CH-53s. The Corps is budgeting $16 billion to buy a more powerful "K" version of this essential aircraft, but it will still be a helicopter, which means it will fly slower, lower, and at shorter ranges than the tilt-rotor V-22.

Farther Offshore

The heaviest Marine Corps equipment--tanks and other armored vehicles--cannot be delivered by air to a battle zone until infantry troops seize an airfield large enough to accommodate Air Force transports. If the Marines need armor in the first phase of an amphibious landing, it must come ashore either on vulnerable landing craft or under its own power--which is where the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle comes in.

Like the Amtracs of World War II and the current Amphibious Assault Vehicle, the EFV can roll off the back of a Navy transport into the water, motor to the beach, roll onto land, and start fighting. But the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle's mechanically complex transformation allows it to skim the waves instead of wallow through them, making it easily three times as fast as its predecessors. So rather than come within sight of shore to launch the current amphibious armor--thus exposing itself to attack--the fleet could deploy EFVs from over the horizon, 25 or 30 miles away.

But is that enough? "Twenty years ago"--when the Corps's new tactics were conceived--"we were talking about 25 miles," said one analyst who works for the Marine Corps. "The EFV is based on the idea that the enemy can't reach out 25 miles. Now they can." The C-802 cruise missile used in Hezbollah's successful strike against the Israeli corvette in 2006, for example, has a maximum range of about 75 miles.

The Navy is so worried about shore-based missiles, mines, and swarms of motorboats armed with suicide bombs that it is developing a new class of "Littoral Combat Ship" specifically designed to venture into shallow waters while the rest of the fleet hangs back. "Once the enemy gets guided weapons, the whole [scenario] becomes totally different," analyst Work said. "You ain't going to be operating 25 miles off the coast. You've got to operate a hundred miles offshore, and you're going to use, primarily, aircraft."

Even at 30-plus mph, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle cannot bring troops ashore from 100 miles out. The Navy has a massive hovercraft called the LCAC (Landing Craft, Air Cushion) that can carry one heavy tank or several armored cars over 200 miles of ocean at 45 miles an hour. But the hovercraft is effectively unarmored. Unlike the EFV, which can shrug off machine-gun fire--although not rocket-propelled grenades or large roadside bombs--the LCAC can come ashore only on beaches already secured.

A Narrow Niche

So how would marines get ashore? The V-22 Osprey can take off from a ship 100 miles out at sea and carry troops 400 miles inland; even the CH-53 can manage 200 miles beyond the shoreline in this scenario. (The CH-46 could reach only 40 miles inland, a major reason for its replacement by the V-22.) But any enemy with enough anti-ship weapons to keep the Navy 100 miles out could probably afford enough anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down incoming Marine Corps aircraft.

"You wouldn't take a landing force and fly them into an integrated air defense without having done something about it first," said Col. Glenn Walters, a senior aviation planner at Marine Corps headquarters. Cruise missiles, unmanned drones, and jet aircraft--not only from Navy and Marine Corps ships but also from Air Force bases on land--would have to savage an enemy's network of radar and missile launchers first. Only then could tilt-rotor aircraft move through the gaps in enemy defenses--using their speed, range, and altitude to go around or over the remaining threats--to land riflemen in areas thoroughly "sanitized" by smart bombs.

Those troops in turn could tear bigger holes in the defenses to let the CH-53s, flying lower and slower than the Ospreys, bring in heavier weapons. Thus reinforced, light infantry should be able to secure sites for the LCAC hovercraft to land heavy armor.

Where the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle fits in such a scenario is not entirely clear. Unlike tilt-rotors, conventional helicopters, or even hovercraft, the EFV cannot be launched from ships 100 or 200 miles out at sea. Before the Navy would come in closer--even a small amphibious assault ship costs $1 billion and carries 400 sailors, not counting marines--it would want enemy defenses thoroughly beaten down, which would not leave much for the EFV to fight.

The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle's revolutionary technology ends up making it suitable for a fairly narrow combat niche: attacking enemies who have enough anti-ship weapons to force the fleet to stay 25--but not 100--miles offshore, and who have enough machine guns to keep the unarmored LCAC hovercraft from landing but not enough rocket-propelled grenades or improvised land mines to penetrate the moderately armored EFV. On top of that, the Marine Corps won't buy enough EFVs to attack such opponents on a large scale.

"Would you ever do a classic amphibious invasion with this? We're only going to have just over 500," said Roger Smith, the deputy assistant Navy secretary who oversees Marine expeditionary warfare procurements. Even the original plan to buy 1,000 or more would hardly allow the Corps to replicate Iwo Jima, Smith acknowledged: "We've got a completely different force."

The Old Is New Again The Marine Corps, and the Navy for that matter, are simply smaller than they were during the Cold War, let alone World War II. Even the planned, highly expensive expansion of the Marine Corps from its current strength of 189,000 to 202,000 will only return the service to its 1980s peak. The Navy, meanwhile, has gone from having enough amphibious assault ships to deploy three Marine brigades simultaneously--a fraction of the force at Inchon or Iwo Jima--to not quite enough to carry two. Two brigades happened to be the size of the Marine feint during the Gulf War.

"You could not stage an amphibious invasion of Iran. You couldn't stage an amphibious invasion of North Korea," said Baker, the former naval intelligence analyst. "God knows, you can't invade China."

In the context of the "small wars" and noncombat crises that have historically been the Marine Corps's forte, however, a two-brigade force looms larger. The Corps's plan for the "long war"--the Pentagon's term for the battle against terrorism after the Iraq conflict--calls for returning to the traditional rotation of small, flexible Marine Expeditionary Units standing by on Navy ships around the globe, augmented by new formations specially tailored for "security cooperation" missions: helping allied militaries to train, to hunt terrorists, and to respond to natural disasters. In the future, one January 2008 strategy pamphlet says bluntly, "there will be fewer high-spectrum combat operations that will require our marines to bring the full force of our combined arms capabilities to bear."

Such a future of small forces operating over long distances against relatively limited threats would offer many opportunities for the $67 million V-22 Osprey. The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, relatively cheap at $16 million apiece, would see less real-world use for the dollar.

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Wear and tear adds up on military aircraft

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

"There were daily conference calls with the accident investigation board," said Maj. Joe Harris, commander of the Air National Guard's 142nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron in Portland, Ore. "We were released to fly, and then they grounded us again." Getting their base's 20 F-15s back in the air took Harris's mechanics "over 5,000 hours" of work, he said -- 250 hours per plane.

The problem: A key structural element in many early F-15s -- including six of the 20 at Harris's base -- had been manufactured too thin and thus did not conform to specifications. The defect was so slight that no one noticed for two decades. But the F-15 that cracked up in flight had been in continuous service for 27 years. That translated into 5,600 flight hours, thousands of jarring takeoffs and landings, and countless high g-force turns. The wear and tear had simply added up. The average age of the 441 grounded F-15s? Twenty-five and a half.

Those F-15s are not alone. The average age of the Air Force's core fighter, the F-16, is 16.7 years. The average age of the Navy's F-18 is a relatively youthful 13.6 because the Navy bought more fighters in the 1990s than the Air Force did. Both services, nevertheless, are relying primarily on fighters built during President Reagan's defense buildup. Even the military's own notoriously optimistic budget projections call for buying new planes at such high prices -- and therefore at such low annual rates of production -- that some 1980s-vintage aircraft will have to stay in service through the 2020s, when they will be more than 40 years old.

Large-bodied aircraft tend to last longer than hard-maneuvering fighters, but many of the military's big planes date back to President Kennedy's buildup. The average age of the B-52 bomber is 46.6 years, older than most of its pilots. The KC-135 tanker that both the Air Force and Navy rely on to refuel other planes of every type in-flight? Depending on the model, it averages 46 to 48 years old.

On February 29, the Air Force awarded a long-delayed contract for a replacement tanker to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and EADS, the defense arm of Europe's Airbus. The losing bidder, Boeing, has filed a formal protest. Even if the program proceeds on schedule, the last KC-135s may not be replaced until they are 80 years old. "These airplanes could fly as late as 2045," said Ben Robinson, a retired brigadier general who now heads the plane's maintenance program at Boeing. "The last crews, their parents haven't met each other yet."

Costs Per Flight-Hour Rising

To be sure, over the past two decades, the armed services have invested billions of dollars in modernizing, upgrading, and extending the working lives of their 1980s-vintage aircraft. But they cannot just pop out old, tired parts and snap in new ones: The process is more like pulling one strand on a sweater and hoping that the whole thing doesn't unravel. To repair the F-15s, for example, mechanics had to peel back the aircraft's steel skin and pull off its ribs just to get at the faulty part (a longeron), and then put everything back together. By one estimate, replacing the $12,000 part cost $250,000 in labor.

Swapping out a more complex component can cost millions. The 1960s-vintage KC-135 tankers, for example, later acquired more-powerful, fuel-efficient engines. "You've got a more powerful engine, therefore you've got to have a stronger engine strut that connects the motor to the wing," Boeing's Robinson explained. "You need different hydraulic pumps because the hydraulic pumps are driven off the engines. You've got a more powerful airplane, and the rudder needs to be more efficient. In the cockpit itself, all of those engine instruments had to be updated." The aircraft even got new aluminum skin on their underbellies, Robinson said, because "there's a lot of corrosion right below where the restroom was."

Once in place, the new parts break down less often -- not just because they undergo less wear and tear but because maintenance crews are replacing mechanical or hydraulic moving parts with solid-state electronics. But the high-tech components require a higher degree of skill from the mechanics. "What they're doing is more complex, and the demands placed on them continue to increase," Harris said. "It's tougher and tougher to recruit into those career fields."

Between new complexities and old parts, it takes more work to keep fewer planes less ready. "In my 10 years with the F-15, the cost per flying hour has doubled," Harris said. In fact, the cost per flight hour has climbed for every one of the 14 major aircraft types in continuous service since the 1980s (a trend aggravated by rising oil prices). All 14 have lower readiness rates than they did in 1991.

Many aircraft have to be flown at less than their design limits. "We've placed restrictions on them to preserve the structural life of the airplane," said Maj. Gen. Paul Selva, director of strategic planning for the Air Force. But engineers and maintainers can guard against future problems only to a certain extent. Last November's F-15 crackup was only the latest ugly surprise. The younger and more numerous F-16s suffered a series of crashes, traced to engine faults, in the late 1990s; and 63 F-16s are currently grounded with structural cracks. A KC-135 crashed in 1999 because of a failure in its flight controls. "We're essentially conducting a grand experiment," Selva said. "We've operated most of the airplanes we're flying beyond their originally designed life span."

At some point, the military needs to start buying new aircraft to replace those built when Reagan was in office. But after the Cold War ended, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton cut the military procurement budgets sharply even as the price of new higher-tech aircraft continued to escalate. Crunched between shrinking budgets and rising costs, the Navy and the Air Force made very different decisions -- not only on how many planes they bought but also on what kind of wars they bought planes for.

The Tortoise and the Hare

In the heady days of the 1980s, the Air Force and Navy moved on parallel tracks. Both bought hundreds of short-range, high-performance fighters and struggled to develop longer-range, larger-payload bombers designed to evade enemy radar, specifically the Air Force B-2 and the Navy A-12. When procurement budgets shrank, the same roof fell on both services. Fighter procurement dropped from a peak of 399 in 1986 to just 60 in 1993, the B-2 was cut back from a planned 132 planes to just 21, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the A-12 altogether.

The Navy decided it could no longer wait for the development of stealth airplanes, with their ungainly radar-diffusing shapes, which made them difficult to land on aircraft carriers, and their radar-absorbent coatings, which made them difficult to maintain in salty sea air. Instead, Navy planners focused their modernization program on a heavily upgraded F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, a plane 30 percent larger -- and correspondingly more expensive -- than the basic F-18, and able to carry more bombs and fuel but still lacking the range, payload, or stealth envisaged for the canceled A-12.

The Air Force, by contrast, bet all of its chips on stealth. Disappointed by the handling and maintenance problems of its F-117 stealth fighter and B-2 stealth bomber, the service invested heavily in a "third generation" of stealth that would combine radar-evasion with high-agility aerodynamics, supersonic speed, and manageable maintenance. While it poured ever more billions of dollars into this Holy Grail fighter, the F-22 Raptor, the Air Force all but stopped buying more F-15 Eagles and F-16 Falcons.

The two services' purchasing profiles diverged dramatically. Navy fighter procurement plunged from 171 planes in 1986 to just 36 planes in 1993, and then grew to a steady current rate of 40 to 50 F/A-18s of various types per year. The average age of its fighter fleet rose, but only from 11 years in 1986 to 13.6 today.

By contrast, Air Force fighter procurement crashed to the ground: 228 planes in 1986, 24 in 1993, zero in 1995. Purchases did not climb back up to 21 planes a year until 2003 -- but all 21 were F-22s, in service at last. In the meantime, however, the average age of Air Force fighters has climbed from less than 11 years in 1986 to more than 20 today. What's more, the F-22s cost so much to build -- $122 million to $180 million apiece, not counting the two decades of R&D expenses -- that the Air Force budget cannot buy enough to replace its 1980s-vintage aircraft plane for plane.

Sticker-shocked administration budgeteers have slashed the F-22 planned buy to 183 aircraft. Air Force generals have insisted they need 381 -- enough to have two full squadrons of 24 F-22s ready to deploy abroad at any given moment and eight more squadrons either recovering from deployment or gearing up to go, plus trainers, test planes, and spares in case of crashes. One Hill staffer told National Journal that the Air Force's clamor for more F-22s had escalated into "open warfare" between the generals and their civilian superiors in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

"We have had a couple of people get way off the reservation and say, 'It doesn't matter what the Congress and the secretary of Defense say, we're going to buy the [381] airplanes,' " admitted one senior Air Force official who declined to be named. The Air Force has to at least get one point across, the official said: "If you can't support us on 381, don't make a premature decision to close the production line, because if you close the line, you've forestalled any other options."

Current spending plans punt this decision by funding neither continued production nor the shutdown of production facilities. Congress is likely to insert more F-22s into the defense budget. But even the Air Force's dreamed-of 381 planes, bought at the current rate of 20 planes a year, will not replace its 441 F-15s for decades. "They still plan to keep 177 of the F-15C/D version through 2025, some of them by then 40, 45 years old," said Mark Bass, the Boeing executive in charge of sustaining and modernizing the F-15s. "That is based on the Air Force eventually procuring 381 F-22s." And what if they don't get 381? "They don't have that in their plan," he said.

Lightning Strikes

Some relief arrives for the Air Force in 2013, in the form of its first squadron of the F-35 Lightning. Conceived in the 1990s as the Joint Strike Fighter and imposed by the Defense Department on reluctant Air Force generals and Navy admirals, the F-35 is intended to be cheap enough that the two services, combined, can buy 2,443 in three variants. Meeting that cost target has meant sacrificing some of the high-performance attributes of the F-22, especially its supersonic dogfighting capabilities, and focusing the F-35 on more-prosaic ground-attack missions.

"You had to sacrifice some of the total dominance in some of these mission areas," said Maj. Gen. Charles Davis, the Air Force officer in charge of the joint service program. As for the price targets, "since the contract was signed back in 2001, the cost of the airplane has risen about 38 percent," mostly because of the rising price of specialty metals on the global market. "Within factors we can control, we're doing a pretty good job," Davis said. "Is it ever going to be the $39 million aircraft [proposed in the '90s]? No. That was probably unrealistic."

If the F-35 materializes more or less on cost and on schedule, it will be the plane the Air Force relies on to replace its 1,200 F-16s and the Navy relies on to replace about 1,000 early-model F-18s. By 2030, the Air Force will at last have the all-stealthy fighter force it dreamed of in the 1990s. Both the F-22 and F-35 are designed to avoid detection: Their shapes minimize radar reflections, their engines hide the heat of the exhaust, and their weapons stay concealed until launch. But the Navy intends to fly its F-35 variant alongside its F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, which, despite some "low-observable" features, have to carry their bombs and missiles dangling from the wings, a dead giveaway on radar.

Instead of stealth, the Navy plans to use high-powered jammers to baffle enemy radar. It is investing in an "electronic attack" version of the Super Hornet, the EA-18G Growler, to replace the 1970s-vintage EA-6B Prowlers used today. The Air Force, by contrast, retired its electronic attack aircraft years ago and is relying on Navy jammers while it waits for its all-stealth fleet.

"The Air Force does not believe that aircraft lacking stealth will be able to survive in the future," said Loren Thompson, a defense-industry consultant and analyst at the Lexington Institute who has close ties to Air Force officials. The Soviet Union collapsed before Moscow could build the interlocking system of advanced Sukhoi fighters and long-range surface-to-air missiles that the F-22 was designed to defeat. But Russia's cash-strapped defense industry has sold some of its technologies abroad, allowing China, in particular, to raise the risks for any nonstealth aircraft operating within a few hundred miles of its territory. As Sukhois and SAMs proliferate, Thompson said, "the Air Force doesn't understand why the Navy doesn't feel a greater sense of urgency about moving beyond the existing Super Hornet."

Navy Capt. Mark Darrah, chief of fighter modernization for the Naval Air Systems Command, acknowledges that the Super Hornet is not stealthy. "We know that," he said, but "when we look at survivability, it's a multifaced issue, and the observability of an airplane is just one aspect."

The Navy's problem with stealth is Moore's Law, referring to the rapid improvement in computer chips. Because stealth has to be built into the basic structure of an aircraft, the degree to which a plane reflects radar beams back to enemy receivers remains essentially the same throughout its 20-plus years in service. The computing power available to those radar receivers to distinguish faint signals from background noise, however, doubles every 18 months. "Signal processors are getting faster all the time," said Norman Friedman, a military analyst and historian who is a leading critic of stealth. "There may be some reason to believe Moore's Law is going to top out, but how much money do you want to bet on that?"

The Air Force's problem with jammers is that by definition they emit energy. If the jamming does not blind the enemy, it gives away your location instead. The F-22 and F-35 will actually have significant electronic warfare capacity built in, but as long as their jammers are on, their stealth is effectively off. Still, F-22 and F-35 pilots will at least have a choice between passive stealth and active jamming; their Super Hornet colleagues have jamming, or nothing.

At best, the Air Force and the Navy will end up with two very different but complementary fighter fleets, each optimal for a different kind of enemy, each a hedge against the failures of the other. At worst, neither will be able to afford enough planes for its chosen approach to work at all.

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On the sea and in the air, military bills come due

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Since 1991, the United States has been the world's sole superpower. Now, 17 years later, the armed forces that underwrite that status have begun to fray. Nowhere are the limits of the U.S. military more evident than on the ground in Iraq, and so Congress and the media have focused their attention on the stretched ground forces of the Army and Marine Corps.

U.S. control of the seas and skies is something that the public and policy makers tend to assume, as they have since the fall of the Soviet Union. But on the sea and in the air, America has coasted for two decades on investments made in the 1980s.

Now, after a generation of heavy use around the globe, from Somalia and the Balkans in the 1990s to Afghanistan and Iraq today, hardware bought during the Reagan buildup is simply wearing out.

The chief of the Air Force has said publicly that he needs an extra $20 billion -- per year -- beyond the administration's requested budget to restock his arsenal. Outside analysts suggest that the less-outspoken Navy needs about the same amount. But the services are laying that $40 billion charge for future weapons on a country that is increasingly chafing under the costs of the current war.

"Domestic spending is going to come up and defense spending is going to come down, whoever's elected the next president," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., the House's top defense appropriator. "The money is going to dry up. We've got to do as much as we can this year with the supplemental budgets and with the base budget."

The irony of this cash crunch is that the Air Force and the Navy remain the strongest in the world, increasing their firepower since 1991 even as they have shrunk in size. For all of the media infatuation with smart bombs in the first Persian Gulf War, they amounted to less than 7 percent of the ordnance dropped on Iraq. Today almost all bombs carried by U.S. aircraft are precision-guided. For all of the impressive footage of Tomahawk cruise missiles hitting Iraqi buildings in 1991, the Navy had only 35 ships with 2,806 launchers capable of firing them. Today it has 74 ships with 7,508 launchers.

In 1991, Air Force and Navy data networks were so crude, and so incompatible, that couriers had to hand-carry strike plans from the headquarters on land to the aircraft carriers at sea. Today, fighter planes are equipped with high-speed data links. The same explosion in computing power that took the Internet from academic obscurity to economic ubiquity in less than a generation sparked a revolution in military targeting as well. The problem, however, is that all of these brave new electronics still need some kind of ship or plane -- a platform, in Pentagonspeak -- to carry them into battle, and those platforms are running up against some basic physical limits.

With the end of the Cold War, defense spending dropped by $42 billion between 1990 and 1994. Some $39 billion of that came out of the research, development, and procurement budget. So, while the military's expenditures for operations, maintenance, and personnel stayed about level, even as the size of the armed forces shrank, the Pentagon had only about half as much to spend on new equipment.

The services weathered this "procurement holiday" in different ways. The Air Force all but stopped buying combat aircraft while it invested in research and development of a supersonic stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, which finally entered full production in 2005. In the meantime, the average age of the Air Force's fighter fleet doubled, from less than 10 years old in 1991 to more than 20 today. (The Navy's aircraft fleet has also aged, though not as dramatically as the Air Force's.) Some major aerospace contractors went under, and some scraped by doing other work for the space, civilian, and foreign-military sectors.

Because the Navy is the sole customer for the "Big Six" shipyards that make all U.S. warships, both politics and preservation of the industrial base called for continuing ship construction, albeit at a markedly lower rate. The Navy made ends meet by retiring older, expensive-to-maintain vessels ahead of schedule, keeping the fleet relatively young at the price of halving its size.

The bottom line for both services, however, was the same: Major new purchases were delayed, stretched out, or cut. This was a stopgap, not a solution. Throughout the 1990s, a growing chorus of defense analysts warned of a coming train wreck, when all of the deferred modernization bills would arrive at once. What they did not expect was that those bills would come due during America's biggest and most expensive war since Vietnam.

It is hard for Defense officials to make a case for supersonic stealth fighters and warships bristling with missiles when policy makers are grilling them about body armor and mine-resistant trucks for troops in battle every day. Defense Secretary Robert Gates flatly told Congress: "The reality is, we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater." In response, Air Force generals have been so vociferous in campaigning for the fighter program that they have verged on "open warfare" with the administration's budget planners, one veteran congressional staffer said. "In all my years on Capitol Hill," he said, "I have never seen the services as outspoken about their needs."

The air and sea services certainly make the case for their own relevance. Besides an increasing number of air strikes since the beginning of the 2007 "surge" of troops into Iraq, "what you see is Air Force airplanes providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in direct support of ground forces," said Maj. Gen. Paul Selva, the service's director of strategic planning. With land vehicles vulnerable to roadside bombs, Selva added, Air Force transports shuttle an average of 2,000 troops a day around Iraq and Afghanistan. But even Selva puts the case for high-tech, high-cost systems in terms of future conflicts, not the current low-tech war.

"The question with the F-22 is the long-term strategic horizon," Selva said, "because whatever number we end up [buying] with the F-22, that's the number we're going to have for the next 20 years." The Navy, likewise, emphasizes that the ships it builds today must last for decades in a world where lethal technologies are proliferating rapidly. Whether these long-term arguments will shake an extra $40 billion out of Congress is an open question. And whether the services' planned purchases are the right investments for the future is another question altogether.

"My main concern is readiness for the unexpected, for what's around the corner," said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "You do your best to have high-technology systems to deter and prevail in the unexpected [future] -- but the need to bolster the ground forces is highly important today. We have to do our very best to balance them out."

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As military begins to draw down, National Guard ramps up

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Iraq drawdown has begun. By New Year's, a brigade of more than 3,000 U.S. troops will have left Iraq without a comparable unit taking its place. By mid-2008, the Bush administration pledges that force levels in Iraq will have returned to what they were before the 2007 "surge." Republican political candidates across the country are hoping that this troop reduction -- from a high of 164,000 last August to 130,000-plus next July -- will relieve the political pressure from a still-unpopular war at a critical moment in their 2008 campaigns.

But there's a snag. While the military as a whole is ramping down, its most politically sensitive component -- the citizen-soldiers of the Army National Guard -- is ramping up. "Today we stand at 46,000 mobilized," said Lt. Gen. Clyde A. Vaughn, the Pentagon's director of the Army Guard. "I see us adding about 10,000 to that."

More than 2,600 members of the Oklahoma-based 45th Infantry Brigade, for example, have already been called to active duty, leaving their families and civilian employers behind for the holidays while they conduct their final predeployment training at Fort Bliss, Texas. In January, they will head to Iraq. Three more brigades of more than 3,000 soldiers apiece -- one each from Arkansas, Indiana, and Ohio -- will follow them sometime in early 2008, in the midst of the intense primary election season.

Then, sometime in the second half of the year, another seven states will mobilize full brigades: Hawaii, Illinois (whose troops are bound for Afghanistan, not Iraq), New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Oklahoma will also send a second, smaller brigade. Some 15,000 Guard soldiers from brigades in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Oregon, and Wisconsin have been alerted that the Pentagon will call them up in 2009.

To prevent a gap in war-zone coverage, at least some of the Guard units set to deploy in late 2008 will have to mobilize before the early-2008 Guard brigades can come home -- a potentially months-long overlap that will likely spike the number of Guard troops on active duty well above Vaughn's target cap of 55,000. The Army National Guard has not called up so many soldiers at once since 2005, when the Army was in the midst of reorganizing all of its combat divisions around the world. And the makeup of the Guard forces differs this time: In contrast to the sometimes superannuated and inexperienced "weekend warriors" of the past, many of the troops are young recruits, and most of the officers and senior sergeants are veterans on their second tours in Iraq.

Since September 11, 2001, the military has relied heavily on reservists to conduct overseas operations. More than 450,000 of these part-time soldiers -- they generally train during one weekend a month and two weeks of active duty a year -- have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan since 9/11; more than 800 of them have died. Each of the armed services, including the Coast Guard, has reached deep into its reserve component to meet the needs of President Bush's global war on terrorism. In the prolonged ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, no reservists have spent their blood and sweat more unreservedly than those of the Army National Guard, which has deployed more than 190,000 soldiers and lost nearly 500.

Unlike most reserve components, which largely consist of specialist support troops, the Army Guard maintains its own full-strength combat brigades, and planners have come to use them as substitutes for regular Army brigades. The Guard supplied just 10 percent of Army troops in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But in 2004, the regular Army launched a massive midwar reorganization into more compact, self-sufficient, and deployable brigades, and the Guard took up the slack in the war zone. In January 2005, some 65,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a record 34 percent of Army personnel deployed -- were Guard troops.

That proportion plummeted to 16 percent by August 2007, as exhausted Guard units went home while the regular Army poured five brigades into Baghdad. But for months, planners, commanders, and Guard advocates have been warning that the citizen-soldiers' turn would come again -- by 2010 at the latest, and probably much earlier. Earlier, it turns out, is next year.

The previous reservist surge pushed the Army National Guard to its limits. "We couldn't have kept that level of participation up," Vaughn said. In 2005, "the chief of staff of the Army said, 'We won't have to have this level of commitment from the Guard for quite some time.' Well, here we are two years later, and the level of commitment is coming back up."

Strain On Families

The Cold War-era military kept its reservists in cold storage for World War III, requiring them to train on weekends but rarely to mobilize for real-life conflict. Today's reservists are essential to day-to-day military operations. But as Arnold Punaro, a former Senate staffer and a major general in the Marine Corps Reserve, points out, "We have not had a national debate about whether or not we want an 'operational reserve.' We backed into it." Punaro chairs the congressionally chartered Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, which declared current practices "not sustainable" in its March 2007 interim report. (The final report is due in January.) "We say the operational reserve is neither feasible nor sustainable without substantial, fundamental changes in just about everything from mobilizing and demobilizing, to equipping, to training, to funding, to personnel management," Punaro told National Journal. "None of those changes has occurred."

The Guard's own commanders echo that anxiety.

"My fear is for the guys and gals and their families who have been in the Guard for years," said Maj. Gen. John Libby, the adjutant-general of the Maine National Guard. "It was easy to wrap the flag around that first deployment and feel good about where you've been and what you've done. I think the second deployments, given the tenor of the political discussion [of the war] and the strain on families and employers, are going to be more difficult."

Despite the strains on the Army Guard nationwide, it has managed a turnaround in recruitment. After stumbling badly in 2004 and 2005 -- not coincidentally, the years of peak commitment to Iraq -- and falling 17,000 below its authorized strength of 350,000 soldiers, the Army Guard is now nearly 3,000 soldiers over strength.

Those figures, however, mask the increasing replacement of experienced but exhausted veterans with fresh recruits. Historically, nearly two-thirds of Army Guard soldiers had experience in the regular military. But today, two-thirds of enlistees bring no military experience. "We have more soldiers with less than eight years' experience than [with] over eight years', for the first time," Vaughn said, adding, "We have more soldiers that are unmarried than married for the first time in our modern history."

While the military as a whole is ramping down its presence in Iraq, its most politically sensitive component - the citizen-soldiers of the Army National Guard - is ramping up from 46,000 to 55,000 troops.

That statistic hints that military service and married life are increasingly incompatible. Army Guard troops from sergeants to colonels to generals told National Journal that the troops' morale is high -- but that they worry about their families' ability to endure repeated deployments. "As far as the soldiers, emotionally, physically, mentally, we will all be ready," said Col. Bruce Oliveira, commander of Hawaii's 29th Brigade, which next year heads to Iraq for the second time. "I would be more concerned with the families. All our spouses were terrific the last time we deployed, and to ask them to do it again is going to be a challenge." Oliveira worries about his own wife. "My first deployment, I left her with three teenagers," he said. "We're trained to do our mission, but our wives are not trained to be single parents for a year."

Surveys of reservists' spouses "show a significant drop in support for reserve service," warned the Commission on the Guard and Reserve. Although a recent study by the Rand think tank called into question the presumed link between overseas deployments and divorce, three of the 10 Guard sergeants who spoke to National Journal said that their marriages had broken up at least partly because of their service abroad.

"I truly love the military," said Staff Sgt. Curtis Coleman, an Arkansas Guard soldier who will return to Iraq for his second tour next year. As for his ex-wife, he said, "Our career paths were headed in different directions, because mine ultimately is retirement from the military, or service until I can no longer stand, and hers is college. I didn't want to hold her back from great things -- because she'll do great things -- having to wait on me."

Streamlining Mobilization

For more than 40 years, balancing civilian life with reserve service was straightforward. From the end of the Korean War in 1953 until the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Guard troops and other reservists drilled two weekend days a month plus two weeks a year, but almost never were called up to deploy abroad. After the brief Gulf War, 4,500 Guard troops deployed as peacekeepers in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Sinai. "Even there, the assumption was that it was going to be six months [per deployment] and it wasn't going to be repeated," said David Segal, a sociology professor and the director of the University of Maryland Center for Research on Military Organization. "It's only with Operation Iraqi Freedom that we have changed the rules massively and said we will deploy Guard units for a year or more, and do it repeatedly."

A new "Army Force Generation" scheme, known as ARFORGEN, calls for every unit in the Army Guard and Army Reserve to spend four years at home and one year on active duty. That deployment pace is far higher than the wildest expectations of the 1990s -- and far lower than the reality thus far in the 21st century. "According to the ARFORGEN model, we're getting prepared for a 2010 ready date," Oliveira said. Instead, this October the Hawaiians were alerted to deploy in mid-2008, which will be just two and a half years after they came home from Iraq.

During Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as Defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, the Pentagon policy was that no Reserve or Guard member would have to spend more than 24 months, cumulative, on active duty. As the war dragged on, however, the military found it increasingly nightmarish to organize deployments around a million reservists' individual schedules. Planners would tap a unit to deploy only to discover that many of its personnel had previously been mobilized, either as individual volunteers for active duty or as part of another Guard unit to which they had belonged.

Each person with too much time on active duty had to be left behind, ripping apart teams that had trained together, sometimes for years. Planners then had to fill the resulting holes. To bring one unit up to full strength to deploy, they had to strip individual troops or entire subunits out of several other units -- which would then be shorthanded when their turn came to mobilize, requiring yet more hole-filling at the expense of yet more units. Each short-term solution made the long-term problem worse.

"There was always this perception that there'd just be one last push and then we'd get this thing fixed," said Col. Ted Martinell, chief of plans, mobilization, and readiness for the Army Guard. Instead, Rumsfeld's Iraq insurgency of "dead-enders" kept fighting, and the mobilization problem kept growing and growing, like a snowball kicked downhill.

The administrative nightmare was particularly brutal in the Army National Guard, where a typical mobilization involved up to six months of full-time training at an active-duty base in the United States, then another 12 months deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. That meant that even seven months of active-duty service -- say, as a volunteer augmenting the Pentagon staff after 9/11 -- would render an individual Guard soldier ineligible for an 18-month deployment with the rest of his unit because he would exceed Rumsfeld's 24-month cap. It also meant that no unit could deploy more than once. After the peak demands of 2004 and early 2005, the Army Guard was simply running out of units.

So just weeks after succeeding Rumsfeld in December 2006, Defense Secretary Robert Gates threw out his predecessor's mobilization policy. Gates's January 2007 announcement cut the Gordian snarl by ceasing to manage an individual reservist's cumulative time on active duty. Instead, planners would track time served for each unit as a whole. That allows teams that trained together to mobilize together, and dramatically eases the administrative burden -- at the price of redeploying some individuals who had already served significant active-duty time.

Although Gates took away some protection for reservists with one hand, he gave back with the other: Under the new policy, no unit may spend more than 12 consecutive months on active duty, a 33 percent cut from the 18-month mobilizations that had become standard in the Army National Guard. The nine adjutants-general who spoke to National Journal applauded the change. "That was one of the best moves" Gates could have made, said Maj. Gen. Steven Doohen, adjutant-general of South Dakota's Guard. "It gives some predictability, that [soldiers are] going to be gone just a year, and that is very important to employers and families."

But to shorten mobilizations, something had to give -- and that was training time. "It places a little more responsibility on the states that these individuals are trained and ready to go when they leave the state," Doohen said. The four Guard brigades that will deploy in early 2008 will be the first full-scale test of Gates's grand trade-off.

Tightening Training

Cutting training time for troops about to go into harm's way goes against every instinct of the modern American military. But in interview after interview, Army National Guard soldiers ranking from sergeants to state commanders said that spending up to six months training full-time before deploying to Iraq was wasted time.

"We were assumed to be basic trainees," said Maj. Damon Cluck, a battalion commander in the Arkansas National Guard. All the time that Guard troops had spent on their weekends and in their annual drills qualifying for the individual skills that the Army requires "might as well not have happened," Cluck said. "We still had to do it again." And because the Guard troops were shipped to active-duty Army bases for the predeployment training, they faced prolonged bottlenecks at overcrowded training facilities. "It took us a month to do individual and crew-served weapons qualification," he said. "That's a task we normally knock off in about three weekends." Of five months that soldiers spent away from family and employers, Cluck said, only about six weeks were genuinely valuable.

The root problem was the regular Army's decades-old distrust of the weekend warriors' ability. During the 1991 Gulf War, large numbers of Guard forces were mobilized, but they were mostly kept in supporting roles. The Army deemed three of the Guard's combat brigades to be unready and forced them to do so much extra training that they missed the conflict altogether. In the late 1990s, when the Guard units deployed as peacekeepers to Kosovo, Bosnia, and the Sinai, "the active Army resisted that tremendously; they didn't think the Guard could do it," Segal said. "But we learned that the Guard could be deployed overseas."

Those tentative deployments in the 1990s laid the foundation for radical change in how the Guard prepared for war. "When I first got to the brigade back in 1985, the training wasn't very realistic," said Col. Kendall Penn, who as commander of the Arkansas 39th Brigade is Cluck's superior officer. "Since then the level of professionalism has increased dramatically. All of the soldiers now realize that the end state of their training is skill sets they're going to actually use in combat."

Secretary Gates's policy challenges the Guard to live up to these words. Instead of six months of training under the supervision of regular Army officers before they deploy, Guard units train for just two or three months in the U.S. before they deploy to Iraq. That requires them to get all of their soldiers up to speed on basic combat skills before mobilization. Isn't that a lot to accomplish in two weekend days a month plus two weeks a year? "It is," Cluck said, "but a lot of it is stuff that we'd do every year whether we were deploying [or not]."

The federal government is funding states' efforts to give Guard soldiers additional weekend drills and extended annual training periods. "We'll probably increase all the training time by at least 25 percent," said Hawaii's adjutant, Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee. "You can equate that to extra [weekend] drills and probably two to three weeks of additional annual training."

Several soldiers grumbled to National Journal, however, that this method of sprinkling extra training periods throughout the year before deployment creates a painful back-and-forth between civilian and military life. "A lot of kids in my platoon, their employers are really not happy with how we're training right now," said Sgt. 1st Class Spencer Kohlheim, an Indiana Guard soldier preparing for his second deployment, this time to Iraq. (Kohlheim and his wife separated after his first tour, in Afghanistan.) If he asked his troops if they would rather be put on full-time active-duty status to train, Kohlheim said, "I'd have 100 percent raise their hands."

The Arkansas Guard is trying a unique alternative program: With its timeline to deployment too short to space out training periods throughout the year, the state has mobilized Penn's brigade for 90 extra days -- but on state, not federal, active duty, during which they'll train at local armories rather than at distant Army bases. The troops are getting full-time military pay and benefits, and their employers have a solid block of time for which to hire temporary workers instead of coping with reservists' off-again, on-again attendance.

Best of all, Cluck said, "most of our soldiers go home and sleep in their own bed at night," instead of spending six months at an Army base far from home with only a few days of leave. Maintaining those home ties is especially important in the National Guard, which draws its strength from the intensely local loyalties of its troops and their families.

Taking A Village

Since the first colonial militia mustered on the village green, National Guard units have been hometown troops. The regular Army runs a nationwide recruiting program, ships soldiers to centralized boot camps, and then reassigns them from base to base every three or four years. An Army National Guard unit recruits from its local community and may keep the same soldiers together for decades. That those communities keep producing volunteers six years into a global war speaks to the depth of their military traditions.

"My father was in the Army in the 1950s, my grandfather was a World War II veteran, my uncle was a World War II veteran," said 1st Sgt. Darin Carlson, a soldier with 17 years in the Indiana Guard who has served since 9/11 in Bosnia and Iraq, and who is headed for Iraq again next year. (The back-to-back deployments were a factor in his divorce.) "Growing up, that was what I always wanted to be."

The next generation seems to feel the same way. "We continue to have soldiers coming into the Guard in record numbers," Carlson said. "When you have a group of high school kids and three or four of them join one unit, all their buddies want to be part of that." Once they are in, those bonds only tighten: Of about a hundred soldiers in Carlson's company, "four or five" who left the Guard after the last deployment re-enlisted when they learned the unit might go again. "In the Guard, you get that local family feel, where those guys become close," Carlson said. "Then when that unit goes, that town goes."

Such ties are strongest in small towns -- not in more-rural areas, where people live too far apart to converge easily at a local armory, and not in large cities, with their abundance of social and economic alternatives. "In some communities, the local Guard unit is one of the major sources of social cohesion," said the University of Maryland's Segal. "Being in the Guard is how one earns one's bona fides as a member of the community." But precisely because those bonds are so tight, the Guard does not provide the same social mobility that the regular military does. Segal said, "If you're looking for a way out [of your circumstances], the active duty is a better bet." All of these factors mean that the Army Guard has about half the percentage of African-Americans as the regular Army, significantly fewer Hispanics, and a lower ratio of women to men.

As a rule of thumb, the lower a state's population density and the lower its percentage of minorities, the higher the percentage of its population likely to be serving in the Army National Guard. Nationwide, the 350,000-strong Army Guard averages just below 12 soldiers per 10,000 people. In North Dakota, however, that ratio is 52 soldiers per 10,000; in California, it's only four.

So although the Army National Guard is a consummately American institution, it does not reflect America as a whole. It reflects instead a certain slice of society from which it disproportionately draws, and on which the burden of Guard service disproportionately falls. Not all of America is at war.

So far, however, even after six years, the hometowns that are at war are staying in the fight. "They're proud of their soldiers. The community feeling hasn't backed off at all," Carlson said. As his brigade prepares for its second tour in Iraq, he said, "support here in Indiana is higher than when we went the first time. I don't see why they couldn't keep it up for a long time, to be honest with you."

That enduring support does not, however, wipe out the cost of service. "I have four children," said Staff Sgt. Nathaniel Rogers, now mobilized and training for his second deployment with Oklahoma's 45th Brigade. "On my last [tour in Iraq], from what my wife tells me, the three little ones, they were so little they didn't understand what was going on. My oldest, he did. When I first left, he had nightmares." This time, Rogers said, "he'll be 12 in January. He accepts it. He really helps my wife out a lot with the younger kids. I think we're good."

Rogers is working with the Pentagon's Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve program to persuade his employer to give him back his civilian job when he returns to the States. Soldiers' requests for such help from the Employer Support office have doubled since 2004. "If we're going to call them up so frequently, maybe they're not part-time soldiers," said Lee, the adjutant-general of the Hawaii Guard. "Maybe the main employer is the United States Army" -- in which case, Lee added, "we need better compensation." Lee and his fellow Guard generals are still trying to figure out what that new social and economic contract with their troops should be.

In the meantime, Rogers says, like tens of thousands of other Army Guard soldiers, "I don't have a problem with going back over there."

National Journal Correspondent Alexis Simendinger contributed to this report.

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Thin line separates aggressive fighting from war crimes

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

But on April 26, 2006, in the town of Hamdaniya, the young Marine lance corporal and the seven other members of his squad stepped over the line. Frustrated by the Iraqi police's revolving-door releases of a suspected insurgent that U.S. forces had arrested three times, the squad decided to execute the man.

A barking guard dog at the home of their intended target, a suspected cell leader known as Gowad, thwarted the marines, who instead broke into the house of Gowad's lieutenant, Hashim Ibrahim Awad, and shot him. Then they planted an AK-47 rifle on the body, along with a shovel, to make it seem as if he had been digging a hole to hide a roadside bomb.

With that cover-up, the squad members tacitly acknowledged that they had knowingly violated the rules of engagement laid out by their superiors. At their trials this year Pennington testified, "We were sick of their rules and decided to write our own."

Pennington's attorney, David Brahms, described his client's act as a "pre-emptive strike." Brahms, a retired brigadier general and a former senior legal adviser for the Marine Corps, told National Journal that among the marines in Hamdaniya, "there was a level of frustration and fear that it was only a matter of time until the [insurgents] did something that would kill or maim one of their own. So they said, 'We've got to do something. We're trained to take the fight to the enemy.' "

The problem was how. "I remember my client saying, 'The mission was clear in Falluja, but in Hamdaniya it wasn't clear what the hell we were doing,' " Brahms said. Pennington's mission had shifted from an all-out assault on Falluja, a city largely abandoned by civilians, to a murky, cat-and-mouse counterinsurgency in Hamdaniya, where the enemy he was supposed to destroy intermingled with the civilians whose hearts and minds he was supposed to win.

But Pennington's heart and mind were stuck in Falluja. His mother testified that when her son was home, he carried around a map of the Iraqi city marked with the places his comrades had died. "The way the brain functions actually changes after trauma," said Glenn Scott Lipson, a forensic psychologist, who testified that post-traumatic stress disorder impaired Pennington's decision-making. "He was [chronically] in a state of fight-or-flight, and with that level of arousal, it undermines the ability to deliberate rationally."

Pennington pleaded guilty to kidnapping and conspiracy to commit premeditated murder, and was sentenced to eight years. Then, in August, the commanding officer of all marines in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Mattis, ordered him released from prison. Pennington is currently in legal limbo, the remainder of his sentence technically deferred until his superiors decide to either commute it or return him to prison. (Pennington, Mattis, and the Marine Corps would not comment on the ongoing case.)

In his terse public explanation, Mattis cited Pennington's youth and low rank as reasons for clemency, along with the fact that he did not personally shoot the victim. With Pennington's release, seven of the eight squad members are now out of prison, albeit most of them with dishonorable discharges from the Corps.

Leniency in cases of U.S. troops accused of killing Iraqis outside the rules of engagement is hardly unique. In late September, even as outrage exploded over the killing of at least 14 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater USA security contractors, a court-martial found Army sniper Jorge Sandoval not guilty of murder in an incident in which he and his team had shot a suspected insurgent and then planted bomb-making materials on the body to bolster their case for his guilt. Sandoval will spend 44 days in prison on lesser charges. And in the most notorious wrongful-death case of the Iraqi war, two of the four marines accused of killing 16 Iraqi civilians (along with eight insurgents) in Haditha in November 2005 had their charges dropped.

Since the Iraq war began, the Army has filed charges involving the wrongful killings of Iraqis in only 22 cases, according to some 10,000 pages of documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Pentagon. (The Marine Corps has not yet opened its files.)

By contrast, estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed by coalition forces range from 11,000 by the British Web-based organization Iraq Body Count -- which uses only verified news reports -- to 186,000 contained in a controversial 2006 survey published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Preventing such deaths when possible -- and containing the fallout when not -- is a crucial part of any counterinsurgency strategy.

"We're supposed to be protecting the population, not killing it," said Brig. Gen. Edward Cardon, now on his third tour in Iraq as assistant commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. Every death not only alienates more Iraqis but also inspires some to seek revenge on U.S. forces. "I think the soldiers understand the nuances of the war much better today than they ever have," Cardon said. "They understand [that] if you kill somebody, there could be blowback, that your fellow soldiers are at risk."

This constant dilemma -- to shoot, or not to shoot -- is an intensely personal one for military professionals. Lt. Gen. Mattis has met twice with Pennington, now reduced in rank to private.

Such intense focus from the highest level speaks to the seriousness with which the military takes the rules of engagement, even amid ambiguous and brutal guerrilla warfare, said psychologist Jonathan Shay, recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for his work with combat veterans. Shay told National Journal, "The killings that really take up residence as psychological abscesses are those that have a moral dimension of violating that person's own principles, like when a soldier discovers he's killed a child" -- as Pennington did.

"I have very strongly come to believe," Shay went on, "that the bright line between militarily necessary, legitimate killing, and murder means everything to a soldier." The question, of course, is where to draw that bright line.

Rage and Restraint

The kind of aggressive action that wins battles can all too easily slide into the kind of aggressive action that leads to war crimes. Holding the line between them takes extraordinary self-discipline.

One night in 2003, Lt. Col. Steven Russell was racing in his Humvee toward the site of an ambush in downtown Tikrit when "we saw a white Nissan truck come fishtailing around the corner," said Russell, now retired. "In really just a flash of a second, I saw the silhouette of a rocket-propelled grenade in the back, and I yelled at my driver, 'Cut him off!' So he headed the vehicle straight at him and rammed him; and as he rammed him, I leapt out and began firing."

In seconds, Russell and his driver had shot all four armed men in the truck. "Once I realized I was out of danger," Russell recalled, "I instinctively let out a very guttural yell. I can't describe it."

Then Russell switched modes completely. "One of them was a very big guy, and he didn't die immediately," he said. "I called a medic. It was clear he was not going to make it, but it was our duty as decent human beings. Once we had them down, we bore them no malice, even though they had tried to kill us."

Some of Russell's men, stoked with fear and adrenaline, struggled to make the same switch. "One of my soldiers fired a round at one of the insurgents who was down and incapacitated," Russell said. "I remember shouting, 'Cease fire, cease fire! We will show quarter!' "

In the final moments of that big insurgent's life -- after Russell shot him but before he died of his wounds -- the Iraqi had changed from a legitimate target to a protected person under international law. In fact, the duty of warring parties to care for, not kill, wounded soldiers no longer able to fight was the subject of the first modern treaty on the law of war, the original Geneva Convention of 1864.

Later conventions extended legal protection from lethal violence to prisoners of war, to civilian noncombatants caught in the crossfire, and -- in a pair of 1977 protocols never formally ratified by the United States -- to civilians who, without being part of an organized guerrilla force, might have taken up arms at one time (say, by planting a roadside bomb) but who were not currently "directly participating in hostilities." Especially hard for combatants, however, is honoring the rules even when the enemy may not. Geoffrey Corn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was the service's chief adviser on the law of war in 2004, said, "It is very common to get the cynical view of, 'Why should we care about this if the other side doesn't?' It really boils down to discipline. Soldiers are taught from the beginning of their service that there are lines that can't be crossed. Once they start crossing those lines, it is going to create a breakdown in the trust and confidence that subordinates have in their leaders."

That the rules of warfare are somewhat ambiguous makes the snap judgments that combat requires even more difficult. The Red Cross has midwifed every Geneva Convention, but national governments and their militaries work out the final text.

"It's the states that developed the law of war," said Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the Washington delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. "We just help monitor it and advise. And when you're talking about regulating activities on the battlefield, international humanitarian law speaks in very general terms. If it imposes obligations that are unreasonable or impracticable, it's simply going to be ignored," he added.

International law prohibits the direct targeting of civilians, for example. But its only limitation on "collateral damage" resulting from an attack on a legitimate military target, such as a munitions plant near a residential neighborhood, is that the loss of civilian life cannot be "excessive" in relation to the military need -- an assessment made not by lawyers but by commanders. The elaborate calculus of blast radius, population density, and the odds of a miss that the U.S. military goes through when planning air strikes is self-imposed, not a requirement of international law.

Right of Self-Defense

Cutting through all the protections afforded the wounded, prisoners of war, and civilians is an exception granting combat troops the right to self-defense. But just as with air strikes, the U.S. military imposes additional restrictions on ground troops before they can use lethal force to defend themselves.

These are the much-discussed "rules of engagement." They vary from one operation to another, and details are classified, but some general patterns hold. The target must show "hostile intent," for example, by speeding toward a checkpoint despite warning shots; or by not only carrying a weapon (because Iraqi and Afghan civilians have the right to bear arms) but actually pointing it at U.S. forces. And rather than, say, firing blindly into rooms that might contain civilians -- as apparently happened at Haditha -- U.S. troops must "positively identify" the individual or at least the specific location they are targeting.

"If we could tell where the fire was coming from, we'd fire back, but that was maybe three-tenths of the time," said Army Staff Sgt. Timothy Johnson, an Iraq veteran now training recruits at Fort Benning, Ga. "There were a lot of kids, a lot of women, a lot of elderly people," he explained, so if his men could not pinpoint the target, they would hold their fire, cordon the area, and start searching house-to-house in the hopes of capturing the sniper. If you just opened fire indiscriminately, "you'd go to jail," Johnson said. "The instant you don't control your anger, you quit being a soldier."

But what if some soldier fails to control his anger? At that point, the fog of war and the leniency of international law combine to make a murder case extremely difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. That is especially true because a jury of military personnel tries all courts-martial, and because commanding officers are the ones who decide whether to file charges in the first place.

"It's a tough tightrope to walk for a commander," said Corn, the former Army chief adviser on the law of war. "It's very hard for them to understand why someone who volunteered to go into harm's way for the country should be put through that process."

During the fighting for Falluja in 2004, an embedded media cameraman videotaped a young marine standing over a fallen, unmoving Iraqi and shooting him in the head. The clip ran on NBC.

"The way it was presented in the media, this was a terrible, unmitigated murder," said Brahms, the defense lawyer. But after five months of investigation, "no charges were leveled -- not because the commanding officer was soft on crime but because he understood the mind-set of this young marine. Just a day or two before, there had been a similar situation: The Iraqi was [playing dead], rolled over, and shot and killed a fellow marine."

"War is a blurry endeavor, and the fog of battle is very real," Corn said. "If it was an honest mistake, then that's an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of war -- and not a criminal violation."

Confusing Stop Signs

The slow, uncertain process of military justice is little comfort to Iraqis who have seen American forces kill or injure loved ones. As a matter of cold-blooded counterinsurgency strategy, it is far better to avoid unnecessary shootings in the first place and to make amends directly to the survivors when they do happen. But basic cultural misunderstandings have hindered U.S. efforts on both those fronts.

Nowhere in Iraq have more noncombatants been killed by simple mistakes than at traffic checkpoints. When U.S. forces tried to keep civilian cars from blundering into the path of the invasion force in 2003, said Maj. Ben Connable, a Marine Corps foreign-cultures expert, "we started out just by trying to wave them down, by putting a hand out -- 'Stop!' -- with the palm forward. And this wasn't working at all. There were several incidents where we had shot up vans full of families trying to flee the fighting. It was an Army foreign-area officer who realized that [gesture] was the Iraqi symbol for 'Welcome, come forward!' We were actually motioning people to come forward and then shooting them, because we had no cultural training."

The U.S. military entered Iraq badly unprepared to sort civilians from guerrilla fighters.

"We'd hoped we would be fighting clearly marked enemy combatants," said Dennis Carletta, a military lawyer with the 3rd Infantry Division during the invasion. "But they were using civilian vehicles and civilian clothing, which is a violation of the laws of war. To this day, I see white pickup trucks driving on the highway in the States and I flash back."

Although the formal rules of engagement did not change, Carletta said, "we just made sure our troops were educated about enemy combatants posing as civilians. If a car blows through a checkpoint at a high rate of speed, that's hostile intent right there."

But at first, procedures were lethally inadequate. Carletta himself was nearly shot by nervous U.S. sentries when he drove up on them in the dark. The first checkpoint shooting of civilians by his unit came one night when an Iraqi car sped past a makeshift traffic stop: a couple of large standardized shipping containers partially blocking the road, with U.S. troops nearby invisible in the darkness. (Both civilians in the car, though wounded, survived.)

Carletta's unit did not have something as basic as stop signs to put up. "While we were in Kuwait [before the invasion], we actually tried to make signs saying 'stop' in Arabic," he said, but they could not even scrounge enough boards and paint to improvise some. "Would it have saved lives?" Carletta said. "Possibly."

As misunderstandings, and Iraqi civilian casualties, mounted, military checkpoints became more and more elaborate: signs bearing Iraqi traffic symbols for the many local drivers illiterate in Arabic; speed bumps; Jersey barriers; lights and flares for nighttime.

The emphasis was on avoiding the need for a split-second shoot/don't shoot decision. "We created an environment that prevented a lot of shootings of innocent Iraqis without compromising force protection" of U.S. troops, Brig. Gen. Cardon said. "When there are shots fired, often you have to go back and ask, how did you get in this situation to begin with?"

The same principle applies to preventing deadly shootings by U.S. military convoys. All too often, Cardon said, the high-speed, highly aggressive driving that some U.S. troops engage in to avoid potential ambush points can lead to lethal encounters with Iraqi traffic.

For example, "The soldiers are driving on the wrong side of the road; they fire a warning shot at a car because it's, quote, 'driving erratically.' After the warning shot, it drives more erratically, and they fire more shots and wound the driver," Cardon said. "Well, do you think that when you were driving against the flow of traffic, that scared the hell out of the driver?"

Cardon ordered troops on routine missions to drive on the right side of the road at reasonable speeds. "I encouraged the use of sirens and spotlights," the general said. "We made stop signs that the soldiers hold up. It says, STOP. That's amazingly effective, by the way." In contrast, Blackwater security guards often try to get Iraqi cars out of the way by hurling water bottles at them, a practice that Cardon banned for his troops.

But in a war zone, no precautions can prevent all civilian deaths. "I took every shooting that resulted in the wounding or killing of an innocent Iraqi and did an investigation," Cardon said. "It took a while to educate the soldiers that this isn't a witch hunt: If you followed your rules of engagement, just write down what happened and trust your chain of command. The ones we prosecuted were the ones that lied."

A Culture of Blood Money

In tandem with internal investigations of wrongdoing, U.S. forces pay compensation to Iraqi families for deaths, injuries, and damages -- a system that many officers say is easily abused by false claims but that saves the Pentagon money, not to mention lives, by reducing revenge attacks. But, like checkpoint procedures, the compensation system had to overcome basic misconceptions initially.

During the Cold War, U.S. forces stationed around the world had a well-established two-tier system in place: small, informal "solatia" (from the root word for "solace") payments made at a commander's discretion out of his unit's operations and maintenance budget, and larger, formal awards by investigating officers working under the Foreign Claims Act.

"The concept of these types of payments is not new," said Jon Tracy, a former Army lawyer who is now legal adviser to the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. But the Foreign Claims Act, enacted in 1942 at the outset of World War II, does not allow payouts for deaths or damages resulting from combat operations of any kind. And solatia payments were initially forbidden in Iraq.

Instead, the military began making "condolence payments" with cash recovered from Saddam Hussein's government -- an unregulated funding source later formalized as the Commander's Emergency Response Program.

"It was very ad hoc, and units could really do what they wanted," Tracy said. "Some units would impose statutes of limitations. Some would only pay if the harm had gained the attention of the media or the leaders of the community, so if an average Iraqi came with a claim, they wouldn't accept it."

More-enlightened commanders found ways to bypass formal restrictions to mollify angry Iraqis, not only by paying claims but also by sending officers to make personal apologies. "It's just as important as the monetary compensation itself," Tracy said, "that someone in the same uniform as the person who caused the harm is there to show sympathy."

Cardon, for example, routinely sends the captain who commands the company involved to apologize to the family, scaling the apology up to majors and colonels depending on the tribal status of the victim. "This was hard on us in the beginning," he said. "It just took a while for the system to understand the culture. There's a culture of blood debt here. Unless you pay" -- both money and respect -- "your fellow soldiers are at risk."

In the summer of 2003, Cardon's brigade took over the Falluja region from the 82nd Airborne Division, whose soldiers had fired into an anti-American demonstration, reportedly killing 17 Iraqis, and then failed to appease local honor by paying claims. "We were getting a lot of small-arms fire," Cardon recalled. "We went and did a lot of payments, and it really calmed the situation down." For a while, anyway. The next year, Falluja erupted into some of the worst violence of the war.

The advantage of the blood-money tradition is that it buys peace between rival groups even if no specific individual can be held accountable.

"The point is to re-create balance between the disputing parties and pay damages, not necessarily to ascertain who is absolutely guilty or innocent," said Andrew Shyrock, a University of Michigan anthropologist who has lived with Yemeni and Jordanian tribes. The disadvantage, however, is that even blood money does not always keep a feud at bay permanently.

"It's a downside of tribal law that these disputes are never really solved," he said. "It's very easy to retrigger old animosities."

In May, the Government Accountability Office reported that in fiscal 2003 through 2006, the Defense Department had disbursed almost $31 million in solatia and condolence payments to Iraqi and Afghan families for property damage, injuries, and deaths -- with a $2,500 maximum per wrongful killing. But attacks on U.S. forces continue, of course, as do U.S. shootings of civilians. Ultimately, condolence payments, courts-martial, and stop signs can serve only to contain the cost of war, never eliminate it.

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Air Force’s commitment to new bomber a matter of debate

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Against an enemy less ill-equipped than the Taliban in 2001 or Iraq in 2003, these aging bombers would be easy targets for surface-to-air missiles. In 1972, North Vietnamese air defenses destroyed 18 B-52s. In 1991, during the first Persian Gulf War, the Air Force held them back from Iraqi airspace until other systems had hammered down Saddam Hussein's air defenses. In 1999, B-52s struck Serbian forces in the field but avoided critical targets such as Belgrade itself.

In every war after 1991, "the very toughest targets were assigned to the B-2 [stealth bomber], and only at night," said Rebecca Grant, who wrote a report for the Air Force Association advocating, in the words of its title, the "Return of the Bomber." Said Grant, "Commanders have been limiting what they do with the B-1 and the B-52 for a decade at least."

Yet the Air Force's 94 surviving B-52s -- out of 744 built -- today make up more than half its fleet of long-range, large-payload bombers, along with 65 B-1Bs, built in the 1980s, and 21 B-2s. When the last B-2 was delivered in 1997, it was the first time the Air Force had not had a new bomber in production or at least in development since 1917.

For a decade, however, the service's plan was to concentrate on short-range, small-payload but high-performance fighter/ attack airplanes, buying 175 F-22s and 1,763 F-35s, at a total price of more than $250 billion, while postponing a "future long-range strike" program to 2037, the year the youngest B-52 turns 75 years old.

Now, after years of prodding from Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Air Force officials have publicly committed to flying a new bomber by 2018. The development costs alone for a new bomber could reach $30 billion over the next 10 years. But many analysts doubt the Air Force's seriousness.

"We'll know it when we see cash," said Richard Aboulafia, senior aviation analyst for the Fairfax, Va.-based Teal Group. So far, funding for the bomber is classified. "So either it's a totally 'black' program," Aboulafia said, "or it's just talk -- preserving cash for fighters while fending off congressional criticism over inadequate funding for bombers."

Nearly half of all Air Force generals are fighter pilots, but less than 5 percent have bomber backgrounds. Since Vietnam, the service has favored high-performance fighters over bombers. That choice means sacrificing range and payload, the bombers' strong points, for the maneuverability and speed that fighters use to penetrate enemy air defenses.

In 1999, the Serbians shot down an F-117 stealth fighter, and the Air Force fears that the defeat of the B-2's more advanced stealth features is just a matter of time as advanced sensor technologies proliferate around the world. So the next generation of aircraft, the F-22 and the F-35, is designed not only for stealth but also for agility and supersonic speed, allowing them to break away from any hostile radar that does manage to detect them. The Air Force's argument for the ultra-high-performance, $338 million F-22 is that no other aircraft can survive against the next generation of air defenses.

Bomber advocates retort that any adversary able to afford such air defenses will also have the ability to deny the U.S. air bases near its borders, by intimidating neighboring countries, employing terrorist sabotage, or using Scud-type ballistic missiles. The nightmare scenario is a war over Taiwan with China's rapidly modernizing military.

Even from the nearest U.S. bases, in South Korea, the F-22 and the F-35 may well penetrate the outer layers of enemy defenses only to run out of fuel long before they reach any target. Slow, bulky tankers can refuel the short-range fighters in midair, but would never perform this delicate operation in full view of hostile radars. Thus, strike planes must rely on their internal fuel tanks once they enter enemy airspace. The F-22 has an estimated combat radius -- the maximum distance it can fly before it must return to base -- of 540 nautical miles; the still-in-development F-35 will be slightly better, at about 633 miles.

Either fighter could hit, say, Tehran from bases in Kuwait, or Beijing from South Korea. But if U.S. allies balked, or if the bases came under fire, or if, in China's case, key targets were hidden deep in Central Asia -- like the Xichang space facility from which China test-launched an anti-satellite missile in January -- the fighters would simply run out of gas.

By contrast, the B-2 has a combat radius of more than 3,000 miles. The stealth bomber program, of course, was cut off at 21 aircraft because of the mismatch between the B-2's $2.1 billion cost and its many limitations. The plane's radar-deflecting shape, without an upright tail to aid maneuvering, made it an awkward flier. Its radar-absorbent covering proved to be a maintenance nightmare, requiring ground crews to reseal gaps using putty knives and special tape, although Northrop later developed a spray-on version. But the B-2 first flew in 1989, and 18 years of research since then has gone a long way toward reconciling stealth with maneuverability and maintainability, as in the F-22 fighter.

Starting with an Air Force "request for information" in 2004, Northrop and other contractors have been exploring a blank sheet of paper for the future of bomber design. Besides improving stealth, modern manufacturing techniques enable the use of composite materials to reduce cost and weight.

What's more, the shift from dropping large numbers of unguided "iron bombs" to small numbers of precision weapons -- a revolution only dreamed of when the B-2 was designed in the 1980s, before the first Gulf War -- means a future bomber could get by with perhaps half the B-2's massive 20-ton bomb load, slashing not only cost and weight but also size and therefore visibility on radar.

So the future bomber that Air Force generals have described in recent months looks very much like a smaller, sleeker, second-generation B-2, and like the B-2 it is a subsonic aircraft. But the Air Force often describes the bomber that's coming in 2018 as an "interim" bomber, a stopgap to shore up the aging air fleet while it works on truly revolutionary technologies for an ultimate bomber replacement in 2037.

The service's Holy Grail is a hypersonic aircraft, possibly unmanned, capable of high-altitude "suborbital" flight at more than six times the speed of sound along the boundary between the upper atmosphere and space. The Air Force long deferred a new bomber design on the grounds that hypersonics needed more time to develop but was the right technology for the next plane, and even now, the 2018 plane strikes some observers as a reluctant compromise.

But would a hypersonic, suborbital superbomber really be worth waiting for? "It would be neat, it would be sexy, it would be cool, but I just can't see the operational utility against real-world problems," said Barry Watts, a veteran aviation analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles -- armed with high-precision conventional bombs instead of nuclear warheads -- would be costly one-shot weapons, but they could hit any target on Earth in 30 minutes. Hypersonic aircraft are not only decades and billions of dollars away but relatively slow in comparison, needing two hours to race around the world from the United States. By contrast, one of the B-52s that the Special Forces horsemen called on in Afghanistan was able to drop its bombs in 19 minutes because the lumbering aircraft was already circling overhead.

It is in such on-call air strikes, with long-endurance, large-payload aircraft linked electronically to troops on the ground that existing bombers have proved their worth since 2001. What we need, Watts and others argue, is not raw speed but "loiter time," the ability to stay in enemy airspace long enough to hunt down elusive targets and then hit them within minutes before they fade away.

For such missions, a highly stealthy but subsonic 2018 bomber might be not only more affordable but also more appropriate than a speeding 2037 space plane. And if the Air Force does not get serious about the "interim" bomber soon, it may never get its Holy Grail plane anyway.

"Production of some existing aircraft will be tailing off by that point [2018], freeing up industrial capacity," said Jeremiah Gertler, vice president for defense and international programs at the Aerospace Industries Association. "But if you wait until 2037, then the engineers who worked on the F-22 and the F-35 won't be there."

The question is whether the Air Force, caught between limited budgets and its high-tech desires, can seize the war bird it has in the hand.

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Boeing stands to make a comeback at Air Force

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

This year, however, a cleaned-up Boeing stands to hit a double with two crucial contract decisions about those very same programs.

Congress funded an extra 10 C-17s last year when the original Air Force contract for 180 planes was running out, and now key members, including Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, are musing aloud about extending the contract yet again -- even, Inouye said, if the C-17 money has to come from cutting the program to modernize an alternative transport, Lockheed Martin's gigantic C-5 Galaxy.

Meanwhile, Air Force procurement officials are preparing to judge between Boeing's KC-767 and Northrop Grumman's rival KC-30 for the first 179-plane, $20-billion-to-$40-billion installment of what could become a 500-plane, $200 billion program.

What's more, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who led the charge against the original, flawed tanker contract, has stayed relatively quiet this time around, said Richard Aboulafia, aviation analyst for the Fairfax, Va.-based Teal Group. "You can't get too aggressive if you're planning a bid for the presidency," Aboulafia said, "and his reformer status has been compromised by tying himself to Bush and the troop surge."

Neither contract is anything like a lock, not yet. But in both cases, Boeing is the betting man's favorite. After being decisively shut out of the fighter-building business in 2001, when it lost the Joint Strike Fighter contract to Lockheed Martin, Boeing now stands to dominate the market for the unglamorous but essential "air mobility" planes that haul heavy equipment, supplies, and fuel around the world.

Traditionally, the military has met its transport needs with three very different kinds of aircraft: ordinary commercial airliners, hired on contract, to carry troops and bulk supplies; purpose-built military "airlifters," such as the C-5 and the C-17, to carry tanks, Humvees, and other outsized cargo; and modified commercial airliners to refuel other aircraft in flight, such as Boeing's KC-767, a derivative of its 767 airliner, or Northrop's KC-30, a derivative of the Airbus A330. (Although the A330 is a European design, at least 50 percent of the KC-30 version would be built in the United States, primarily in Mobile, Ala.)

Boeing is offering aircraft that are highly specialized for the cargo and tanker missions. Consider Boeing's C-17, a rugged plane with heavily reinforced landing gear. The C-17 is unsuitable for commercial freight, as Boeing learned with its proposed civilian version, the BC-17, but it is ideal for delivering military equipment to short, dirt airstrips.

Lockheed's C-5 transport, by contrast, can carry 60 percent more cargo but is restricted to longer, better-paved runways. In a pure cost-per-cargo calculation, the C-5 is more efficient, especially because modernizing each existing C-5 would cost $86 million to $130 million, while building each new C-17 would cost $230 million-plus. In real-world operations, however, the C-17 can get to places that the C-5 cannot.

Similarly, Boeing's KC-767 tanker is essentially a replacement for the Air Force's existing KC-135 Stratotanker. Northrop's rival KC-30 is a dramatically larger plane. Both can carry cargo as well as fuel, but the KC-30 carries much more -- and although exact prices are closely guarded trade secrets, the KC-30 probably delivers more capacity per dollar of cost. With tankers as with transports, however, economic efficiency does not always equal operational effectiveness.

"On any given mission, where you want to take the cargo is not where you need to take the fuel," said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a defense think tank, who is also a Lockheed Martin consultant (although not involved in the aircraft programs discussed in this article). Even the current KC-135 has some cargo capacity, but in practice, demand for tankers is so high that the plane is rarely used as a dry-cargo transport.

Northrop argues that its larger aircraft is a better tanker. The KC-30 carries about 25 percent more fuel than either the rival Boeing KC-767 or the old KC-135. The problem is, no matter how big the tanker, the number of aircraft it can refuel at once stays the same: two at most, using hoses dangling from each wingtip (the Navy method), or more often only one, using a rigid pipe called a "boom" (the Air Force approach).

Either way, the number of tankers in the sky matters more than the capacity of any one plane: The Air Force has 59 big KC-10 tankers for long-range missions, but the mainstay of its tanker fleet is its 500-plus KC-135s, and the average age of that fleet is 45 years.

The history of the KC-135 also shows that even these smaller tankers usually don't use their full refueling capacity. Combat aircraft almost always fly in groups, rarely solo, which means that multiple planes need refueling at the same time; so tankers have to operate in groups as well, with each tanker offloading only a portion of its capacity.

A study by Thompson and colleague Rebecca Grant showed that KC-135s usually returned to base with fuel to spare: The average fuel offloaded per tanker per flight ranged from under 50,000 pounds in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo conflict -- in which the combat planes' targets were relatively close to their bases -- to 60,000 pounds in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and 75,000 in the 2001-02 invasion of Afghanistan, where the targets were far from U.S. airfields.

All of these figures are handily within the 200,000 pound capacity of the current KC-135 and Boeing's proposed KC-767, even after accounting for the tanker's own fuel needs. In this context, the Northrop KC-30's 250,000 pounds of fuel just looks like overkill.

"You can't really justify the larger plane purely on the basis of aerial refueling requirements," Thompson said, "so they have pitched it as a versatile aircraft that can do refueling, carry cargo, or carry passengers."

The Air Force's C-17s are overburdened in keeping the force supplied in Afghanistan and Iraq. Northrop argues that its cargo-carrying tanker-transport could take over the job of hauling mundane bulk supplies into Iraqi airports -- for far less, incidentally, than it would cost to buy more specialized, heavy-hauler C-17s from Boeing.

But any runway that is long enough and well-paved enough for a tanker to land on is good enough for a commercial airliner, too: After all, the Northrop KC-30 and the Boeing KC-767 are both modified airliners.

The reason the military does not just hire commercial aircraft for Iraq is the threat from insurgents with shoulder-fired missiles. The new tanker, whatever company makes it, will have built-in countermeasures against such weapons.

But experiments in placing the same anti-missile systems on civilian airliners are under way. Christopher Bolkcom of the Congressional Research Service estimates the current cost of such modifications at $1 million to $3 million per aircraft. Since Northrop's KC-30 will probably cost at least $10 million more than Boeing's KC-767, the Air Force might do well to buy the less-cargo-capable Boeing plane and spend the difference on subsidizing anti-missile defenses for hired commercial planes.

That two-pronged approach would allow the Air Force to do what it has historically preferred: dedicate its tanker aircraft to refueling missions, reserve its specialized airlifters for hauling heavy equipment, and leave bulk supplies and passengers to the commercial planes that do those jobs best.

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New style of war key to success in Iraq

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The armed forces have 125,000 Humvees of various types, more than any other kind of vehicle. And though exact figures are classified, more U.S. troops have died in Humvees since 2001 than in any other vehicle.

No wonder, then, that Congress and the media have focused on the ever-escalating arms race that has the military adding thicker armor and the insurgents building bigger bombs.

The latest Humvee model, the M1151, weighs in at more than 5 tons, twice the weight of the original, unarmored M998. Even with radical upgrades to its engine and suspension, the Humvee hits its weight limit at about 6 tons. The military's new "Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected" vehicle program is awarding contracts to build wheeled transports as heavy as 40 tons.

Meanwhile, the most powerful "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs -- some allegedly made in Iran -- can penetrate the armor on a 70-ton M1 tank or even flip it into the air.

"We started out with pretty much nothing," said Sgt. Jason Sanders, whose Marine unit began its tour in Iraq in February 2004 with only unarmored Humvees. The troops put sandbags on the floorboards, and they eventually received a trickle of Humvees with add-on armor, but "it didn't really matter," Sanders said. "If whatever [the insurgents] were building at the time didn't blow up the damn up-armored Humvee, they'd build it three times as big the next time. You had a better fighting chance on foot, where you can take cover."

Adding more and more armor to the Humvees was the right answer to the wrong question. The soldiers' and marines' problem wasn't just that their Humvees lacked sufficient armor: The problem for the troops was being in Humvees to begin with.

Like most units in Iraq, though, Sanders's company had no choice. "We had a 25-mile ride to work," said Maj. Trent Gibson, the company commander at the time.

Assigned to secure the western border town of Karabila, along the insurgency's supply lines into Syria, Gibson had intended to set up a permanent outpost downtown "and operate from there by foot," he said. "And then a decision was made, above my pay grade and above my battalion commander's pay grade, that there would be no bases in [town]. It was considered 'force protection': If we were too close to the populace, we would be putting our marines at risk."

In fact, "force protection" may have gotten a lot of grunts killed. For Gibson's marines, their isolated base was easy to defend, but it was a long drive from Karabila, along only two possible roads.

"Before I could get my guys in [town] and dismounted, where they were safest," Gibson said, "I had to put them on a fixed route in an unarmored or lightly armored Humvee." The insurgents knew exactly where the Americans had to go -- and exactly where to place their homemade mines.

Out of about 150 men in his company, Gibson said, "I had seven marines killed. Four of them were killed in an ambush or IED attack on moving vehicles. Two of them were killed in close proximity to their vehicle after they had dismounted in response to enemy contact."

Only one was killed when he was moving on foot far from his Humvee: Cpl. Jason Dunham, who received the Medal of Honor posthumously for shielding his comrades from a grenade blast with his body. But at the time, Dunham's squad was racing to help another unit that had been ambushed -- on the road, in its Humvees.

The day that Dunham died, he and his men had escorted Gibson into town to inspect potential outpost sites next to the Iraqi police station. "Living in [town] was the key to it all," Gibson said. "It would have allowed us to have a much closer relationship with the Iraqi security forces. If you don't have continual presence with these people, they're going to fear the muj" -- the mujahedeen, or "holy warriors" -- "more than they fear you."

But because Gibson's troops were spread too thin, forced to drive back and forth in their Humvees, he never had the resources to establish a 24/7 presence in town. Without offering that onsite protection to the community, he could never cultivate a network of allies and informers. And without that network, he could never uproot the insurgents who were blowing up his Humvees on the roads. It was a classic Catch-22.

Gibson is hardly alone among the dozens of service members -- marines and Army soldiers, regulars and reservists, junior enlisted and senior officers -- who spoke to National Journal.

Take Lt. Eric Everts of the California National Guard, who saw both his company commander and his battalion commander killed on a single day by roadside bombs. Ultimately, his company reduced improvised explosive device attacks by 90 percent in its sector south of Baghdad -- not by holing up on a big base or commuting in their Humvees, but by keeping the most aggressive and intimate presence forward, in town and on foot, that their superiors would permit.

"We worked with an Iraqi police station right next to our [outpost]," Everts said. "They had the highest rate of captured insurgents in the entire country for any Iraqi police department."

But the next U.S. unit that rotated into that sector pulled back from day-to-day contact with the Iraqis, Everts said, and without American prodding, the local police hunkered down in their station. Meanwhile, the Americans tried to patrol from the apparent safety of their up-armored Humvees, getting out on foot as little as possible.

But their caution didn't make them safer. "They took over 20 casualties -- lost limbs, testicles, eyesight, hearing -- and were eating up all our allotment of the new armored Humvees, as well as all the replacements," Everts said. Without Iraqi contacts or their own men walking the streets, he said, "inevitably they found the IED when it blew up."

Every successful counterinsurgency campaign -- the British in Malaya, the French in Algiers, even the bright spot in Vietnam of the Marine Corps's "combined action platoons" -- teaches the importance of foot troops in small units working closely with the locals.

"Holing up in big bases gives the insurgents the free run of the population," said Andrew Krepinevich, a leading advocate of classic counterinsurgency doctrine. It is not enough to drive through the neighborhoods, or even to walk through, he argued: U.S. troops have to live with the people. "Instead," he said, "we've relied on armor and IED-buster gadgets -- and we've very little to show for it."

Now, after four years of building ever more heavily up-armored Humvees and taking ever heavier casualties, the U.S. military has begun to set up small, permanent outposts within Baghdad, using the troops sent to Iraq as part of the "surge."

At least three dozen Iraqi police stations across the capital, including some in the Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City, are being fortified and reinforced with Iraqi army and U.S. Army troops. That puts platoon-sized pockets of American forces, just 30-50 men strong, living among the Iraqis.

In contrast to the in-and-out sweeps of the past, "the whole concept is constant presence, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, chief of staff for the U.S.-led multinational coalition. And though the small neighborhood outposts are inevitably much more exposed than the big, isolated bases, Anderson said, "the number of attacks has gone down, because the sheer presence of our forces means the enemy is not as capable of conducting attacks" -- so far.

But the enemy has proven lethally adaptable in the past. And the surge style of operations -- on foot, in town, among the people -- is radically different from the American military's mechanized, arms-length habits of the past 60 years. The question is, which side will master the new way of warfare first?

The Limits of the Machine

Like the jeep in World War II, the Humvee has become the iconic vehicle of the Iraq war. Like the jeep, the Humvee was never meant to fight. They were both designed to be "utility" vehicles, to haul troops, supplies, and heavy equipment up to the fighting line, not to stand and fight themselves.

The Humvee "was intended to be a replacement for the jeep, not for any sort of combat," said Robert Baer, a retired Army lieutenant general who helped to plan the military's 1980s buildup that included the first Humvees, as well as the heavily armored M2 Bradley infantry carrier and the massive M1 Abrams tank. "To be very honest," Baer said, "the insurgency threat was not the major concern: It was the Soviets."

The Humvee was designed as a bigger, better jeep for a World War III envisioned as a bigger, deadlier World War II. More ferocious fighting along the front lines would mean a more voracious demand for supplies from the rear, the thinking went, but the basic distinction between the battlefront and the relatively safe rear area would remain.

That mind-set called for distinct types of equipment: heavily armored, very expensive, mechanically complex combat vehicles for the fighting, and unarmored, affordable, mechanically reliable utility vehicles for the fetching and carrying.

The U.S. military was painfully aware that other kinds of conflict blurred those tidy categories -- convoy ambushes and ad hoc armored trucks were not unknown in Vietnam -- but it did not expect, or want, to fight another guerrilla war. Even as the Army in the 1990s increasingly focused on peacekeeping and urban combat, said Arthur Durante, a tactics expert at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., "we didn't make the next step -- that we won't have front lines, and that means we can't have unarmored vehicles."

There were warnings. In 1993, a humanitarian relief mission to Somalia became entangled in civil warfare, and U.S. troops sent to arrest aides of warlord Mohammed Farah Aided were ambushed by hundreds of militia. Because the Pentagon had refused to send armored vehicles, the rescue force had to fight its way through downtown Mogadishu in Humvees. Eighteen Americans died. Defense Secretary Les Aspin resigned. President Clinton ordered a withdrawal. The Army hastily ordered its first handful of up-armored Humvees -- and then debated whether to build any more.

"There were a lot of reasons why putting extra armor on it was a pain," Durante said. Designed as a cargo hauler, the Humvee chassis could take plenty of extra weight. But each pound of armor welded on cut permanently into the vehicle's payload. And, even upgraded, the suspension, the transmission, and the engine suffered from the strain, leading to costlier maintenance and a shorter service life.

Most generals thought the cost of up-armoring outweighed the benefits. The exception was the leadership of the Military Police Corps, the one branch tasked with patrolling the "safe" rear area behind the battle line. The MPs forced the rest of the Army to fund a slow but steady production of the (mostly) bulletproof M1114 Humvee.

"God bless the military police, because they pushed for the Humvee variant that was up-armored," Durante said. "The infantry owes them a debt of gratitude."

When the roads of Iraq turned deadly in 2003, only a few hundred M1114s were in the country -- but the production line was open. Today more than 20,000 are spread across the Army and Marine Corps.

But the M1114s were not enough, not in numbers and not in armor. Troops used sandbags and welded-on scrap iron to add "hillbilly armor" to the thousands of unarmored Humvees. Then the military developed scientifically designed up-armor kits: first, armored half-doors with no windows, then full doors, then armor for the wheel wells and underbody, armored windshields -- ultimately, even a kind of open-topped turret to protect the gunner manning the machine gun on the roof.

Ever deadlier insurgent bombs forced troops to further up-armor even the up-armored M1114s. Models now come off the assembly line with all the latest protection -- and the troops still add armor in Iraq.

The Humvee fleet of unarmored utility vehicles had been transformed. When Durante visited Iraq shortly after the invasion, in summer 2003, he rode in Humvees with canvas sides. "By the second time I went, in September 2003, every vehicle I was in, they'd improvised some sort of armor: sandbags and bolt-on stuff," he said. By Durante's third trip, in 2004, troops never left their bases in a Humvee that lacked a military-issue armor kit.

But all of the problems that had made the military reluctant to up-armor the Humvee in the first place have cropped up with a vengeance. Maintenance demands have soared, reliability and service life have dropped. Some armor configurations make the vehicles top-heavy and prone to roll over in high-speed turns, causing lethal accidents.

Overburdened suspensions make it hard for up-armored Humvees to drive cross-country or travel on dirt roads -- limitations that make their movements even more predictable for the insurgent bomb makers.

And the bombs are still a threat, simply because it is easier to add more explosive than it is to add more armor. A big enough blast can flip a Humvee into the air, snapping soldiers' spines and necks, even if the armor shell remains intact.

"It's maxed out as far as the weight that it can carry. In a lot of cases, we're overweighting them by a 1,000 or 2,000 pounds, and it's still not heavy enough" to avoid being thrown, said Tom Miller, Humvee program manager for the Marine Corps. "And unless you completely redesign the suspension and the drivetrain," he added, "you can't get it high enough off the ground" to let a blast dissipate before it hits the crew compartment. "We're looking at improving the underbelly protection, but we haven't seen anything yet that actually worked."

So the Marine Corps and the Army have begun buying an entirely new class of vehicles: huge, heavy, and high off the ground, somewhat like militarized monster trucks. Many are descended from designs that the apartheid regime in South Africa once deployed against guerrilla land mines. Military bomb squads now ride the 26-ton Cougar; combat engineers keep Iraq's highways open in the 15-ton RG-31 and the 40-ton Buffalo, which has a crew cabin so high its driver's feet are above a Humvee driver's head.

The Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle program is rushing even more models through testing. Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., and other members of Congress have called on the military to replace every Humvee in the war zone with a "mine-resistant" vehicle.

But aside from the cost, the services face even bigger obstacles: If the 6-ton up-armored Humvees are cumbersome, maintenance-intensive, and too heavy to drive off-road, the 15-to-40-ton mine-resistant vehicles are even more so. While the military is commissioning a new class of relatively light mine-resistant vehicles -- a mere 7 or 8 tons -- for urban patrols, the heavier models now in service cannot traverse the narrow streets in many Iraqi neighborhoods.

The new mine-resistant vehicles, meanwhile, will not be usable in the rough terrain of Afghanistan. In fact, the Army has ordered a kind of super-dune-buggy, significantly smaller than a Humvee, for use on mountain slopes and narrow passes. The mine-resistant vehicles fill a highly specialized niche in just one country, Iraq.

"They can't operate in other areas of the world," said Kevin McConnell, a top tactical expert with the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. "You'd need a good road network. There's not any real intent of putting those vehicles into Afghanistan, and there is no intent to keep these vehicles, at least in large numbers, when we come out of Iraq."

The Marine Corps and the Army don't want to replace the Humvee with the specialized, cumbersome mine-resistant vehicles but with an all-new design, something with all of the protection of the latest up-armored Humvees but with the cargo capacity and off-road agility of the original lightweight models.

So far, however, they don't have even a design, let alone a prototype. All they have is a name -- "Joint Light Tactical Vehicle" -- and a few concept vehicles made by private industry to demonstrate a range of ideas: adjustable off-road suspensions to allow adding or subtracting modular armor; seats suspended from the ceiling to reduce blast impact through the floor; expanded battery power (though probably not a hybrid-electric motor) to power stronger jammers to disrupt a roadside bomb's electronic trigger.

The military will not even formalize its requirements until later this year. Current schedules expect the first vehicles to take the field in 2012 and the last Humvee to be replaced sometime after 2020.

So, technology will not get the United States out of its Humvee troubles any time soon. But inadequate technology never was the fundamental problem. The real cause of all of those casualties in Humvees was not the machine itself, but the way it was misused. The real solution will not be a new machine, but a new style of war.

The Wrong Kind of War

The invasion of Iraq showcased a novel American way of war: rapid maneuver and precision strike, high technology and a small force. But after the successful invasion, looters rampaged through Baghdad while U.S. troops stood by, and Iraq turned into a different kind of war -- a war that the U.S. was not merely unprepared for but also unwilling to contemplate.

In the first months after Saddam Hussein fell, American forces occupied the dictator's palaces, barracks, police stations, even abandoned factories -- locations that put them right in the middle of Iraqi neighborhoods.

"All of our compounds were in town, which means you had constant dialogue with all sorts of leaders and even the regular population," said Brig. Gen. Anderson, who served in the invasion and is now back in Baghdad as chief of staff for the coalition forces. "But the logic was to pull out so we would allow the Iraqis to take charge and take responsibility."

At the same time, however, the U.S. occupiers dissolved Iraq's strongest national institutions, the army and the Baath Party, leaving no power center to stop the growing insurgency.

"We had provided very good security in Tikrit -- a 100 percent Sunni town, Saddam's hometown, that hated us," said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, now retired, who commanded the Tikrit district in 2003. "That allowed us to train police, to engage the sheiks and citizens, without whose support we would never have caught Saddam."

It was Russell's troops, with Special Forces support, who helped to find the dictator in December 2003. Russell says he managed to "stiff-arm" orders to consolidate his small outposts around Tikrit into a large, isolated base. But when his battalion went home, the next unit followed the pull-out policy. "We just weren't ready," Russell said, "and we ceded a lot of ground."

Iraq's slide into anarchy, insurgency, and civil war began, in part, because the U.S. military misunderstood its successes in the Balkans. In Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, the first wave of U.S. forces came in heavy, with M1 tanks and M2 armored infantry carriers, and occupied small, ad hoc outposts in towns -- but not for long.

"I was the first U.S. commander in Kosovo," Anderson recalled. "We occupied city halls, former police headquarters, an old barracks, an old officer's club. But, over time, we pulled out of all that, and now we operate out of Camp Bondsteel, the big base where everybody is."

Even in Kosovo, some officers had their doubts about that strategy.

"At first, we had a rifle company in a gymnasium, right there in the community," recalled Russell, who was with Anderson in the first wave. "But there were generals that had the notion that if you balled everything up into giant superbases, that was somehow more secure. I disagreed. It isolated us from the people, and we also made ourselves huge targets: If you make a huge base that's a mile in diameter, even a cross-eyed insurgent with a mortar is going to hit something. And if I was restricted to a few roads [to and from one base], I was very predictable, very vulnerable to ambush."

As the U.S. military pulled back in the Balkans, it parked its heavily armored vehicles on the newly built superbases. Brutally effective in city fighting, 70-ton M1 tanks and 30-ton M2 troop carriers make poor patrol cruisers for day-to-day security, tending to terrify civilians, rip up roads, and require arduous maintenance.

Instead, the big bases sent patrols out in Humvees. They were entirely adequate for the war-weary Balkans, where U.S. peacekeepers arrived as the violence was winding down, but they have been fatally vulnerable in Iraq, where the U.S. invasion set off an escalating spiral of chaos.

"If I was going into a high-threat place like Ramadi itself, I would always have a tank," said Maj. Daniel Gade, who commanded an armored unit in the Ramadi district. But outside of the city proper, he said, "I would normally take a Humvee."

The winding streets of many Iraqi towns and the dirt roads through the irrigated countryside are barely wide enough for a Humvee, let alone a tank. Where the heavy tracked vehicles can pass, they often tear up the roads in the process, leaving them impassable both for patrols and for the revenge-prone locals. And for counter-guerrilla raids, Gade said, "a tank is literally useless," because insurgents can not only hear a tank force coming, they can hear the noisy vehicles start their engines all the way back on the bases.

So it was in his Humvee that Gade was hit by a roadside bomb. "I was in a [factory-built] up-armored Humvee," he recalled. "I would have been dead in an add-on armored Humvee." With the maximum protection possible in a Humvee, Gade lost only a leg, which had to be amputated at the hip. He has one of the most extensive prosthetics among officers still on active duty.

The dilemma that cost Gade his leg, and so many others their lives, was which tool to use for the job. "A tank can take almost any IED out there, and at least the crew is going to survive, or you can have a Humvee that can sneak up on people. It's fast, it's mobile, but they get taken out all the time," Gade said. "We had a hammer and a scalpel, but we had no steak knife -- something really big and something really small, but no real balance of the two."

The irony is that many modern armies do have that in-between class of vehicle. The British patrolled Northern Ireland, and the French their former African colonies, with armored cars -- vehicles that were much heavier and better protected than any jeep or Humvee, but far lighter and more road-mobile than a tank. The Russians sped into Kosovo in wheeled armored vehicles and seized the Pristina airport in 1999, pre-empting the slow-moving NATO peacekeepers.

That debacle, and the Americans' own embarrassing difficulties in deploying, prompted Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to procure an eight-wheeled, 19-ton armored troop transport for his troops: the controversial Stryker. But Shinseki sold his Stryker and its "Future Combat System" successor as vehicles for all missions, capable of replacing heavy tanks, instead of as medium-size vehicles to fill the yawning gap between the nimble wheeled Humvees and the massive tracked armor.

The notion that the gap even needed filling was alien to the U.S. Army, which was still stuck in a binary mind-set that saw a conventional battlefront and a safe rear area but failed to see the guerrilla-warfare gray zone in between. That mind-set, which included a disdain for wheeled armor, had hardened over generations.

"The U.S. Army did build the M8 armored car in World War II," said historian Steven Zaloga, "but they absolutely hated it." After embarrassing mechanical breakdowns and brutal battlefield losses, the Army turned to heavier, tracked vehicles that were better able to go off-road to fight the German Panzers. The M8's defects soured the Army on wheeled combat vehicles -- including Shinseki's Stryker -- for 60 years.

When the Iraq war began in 2003, the Army had grudgingly fielded just one operational brigade of about 300 Strykers. It had only 49 of the even lighter and less popular M1117 Armored Security Vehicle, a 13-ton armored car bought -- like the up-armored Humvee -- at the insistence of the Military Police Corps.

Now the Army has more than 770 hastily built Armored Security Vehicles patrolling roads and leading convoys in Iraq, with new variants proposed for the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle contract; the Stryker troop carriers have proven remarkably resilient in combat in the cities of Iraq.

For World War II, and for the World War III that never came, the Army had no need for medium vehicles, because there was no medium threat. The Army built a relatively small number of heavily armored vehicles to hold the front line; they were to be supplied with fuel and ammunition in vast quantity by fleets of jeep-type trucks, which were to operate out of centralized, highly efficient bases. The Army then tried to apply the same model to what its theorists called, tellingly, "low-intensity conflict": a few superbases, a spearhead of heavy armor, and lots of minimally protected Humvees.

The United States got away with it in the Balkans, but not in Iraq. The light forces were too fragile, the heavy forces too few. Maj. Gibson's Humvee-mounted marines took over their sector from an Army unit that had heavily armored vehicles but too few foot troops to patrol and hold the town.

On his second day in Karabila, before the Army had pulled out, Gibson said, "we got ambushed, and a couple of Bradleys [armored troop carriers] responded. I told the vehicle commander to dismount his infantry and help me clear out these buildings, and he said, 'This is all we got -- it's just me and the driver.' "

The Marine Corps, by contrast, could bring to bear an overwhelming force of infantry: In the marines' most intense battle with the insurgents, a few days after Jason Dunham's death, they swept the neighboring town of Husayba on foot, block by block, without suffering a single death. But without outposts in town -- without enough troops to garrison outposts in every town where they were assigned -- they were compelled to shuttle back and forth in vulnerable Humvees.

Now at last, and perhaps too late, the U.S. military is surging additional forces into Iraq and concentrating them in Baghdad. For now, Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia seems to be cowed into cooperation, and the Sunni bombers appear to lying low. But soon enough, someone will test the new urban outposts.

"I've been in a few little places like that that were overrun," said retired Army Col. Patrick Lang, a military intelligence officer who served in Vietnam and is an expert on the Middle East. "The insurgents have shown the ability to mass 60, 70, 100 men, and a couple of suicide bombers" against a single target, he said. With clever use of car bombs to divert or block U.S. reinforcements, the insurgents could isolate and assault the 30 or 50 Americans troops at a neighborhood base.

The surge into Baghdad brings real risks. But the cautious approach -- commuter patrols, big bases, "force protection" -- was already losing the war. "We often forget that infantry organizations are designed to survive in the field and sustain themselves," said Lt. Col. Russell. "We've lost our way. We decided not to trust commanders to have [small] formations all around town. You have to trust your junior leaders to carry the water."

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Iraq burden shifts from reserves to regular active duty troops

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Units from the regular force and the National Guard alike have had their tours of duty extended in Iraq to swell the force on hand. A new Pentagon policy, meanwhile, has given commanders extraordinary authority to call up Guard and Reserve troops for a second tour, or a third.

Yet at the same time, the number of Guard and Reserve troops on active duty has dropped to its lowest level since January 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq. This is no momentary dip but a long-standing trend.

The number of Guard and Reserve troops deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere worldwide has been dropping steadily since September 2005. Yet the size of the force abroad, counting regulars and citizen-soldiers combined, has consistently remained between 250,000 and 300,000. That means the burden has shifted.

In the early years of the war in Iraq, it weighed heavily on the Guard and Reserves; in recent years, the burden has fallen more on the regular active-duty force.

Nor does this trend show any sign of stopping soon. Since January 2005, the decline in the number of Guard and Reserve troops mobilized into active duty has continued almost unbroken. Nor has it picked up again in recent weeks because of the surge -- a crucial indicator because most units mobilized must train stateside for months before they deploy abroad. The official (albeit tentative) schedules for this year call for not a single new National Guard brigade to go to Iraq.

So if the Pentagon has new powers to call up reservists at the same time it is surging in Iraq, why isn't it calling them up? The answer lies in what could happen after the surge.

Even if the extra 20,000-plus combat troops stanch the sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad, the only thing that the U.S. gets out of their success is more time. It will still need troops there, and President Bush shows no signs of pulling them out.

If the surge fails, the possibilities of anarchy, genocide, or a wider regional war require the U.S. military to have devised its own contingency plans. So, while Congress and the media may be fixated on what happens between now and August, military planners are drawing the blueprints for what comes after that.

The military claims it needs no Guard combat brigades for 2007, said John Pike, top analyst and outspoken founder of the private intelligence firm Globalsecurity.org, "but I am guessing that 2008 may be a different matter."

In fact, the Army National Guard and Army Reserve have already endured a nearly two-year-long "surge" of their own, in 2004 and 2005. This prolonged increase in Reserve and Guard commitment overseas gave active-duty Army units the time they needed at home to reorganize into smaller, more self-sufficient brigades better suited to modern war.

As a result, Guard and Reserve troops made up more than 30 percent of the force deployed abroad in every month from March 2004 through October 2005, peaking at 36.7 percent in December 2004. In recent months, by contrast, their share of the deployed force has stayed below 25 percent.

This level of effort is still far greater than anything in the 1990s, when months-long peacekeeping missions in the Balkans first broke citizen-soldiers out of their traditional "weekend warrior" mode. The number of Reserve and Guard troops on active duty may have dropped dramatically since the peak of their commitment to Iraq, but it still exceeds the number mobilized after 9/11.

And in stark contrast to 2001 and 2002, when the majority of Reserve and Guard troops called to active duty remained in the United States, protecting American airports, power plants, and bridges from potential terrorist attacks that never materialized, now the majority are in Iraq or Afghanistan, fighting off real attacks day after day. And if military pundits are right that the current surge will exhaust the regular force within six months, the Reserve and Guard contribution is only going to climb again come September.

So the Pentagon's new policy on the Reserves and Guard, announced in January, is designed to make it easier for citizen-soldiers to keep running this bloody marathon, not to let them stop.

Current Army practice is to mobilize a Reserve or Guard unit to active duty, send its members to a training camp in the United States for up to six months, and only then deploy them abroad for a 12-month tour in Afghanistan or Iraq. Citizen-soldiers despise the lengthy pre-deployment stateside training, which separates them from their families but does not allow them the satisfaction of a real-world mission.

"It's ridiculous," said John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States. "We had units that experienced as much as six months of [pre-deployment] training in some place like Camp Shelby [Mississippi] or Fort Bliss [Texas]. It's incredibly repetitive, redoing things that the Guard did on weekend drills prior to mobilization."

The new Pentagon policy will cut in half the length of time that Guard or Reserve troops can be mobilized, from 24 consecutive months to 12. But the plan is to take out the slack of redundant pre-deployment training while making the tours in Iraq or Afghanistan as close to a full year as possible.

The Reserve and Guard units will now have to squeeze the training for short-notice response into their regular schedule of one weekend a month, two active-duty weeks per year. That is a lot of new pressure.

The policy also ends exemptions that allowed some citizen-soldiers to stay at home while the rest of their unit deployed. Many Reserve and Guard troops volunteer for active duty as individuals, detached from their parent unit for months at a time; others transfer from unit to unit as they move in civilian life. Under the old policy, an individual could run out his personal 24-month deployment clock before his unit as a whole even got the call to mobilize, which meant the unit had to find a replacement for him when it was called up -- a laborious, disruptive, bureaucratic shuffle.

Now, although the time required on active duty has been halved to just 12 months, the limit will apply only to a unit as a whole, not to individuals: No matter how many months a citizen-soldier has already served as an individual volunteer while detached from a unit, he or she will still have to deploy with it for the full unit tour.

"People who have gone before and maybe done pretty close to 24 months can [now] figure it's not a matter of 'if' they're going to be tapped to go back, but 'when,' " Goheen said. "But most people thought that was inevitable anyway." So although no full brigades of National Guard combat troops are on the deployment schedule for 2007, Goheen went on, "our units will be needed again. The hope was they wouldn't be needed until '09. Unofficially, there have been reports it could be '08."

Whether the surge succeeds or not, the Guard and Reserves are treating 2007 as their chance to regroup for the long haul, not as the last year of the war.

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Medals for military valor rarely in the spotlight

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

On February 21, 2005, before all of his unit had arrived in Iraq, Army Staff Sgt. Thomas Stone and his advance party of California National Guard soldiers stopped to help another group of soldiers after a Humvee accident in downtown Baghdad. Stone shepherded the other unit's dazed troops into a proper security perimeter and called in a helicopter for the injured.

But as the chopper landed, an insurgent detonated a hidden roadside bomb that shredded nine men. Stone ran back and forth, braving sniper fire, to grab first-aid supplies. Then, as a second medevac helicopter arrived and the survivors braced for another blast -- a common tactic of Iraqi insurgents -- Stone curled himself around a badly wounded friend, covering the soldier with his own body. "If it goes off, you're going to be OK," Stone told him. "Hug your wife and kids, and don't ever forget me."

"But there were no more explosions," Stone recounted in an interview with National Journal. The enemy did not have a "secondary device" in place to attack the reinforcements, not this time. Stone and his wounded comrade both survived the attack. Stone is still in uniform -- now wearing the chevron of a sergeant first class and the red, white, and blue ribbon of the Bronze Star, emblazoned with a quarter-inch-high bronze letter "V" for valor.

The latest official figures show that 3,463 Bronze Stars with V have been awarded since September 11, 2001. That's about the same figure as the total number of U.S. troops killed since then in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Every dead warrior leaves behind a story of tragedy and loss. Every medal winner leaves behind a story of dedication and courage. Sometimes the two are the same: A soldier is killed in action and is decorated posthumously. But the vast majority of these heroes, like Sgt. Stone, are still alive; many, like him, are still in uniform.

It is much harder, however, to learn about the valorous living than about the valorous dead. Major media outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and PBS's NewsHour regularly display photos of those killed but rarely of those decorated. The military itself does not do much to get the word out.

The Pentagon's press office issues a detailed news release listing the name, age, rank, and unit of each fatality, but it delegates most awards stories to lower-profile public-affairs offices working with local newspapers -- that is, if the decorated service member in question receives and completes the proper release form.

Since 9/11, the official Army & Air Force "Hometown News Service" has sent out 3.6 million press releases, but most of those announced routine boot-camp graduations and promotion: Only 2,500 cited valor awards, and many of those involved Commendation Medals, an award more common and less prestigious than the Bronze Star.

It is not only the relatively numerous medals for achievement that the military fails to publicize but the rarer and more prestigious decorations as well. You have almost certainly never heard of David Dunfee, a Marine Corps chief warrant officer. At the outset of the Iraq war, his battalion advanced through fierce resistance to seize the Euphrates River crossings in the city of Nasiriya in March 2003.

Dunfee, who is officially a technical expert and training adviser, not a commander of combat troops, encountered numerous threats during the chaotic urban fight and enlisted any marines he could find to help quell them. Then, with vital bridges finally secured, a second wave of marines began crossing his unit's lines under cover of darkness -- and mistakenly opened fire on their comrades.

"I kind of lost my mind," Dunfee recalled. "I ran up and started banging on their vehicles, making hand and arm signals, yelling to get them to cease fire." Dunfee averted a "friendly fire" disaster, without being shot himself. The only casualty was one marine with a flesh wound to the arm. For his actions, Dunfee received the Silver Star, one of 386 awarded since 9/11.

An even higher award is the Distinguished Service Cross, worn by such soldiers as Army Master Sgt. Donald Hollenbaugh, whose Special Forces team accompanied a Marine platoon on a probing attack into Falluja in April 2004. One of four men in an observation post atop a captured building, Hollenbaugh saw each of his comrades fall wounded, bleeding from shrapnel to the head.

He dragged them to safety, one by one. Then he returned to hold the rooftop alone, making weary circuits to shoot north, throw grenades east, shoot south, over and over, until the Marine commander finally came up to pull him out. It was then that Hollenbaugh learned that his lonely fight had covered everyone else's retreat.

"I was there for I don't know how long," said Hollenbaugh, now retired. "There was no emotion involved. It was just work."

Hollenbaugh's "work" earned him one of just 26 DSCs awarded since 9/11.

The Medal of Honor

At the highest level of valor, only two of the 1.4 million troops to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan so far have received the Medal of Honor.

The first was awarded posthumously to Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, a 33-year-old Floridian. On April 4, 2003, Smith's platoon of 16 combat engineers was building an ad hoc holding area for Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's airport, just behind the front lines of the U.S. forces besieging the city. More than 80 Iraqi Special Republican Guards suddenly counterattacked using a highway tunnel that the Americans had not spotted.

Smith ordered his men to fall back and defend the battalion medical tent while he fired a heavy machine gun from an unarmored open mount, coaxing hundreds of rounds from the often-temperamental weapon before an enemy bullet took his life.

"The floor of that [vehicle] was just covered, every square inch, with .50-caliber shells," said Gary Coker, the battalion's command sergeant major, who remembered Smith as a perfectionist "pain in the butt" during peacetime training.

"He was the kind of guy new soldiers dreaded: 'Let's do it again, let's do it again, let's do it again,' " Coker recalled Smith saying. "I don't think anyone else could have kept that weapon going as long as he did."

A year later, on April 14, 2004, in the small, dusty town of Karibila on the Syrian frontier, a 22-year-old Marine corporal named Jason Dunham was fighting hand to hand with a suspected insurgent when Dunham saw that the Iraqi had a grenade. "I was running up," recalled Sgt. Jason Sanders, "and he said, 'No, no, no, watch his hands!' and then it went off; it happened that damn quick."

But Dunham had enough time to throw his helmet over the grenade and then his body over the helmet. The helmet was shredded. Dunham lingered in a coma for more than a week before he died. The three marines next to him all lived.

His is a story out of military mythology, except for a detail that speaks volumes about the modern professional force: Dunham had developed his own technique for slamming his helmet on top of a grenade just weeks before his death. "He demonstrated how he would do it, and we were, like, nah, ain't gonna happen," Sanders remembered. "But ironically, that's probably what saved my life. Every night I go home and see my son and my wife -- the only reason why I'm here is because of him."

Smith's son received his medal in 2005, two years to the day after he died, while Dunham's parents received his Medal of Honor from President Bush on January 11.

At a House Armed Services Committee hearing in December, Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., heard activists testify that the military awards bureaucracy is taking longer to determine who qualifies for a Medal of Honor and is being less generous in giving them out than in past wars.

True, the modern military is smaller, is more professional, and has better body armor and advanced medical care than the drafted masses of the past. But even so, two Medals of Honor and more than 3,300 dead since 9/11 is a ratio of one for about every 1,600 deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, far lower than the one Medal of Honor for every 1,000 troops killed in World War II and not even close to the one Medal of Honor awarded for every 250 deaths in Vietnam. (None was awarded during the brief 1991 Persian Gulf War.)

Past Practice

After the Medal of Honor, the historical statistics for decorations are spotty. Because lower-level commanders can award lesser medals, records are decentralized, inconsistent, and incomplete: The Army is unsure of how many Bronze Stars for valor it gave out in World War II, for example, and the Navy cannot find figures on Silver Stars awarded as recently as the 1991 Gulf War.

But for the decorations for which data exist, the pattern holds: Whether compared with the total number serving in a conflict or only with those who died, the rate at which Medals of Honor, Service Crosses, and Silver Stars have been awarded since 9/11 is far lower than in World War II, and a fraction of the rate during Vietnam.

"This is really a sore spot with me," said Steven Russell, a retired lieutenant colonel who was awarded the Bronze Star with V after he and his Humvee driver intercepted and killed four insurgents -- including one of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law -- after the Iraqis pulled a hit-and-run ambush on another U.S. unit.

Russell said that the Army shouldn't return to the standards of the Vietnam era, when company commanders received Silver Stars almost automatically. But he added, "We have a number of very senior officers, particularly those that missed Vietnam, who really lost sight of the purpose: recognizing gallant soldiers."

And Russell is talking only about the Army, which proportionately bestows more awards than does the Marine Corps. "Especially in '03 and '04, the Marine Corps was being very stingy with combat awards, and it was tough to get one through the system without it being sent back to you for revision or being downgraded," said Maj. Trent Gibson, Jason Dunham's company commander. "For this thing for Dunham to finally go through was a huge deal."

But how huge a deal is it for the country? The comprehensive LexisNexis database counts 120 articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post about Jessica Lynch, the Army private wounded, captured, and dramatically rescued in the first month of the war. It counts five articles about Jason Dunham, and nine about Paul Ray Smith. That the stories of achievement have been told so much less well than the stories of suffering is as much the fault of the military as of the media.

"The award that everybody feels pretty comfortable giving is the Purple Heart," said Russell. The Purple Heart is normally awarded to any service member injured or killed as a result of enemy action. "But showing absolute deference to our wounded, our maimed, and our fallen, the award of choice can't just be a victim's award. The natural reaction for troops in battle is to recoil from danger. But others decide, 'OK, I could get killed, but I'm going to do this anyway.' They're rare men -- and in some cases women: I decorated one of my female corporals for valor. Not everybody does that."

The Pyramid of Honor

To a civilian, the "ribbon rack" on a dress uniform is at once impressive and unintelligible, like poetry in a foreign language. To the discerning military eye, however, those decorations spell out a coded message with the wordless precision of signal flags.

"You can have someone walk into a room in uniform, and to a civilian he looks like Idi Amin, festooned with 'fruit salad' everywhere," said Bruce Gudmundsson, a retired Marine major who is a military historian. "But the cognoscenti look at that and say, 'Aha, this guy has never seen a shot fired in anger.' Another guy might be wearing only a couple of decorations, but you look at those and go, 'Wow.' "

Popular culture focuses on the Medal of Honor and the Purple Heart, but one official reference for the Air Force alone lists some 80 different ribbons, all arranged in a precise order of precedence. The military speaks in terms of a "pyramid of honor," ranging from the Medal of Honor and other rare, prestigious decorations at the top, to the more common awards like the Good Conduct Medal in the middle, to awards from foreign governments, such as the Republic of Korea's Korean War Service Medal, at the bottom.

In fact, the pyramid has at least three smaller pyramids nestled inside, the contents of each awarded under different rules. Valor awards are given for exceptional courage under enemy fire. "Merit" awards are given for exceptional achievement in command, support, or administrative roles outside of combat.

"Entitlements" are given automatically to anyone who meets certain criteria, such as the Iraq Campaign Medal for all of those deployed to Iraq, or the Army's Combat Infantry Badge for foot soldiers who have seen combat. The Purple Heart awarded to wounded troops is one of these entitlements and technically is not a military decoration at all. Officially less prestigious than valor or merit medals, such ribbons are often more prized as visible symbols of a common trial by fire.

To add to the confusion, many decorations serve double duty as both valor and merit medals, with the identical ribbon distinguished only by the presence or absence of a tiny "V" medallion. But that quarter-inch-high letter spells a world of difference -- especially when it comes to the Bronze Star.

Before Sgt. Stone earned one of each kind, he recalled, "I didn't know there were two different types of Bronze Stars." Then Stone read his "meritorious" Bronze Star citation aloud to this reporter with some contempt and summed up: "That's, 'Thank you for coming to Iraq -- thank you for showing up and doing your job.' Platoon sergeants and above, all got meritorious Bronze Stars. People that didn't even leave our forward operating base got Bronze Stars."

But in Stone's company of 140 troops, only two others were awarded the Bronze Star with V.

Stone is not alone in his opinion. "We know the difference," said Army 1st Sgt. Gerald Wolford, a Silver Star recipient. "If we see a Bronze Star and there's no V on it, we're, like, 'OK, it doesn't mean you did anything. Go home, tell your story, get your Bronze Star license plate, but just realize that my private who didn't get anything did more than you did.' "

Some of this sentiment is the age-old resentment that fighting grunts feel for staff officers who stay in the rear. But by law -- enacted after the 1999 Kosovo war, when the Air Force triggered a controversy by awarding Bronze Stars to airmen stationed at bases in the U.S. -- even the Bronze Star without a V can be awarded only to troops sufficiently exposed to danger to rate "hostile fire" pay.

That standard definitely includes support troops in Iraq dodging mortar rounds on their bases or improvised bombs on the roads. And the meritorious Bronze Star is a common honor for crucial noncombat units such as bomb-disposal squads and hospital trauma teams, who do yeoman's work yet rarely get the glory.

"I saved roughly 120, 125 lives over there, all combat-related," said one recipient, Maj. Douglas Wayne Webb, an Air Force physician's assistant assigned to an Iraqi army base. "We had one bomb at the front gate of our facility hit 88 Iraqis."

Generous Army, Stingy Marines

Although all of the armed services give out more meritorious Bronze Stars than they do the valor version, the difference is most dramatic in the Army. The latest figures indicate that the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps combined have issued 1,765 Bronze Stars with V and almost three times as many, 5,257, without. For the Army, the figures are 1,698 Bronze Stars with V and more than 50,000 without.

Although the number of Bronze Stars for valor awarded by the Army nearly equals the total for the other services combined, in proportion to the Army's nearly 70 percent share of the total U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, it still falls far short. The 50,000 noncombat Bronze Stars, by contrast, make up more than 90 percent of those given out by all four services combined.

The available Army data on medals -- which involves only the troops currently on active duty -- suggest that about 80 percent of those meritorious Bronze Stars have gone to the highest-ranking 17 percent of the soldiers deployed. The comparable Air Force figures show that 85 percent were awarded to the top 27 percent of airmen deployed; for the Marines, 85 percent went to officers, who make up only 10 percent of leathernecks deployed.

This indicates that the Bronze Star for merit is essentially a management award for more-senior officers and the highest-ranking enlisted leaders -- most of whom are safely back in bases -- rather than an award for lower-ranking troops on the firing line.

This slant toward the higher ranks shows up, more subtly, with valor medals as well. Officers make up fewer than 10 percent of the marines deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan but received between 32 percent and 46 percent of each of the three most widely awarded valor medals: the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with V, and the Commendation Medal with V. (Marine databases did not allow more-precise rank-by-rank comparisons, and Navy databases are so limited that no rank analysis was possible.)

Army figures also show a striking bias toward the higher ranks that cannot be attributed to the limits of the data alone: The highest-ranking 17 percent of Army soldiers deployed (senior sergeants and midgrade officers) received 32 percent of the Army Commendation Medals with V, 65 percent of the more prestigious Bronze Stars with V, and 78 percent of the Silver Stars.

That pattern confirms countless anecdotes in which the commanding officer or the senior sergeant gets one award, his subordinates the next one down, and the fighting grunts the next one below that, all on the basis of what the military regards as greater responsibility on the part of higher-ranking troops. Simply put, the more prestigious a medal for valor, the more disproportionately the Army awards it to the higher ranks.

The Air Force, by contrast, awards valor medals in remarkably proportional numbers to the number of airmen serving in each rank. (It may not be a coincidence that the Air Force has the best electronic record-keeping to track whether such trends are out of line.) Compared with the other services, the Air Force's awards of each medal overall are in proportion to the number of personnel deployed.

But compare each service's valor awards to its number of deaths, the best measure of exposure to the dangers of war, and the picture changes. The Air Force and Navy combined account for less than 5 percent of the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq but together have handed out 18 percent of the total number of Silver Stars awarded by all the services, 30 percent of the Bronze Stars for valor, and 21 percent of the commendations for valor.

The Army, by contrast, has suffered 69 percent of the total deaths in the two wars but has awarded only 65 percent of the total number of Silver Stars, 49 percent of the Bronze Stars with V, and 40 percent of the Commendation Medals with V. That makes the Army not only less likely than the Air Force or the Navy to give out the higher awards, but also progressively more discriminating with progressively less-prestigious decorations (which tend to go to lower-ranking soldiers disproportionately).

The Marines are even more reserved about decorating their fighters. Leathernecks have made up only 12 percent of the U.S. forces deployed, yet account for a staggering 27 percent of deaths. But the Corps has awarded only 17 percent of the total number of Silver Stars, 21 percent of the Bronze Stars with V, and 39 percent of the Commendation Medals with V.

Not only are the Marines stingier with decorations than the Army overall, but, in a reverse of the Army pattern, the Corps is progressively more generous with lesser decorations at lower ranks.

Medals Bureaucracy

Do these discrepancies exist because of vaingloriousness by the Army and virtue by the Marines? That's hard to tell without a deep dissection of the ethos of each service, and a time-consuming reading of thousands of citations awarded over several years.

But much of the discrepancy is the unintended side effect of the medals process itself. Each service administers its own awards system, each with its own regulations interpreted by its own officers. Even the rules spelling out the degree of danger required to qualify for the V device are inconsistent, with the Army and the Marines being more restrictive, and the Air Force and the Navy less so.

The Marines and the Army, for example, even disagree on something as basic as the Purple Heart: A soldier gets it for being disoriented by a "level two" concussion, for example, while a marine is awarded one only for a more serious "level three," which means doctor-certified unconsciousness.

On concussions, surprisingly, many marines prefer the Army approach. The "knockouts-only" rule may give Purple Hearts to a few who sustain only minor injuries, but it eliminates from medal contention some marines who suffer appalling and abiding damage to internal organs by the shock wave of roadside bombs.

"We got a lot of kids out there that are walking around on crutches, and they're reported as having an 'abrasion and contusion,' which means that you don't get a Purple Heart," fumed Chief Warrant Officer Dunfee. "But a kid that gets a nick on his finger from shrapnel, he gets a Purple Heart."

Awards for extraordinary bravery naturally involve even more judgment calls than the ostensibly automatic "entitlements," such as the Purple Heart. And military regulations are not much help. The official standards for the Medal of Honor require "incontestable proof" of "gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his or her life above and beyond the call of duty."

The guidelines for the Distinguished Service Cross refer, unhelpfully, to "extraordinary heroism not justifying the award of a Medal of Honor ... [which] involved risk of life." The Silver Star drops the "risk of life" standard and instead cites "gallantry in action ... of a lesser degree than that required for the Distinguished Service Cross." The Bronze Star for valor calls for "heroism ... of a lesser degree than that required for the award of the Silver Star," while the Commendation Medal for valor refers to "acts of valor ... of lesser degree than required for award of the Bronze Star."

It is no wonder, then, that any particular award decision is heavily shaped by personal judgment and military tradition -- which varies not only from service to service but also, for example, between the infantry and the supply branches of the Army. That is, arguably, how it should be: There can be no standard checklist for acts of valor. Some aspects of the system, however, aggravate the inconsistencies at the expense of those most directly exposed to danger.

One obvious Catch-22 is that the more troops are in combat and in the field, the less energy they have to recommend each other for awards. It is those back at headquarters who have the time, the computers, and the skills to put together an impressive package of paperwork. Not so obviously, the less combat experience a unit has, the fewer the acts of valor its leaders have witnessed, and the more any particular action will stand out -- a cause of constant grumbling from the fighting grunts and of some self-doubt among rearguard support troops.

"I didn't feel I did anything special," said Staff Sgt. Justin Frewin, an Air Force explosives technician who spent months disarming roadside bombs. He saw three of his Army security escorts blown apart in the Humvee just behind his, and received the Bronze Star with V for driving into a mortar barrage to rescue a comrade.

"But I went back to Qatar" -- where his unit was based -- "and my flight chief there thought it was great and heroic and all that, and wrote it up [for a medal]. It went up through Air Force channels in Qatar," Frewin said. "But when you see Army personnel who are in Baghdad getting shot at every single day and they come home with no medals, that's upsetting to me."

Heroic Modesty

Far more Army grunts are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than are Air Force specialists like Justin Frewin -- which is precisely why Frewin's deeds stand out more. For the same reason, it is a lot easier to notice the achievements of senior sergeants and commissioned officers, because they are fewer.

What's more, the paperwork recommending someone for an award usually starts with his or her immediate superior and then is reviewed by one higher headquarters after another, so the higher your rank the fewer hurdles your award recommendation has to clear before final approval.

Whether the end result is a Good Conduct Medal or the Medal of Honor, the process begins the same way, with a preprinted form. The Department of the Army Form 638, for example, includes blanks for name, rank, Social Security number, recommended award, and "specific bullet examples of meritorious acts or service," as well as a yes/no checkbox for "posthumous." Attached are two pages for reviewing officers' recommendations.

The more prestigious the award being considered, the higher up the chain of command Form 638 must go, and the greater the number of reviewers who must sign off in turn before it's finally approved.

"You decentralize as much as you can, consistent with your ability to ensure consistency," said Bill Carr, a retired Army officer who, as the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary of Defense for military personnel policy, is overseeing an interservice review of the awards system. "Caprice benefits no one. What we want to be very, very sure of, in honor of the military ethos, is that for the higher awards -- Silver Star and above -- we are clear, which equals consistent, which equals legitimate."

The problem with this understandable desire to give higher awards a higher level of review is not merely that it slows things down. It is that the final decision is pushed further and further away from those who have firsthand knowledge of the person and the action in question.

True, the more prestigious the award, the greater the number of after-action reports, narrative details, and eyewitness statements that get attached to the basic form. True, the "awards boards" that advise most senior commanders often request further documentation.

But there are no provisions, and no resources, for sending an expert to reinvestigate the scene of action or interview the eyewitnesses directly -- the way the military does routinely for, say, a friendly-fire incident, an aircraft crash, or a court-martial. That is one of the reasons why the paper trail is so much fainter, and publicity so much poorer, for acts of valor than for mishaps and misdeeds.

Even when the Army review board considering Paul Ray Smith's Medal of Honor requested confirming details, it left the legwork up to Smith's old unit. A few men who knew Smith made a major effort to get additional statements from the eyewitnesses -- all of whom were back in the United States by that point, some of them reassigned to other units.

For that matter, if not for the lull in the fighting after Baghdad fell, his unit might not have been able to put together the initial package of statements. Had Paul Ray Smith's comrades not gone the extra mile in his memory, his Medal of Honor might well have been downgraded for lacking the "incontestable proof" that regulations require.

It is no wonder, then, that many service members feel that well-deserved nominations for, say, the Silver Star fell through the cracks, especially in the first years of the war.

"If we trust a senior leader to command 20,000 soldiers in battle, we ought to show him a little deference that he knows if someone has done something brave or not," said Russell, the retired lieutenant colonel. "What right does a bunch of colonels sitting there in the safety of the staff office with their asses shaped like a chair have to recommend that the guy's not worthy?"

No number of reviews and regulations can substitute for firsthand knowledge. And clear eyewitness testimony is a precious commodity after a battle. "There were acts of heroism I don't think anybody got awarded for," Master Sgt. Hollenbaugh said, recounting the Falluja battle for which he and his unit's medic both received the Distinguished Service Cross. "I didn't witness all of them, and those guys that I did witness, I didn't even know all their names. When I see my DSC, I think of those guys."

Again and again, troops who have been decorated for valor say they wear their medals in honor of those who have not been so recognized. "I was, like, 'Honestly, I don't feel I deserve it,' " Frewin, the Air Force explosives technician, recalled telling his Explosives Ordnance Disposal unit commander. "And he was, like, 'Yes, you deserve it. You can't think of it so much as a personal medal, but for the E.O.D. community. We're out there doing great things, and we don't get recognized.' "

Again and again, troops who play down their own awards speak proudly of their comrades' medals. "People talk about my Silver Star, and the Silver Star is great, my kids think it's neat," said 1st Sgt. Wolford, who, in an unusual Army publicity effort, became a character in the online video game "America's Army: Real Heroes," accompanied by a collectible action figure bearing his facial features.

"But that says, 'Look what I did this one day,' " he continued. What Wolford prefers to brag about are the four Bronze Stars for valor awarded to his seven-man squad for their acts on that same day in 2003. "Those other guys getting their Bronze Stars means so much more to me."

In the end, America's fighting men and women wear their medals for the same reason that they earned them: to preserve the lives and memory of their comrades.

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Future tanks could surprise critics

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

In 1994, Chechen guerrillas armed only with rocket-propelled grenades had destroyed more than 200 Russian armored vehicles in 30 days, and the U.S. Army was so slow in deploying its heavy machinery to the Balkans in 1999 that the ground forces never participated in the war in Kosovo.

"Power is increasingly defined not by mass or size but by mobility and swiftness," then-presidential candidate George W. Bush said at the Citadel military academy in September 1999. "Yet, today our military is still organized more for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century -- for Industrial Age operations, rather than for Information Age battles."

Just three weeks later, Gen. Eric Shinseki, President Clinton's Army chief of staff, announced a "transformation" program to replace the Army's 70-ton M1 Abrams main battle tank with vehicles weighing less than 20 tons, light enough to be flown around the world into areas with only dirt landing strips.

This "Future Combat System," as the Army termed it, would be protected not by heavy armor but by a linked computer network of sensors, robots, and precision weapons designed to find and destroy the enemy from a distance.

September 11, 2001, seemed the final proof of lightweight warfare. Nineteen terrorists with box cutters bypassed the entire American military. The United States retaliated against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan with special forces and smart bombs, but no tanks.

Sixteen months later, the Bush administration rebuked Shinseki for insisting on a larger, heavier ground force for the invasion of Iraq. But Iraq showed that the age of the armored dinosaur was not over after all.

It was 70-ton M1s and 34-ton M2 Bradley infantry carriers that spearheaded the Iraq invasion -- not only by racing across the open desert but also by pushing deep into downtown Baghdad, shrugging off the same RPGs that had destroyed the Russians in Grozny a decade before. And once the insurgency began, the nimble 2.6-ton Humvees that the Pentagon preferred for "low-intensity" operations proved fatally vulnerable to ambush by rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices.

It was the 70-ton Abrams that plowed through IEDs and RPGs as coalition forces retook Falluja and Najaf. As late as 2002, the Army's armor school at Fort Knox had been teaching tankers to bypass urban areas altogether. But in Iraqi cities today, said Col. David Hubner, who led armored forces into Samarra, "I'd tell my tankers, 'You should have the same mind-set as Tyrannosaurus rex. There's nobody who's going to take you out.' "

While heavy armor is crushing the enemy when called upon in Iraq, back in Washington, the Future Combat System is facing extinction. "The project is over budget, behind schedule, and probably impractical," declared a July cover of Congressional Quarterly; the headline inside was "Dream Army's Rude Awakening."

The FCS has four big problems. The first is financial: The Army is squabbling with outside estimators over whether the program as planned will cost $130 billion, $200 billion, or as much as $300 billion.

The second problem is technological: By the last independent assessment, the computer network protocols, the digital radios, the armed scout robots, the system to shoot down incoming RPGs -- all told, 32 of 49 "critical technologies" that make up the Future Combat System -- have been tested only as "basic technological components" and only in a "simulated environment."

The third challenge is physical: The vehicles that are the linchpin of the FCS have swelled to 26 tons, making them too heavy for the Air Force's standard C-130 transport but still too light to match the protection of the massive M1's armor.

The fourth obstacle is conceptual: The Army has crammed so many ideas into the FCS -- "18+1+1 Systems" (that is, 20 systems), including a computer network, seven kinds of robots, and eight kinds of manned vehicles, according to the latest official Pentagon white paper -- that even program officials struggle to describe what the goal of the FCS program actually is: an updated brigade, built around a light-to-medium-weight armored vehicle, which will be supported by many more computer networks, sensors, and robots than any current mechanized unit.

Yet when describing the FCS, Army spokesmen oscillate unconvincingly between impenetrable jargon such as "soldier-centric" and late-night infomercial-speak such as "see first, understand first, shoot first, and finish decisively!"

So the same vultures of conventional wisdom that circled the heavy tank just seven years ago are now eyeing the Future Combat System. In 1999, everyone said that tanks were too big and too hard to maneuver in a modern, unconventional war, especially in cities. In 2006, everyone says that FCS vehicles are too small and too delicate to survive in a modern, unconventional war, especially in cities. And now, as then, the conventional wisdom appears to be mostly wrong.

The Army's inarticulate enthusiasm for the FCS has fostered three self-defeating myths: that the 26-ton FCS vehicles will replace 70-ton M1s in every capacity; that FCS units will deploy en masse by air to anywhere in the world; and that FCS troops will outfight every enemy, from Arab insurgents to North Korean missiles, by substituting information technology for heavy armor.

Congress, think tanks, and reporters are understandably incredulous. "You've got to be careful not to be taken in by all this great revolutionary bullshit, because none of it is field-tested," said retired Army Col. Douglas MacGregor, a vitriolic and influential critic. But some very real lights are hidden under this bushel of unproven high-tech hype:

Although the Army will mothball some big tanks, FCS brigades will serve alongside heavy-armored units -- using today's M1 Abrams and M2 Bradleys upgraded with new electronics -- until well after 2020, providing a hedge against technological shortfalls or unexpected threats.
Whatever the limits of airlift, the hybrid-electric FCS vehicles will be much more fuel-efficient on land than the huge turbine-driven M1s -- which get half a mile to the gallon -- maneuvering more quickly and needing fewer of the supply convoys that have proven so fatally vulnerable in Iraq.
Whether their high-tech defenses materialize or not, the eight variants of the 26-ton FCS vehicle will have at least as much old-fashioned armor as anything today except the M1. In fact, of the 332 vehicles that run on tracks rather than tires in a current "heavy brigade," from mortar carriers to mobile command posts, 111 are lighter and less-armored than their proposed FCS replacements.

The revolutionary rhetoric was overblown from the beginning, and since 1999 the Army has quietly reinserted traditional military virtues into the program. As recently as April, for example, the Pentagon white paper depicted the FCS "reconnaissance and surveillance vehicle" as a lightly armed platform reliant on long-range sensors, but data given to National Journal in recent weeks show instead a heavily armed machine capable of fighting ambushes as it advances and sentries as it scouts ahead.

The FCS vehicles aren't well suited for head-on slogging matches with big enemy tanks -- that will remain the job of the massive M1 -- but they are arguably better than the M1 for the fluid wars of the future that will have no clear front line.

The truth about the Future Combat System is that it is far less revolutionary than the Army likes to claim. And that's a good thing: It means that it is far more likely to work than the critics believe.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

The U.S. is a superpower of technology. But American ingenuity goes only so far. This summer, after six years of sticking to a 20-ton ceiling for the FCS, the Army publicly accepted that some variants would weigh as much as 26 tons.

"There are too many compromises in an 18-ton vehicle," said Col. Charles Bush of the Army staff's Force Development Division. "The sweet spot is about 24 to 26 tons," he said. "At that weight, I can achieve most of my lethality, survivability, and deployability objectives."

At this weight, the Army says, the FCS can provide all-around protection against mines, the rocket-propelled grenades favored by guerrillas, and quick-firing cannon shells as large as 30 millimeters, the standard caliber of the guns on Russian-made infantry carriers.

An FCS vehicle won't stop the 125 mm shells fired by larger Russian-made tanks -- in both wars with Iraq, shells fired by such tanks bounced off the M1's front armor -- but an FCS vehicle will provide protection equal to that of the M1's side and rear, and to the armor on all sides of the latest-model M2A3 Bradleys that have accompanied the bigger tanks deep into Baghdad, Falluja, and Najaf.

In fact, the infantry carrier variant of the FCS closely resembles the Bradley. The FCS vehicle has a slightly larger gun, 30 millimeters instead of 25; it loses the Bradley's TOW anti-tank missiles, which have seen little use against Iraqi insurgents and which fly so slowly that a targeted tank could fire back, lethally, before they hit; and the FCS has double the carrying capacity -- a full squad of nine infantrymen instead of the Bradley's four to six.

And the quarter-century of materials research since the Bradley's basic structure was designed in the 1970s has made it possible to get the same protection in a 26-ton vehicle as in the old 34-ton tank.

Another evolutionary improvement lost in the revolutionary hype is that almost every bit of super-technology being developed for the FCS could be installed on the M2 Bradley or the M1 Abrams. Shinseki's successor as chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, has repeatedly overhauled the FCS program, ultimately delaying deployment of a fully FCS-equipped brigade by four years (to 2016). But he has ensured that current armored vehicles will be retrofitted with selected FCS technologies.

Even the computerized communications-and-command network -- the fundamental system linking all of the FCS's disparate parts -- builds on a principle a decade old. In 1997, the Army tested a prototype of such a network on every M1 tank and Bradley in an armored brigade, and then expanded it to an entire division. In 2003, a stripped-down version of that network, "Blue Force Tracker," was hastily installed on selected vehicles of other Army and Marine units going into Iraq. Troops have increasingly come to rely on the new technology.

"It was great to be able to look on the screen and see blue icons" representing friendly units, said Capt. Sam Donnelly, a staffer for a battalion command post during the Iraq invasion. "But our primary means of command-and-control was an FM radio, a map, and thumbtacks." As the campaign progressed, however, troops warmed to the new system -- and as units dispersed beyond the effective ranges of their Cold War radios, Donnelly said, "the only real contact we had with them was through [network] text message."

Still, the weakness of the improved communications network was the lack of good information. Donnelly's unit fought through repeated ambushes, and the Army nearly lost a critical bridge over the Euphrates, "Objective Peach," because neither scouts nor spy planes nor sensors spotted 8,000 Iraqis with 70 armored vehicles lurking under old-fashioned camouflage until they counterattacked. Since then, network upgrades and more unmanned drones have hardly made U.S. forces immune to surprise attacks.

The Stryker Experience

One way to judge whether the FCS vehicles will work is to look at the Army's other light-armored solution to modern warfare: the Stryker, a personnel carrier that moves on giant rubber tires instead of tracks and, in its 19-ton basic configuration, doesn't stop anything bigger than a .50-caliber bullet.

Ordered in 2000 as an "interim" step toward the FCS, Strykers were supposed to substitute information for mass. They were battle-tested in Iraq, where they came protected not only by their new electronics but also by an extra 2.5 tons of old-fashioned armor.

That additional metal made a difference, said Lt. Col. Michael Gibler, who was a battalion commander in the eastern half of Mosul in 2004 and 2005: "Twenty-seven RPGs hit Strykers in my battalion alone; not one of them penetrated." His unit of 70 Strykers was also hit by 250 roadside bombs and car bombs: "My vehicle was hit by three; my sergeant major's was hit by five," he recalled. "I only lost one soldier to an IED. He was exposed in an [open] hatch."

Although both critics and cheerleaders call Stryker and the FCS an unprecedented lightening of the Army, these systems are actually a turn toward heavier forces in the long struggle toward quick deployment. Gibler's battalion, for example, is much heavier today than it was before the Shinseki era.

The unit had been stripped of its armored vehicles and heavy artillery in the early 1980s, when the enemy was the newly Islamic Iran that threatened interruption of vital oil supplies far from established U.S. bases. The Army tried to create a force that could be deployed quickly to the Middle East by air: first, the "Rapid Deployment Force"; then an experimental "High-Technology Light Division," with air-droppable armored vehicles and missile-shooting dune buggies. The end result was plain old "light divisions" consisting of foot soldiers, towed artillery pieces, and a handful of Humvees.

The unit that actually did dash by air to Saudi Arabia in 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, was the 82nd Airborne, a division of foot soldiers backed by a handful of air-deployable but notoriously breakdown-prone M551 Sheridan light tanks. The 82nd's troops had so much less firepower and mobility than the Iraqi tank divisions arrayed against them, and so little hope of stopping an attack, that they bitterly called themselves "the speed bump."

But Saddam's tanks stayed put in Kuwait, and the heavy U.S. M1 tanks, M2 infantry carriers, and self-propelled M109 howitzers arrived by sea to devastate the Iraqi armor. So, in the drawdown that followed the Persian Gulf War victory, the Army sacrificed its light forces to save the heavies.

In 1996, Gen. Dennis Reimer, the Army chief of staff, not only phased out the Airborne's last M551 Sheridans, the only air-deployable armored fighting vehicle in service, but also canceled its replacement, the M8 Armored Gun System, which could be stripped down to 19 tons for airlift and then beefed up to 26 tons with bolt-on armor -- the same weight as an FCS machine fully loaded for combat.

Armored Gun Resurrected

The Army missed this light-armored capability just three years later in 1999, when its heavy forces struggled to quickly deploy from Germany south to the Balkans, and missed it even more in 2003, when Turkey denied U.S. forces permission to cross its territory into Iraq.

Instead of the 15,000 soldiers and 1,500 armored vehicles of the 4th Infantry Division, the northern front shrank to the 2,000 foot soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, reinforced by just 41 Humvees, 15 M113 armored personnel carriers, five M2 Bradleys, and five M1 tanks, all laboriously delivered by air.

The elite Airborne still managed to fight off much-larger Iraqi forces. But with so few vehicles, troops could not dash south to trap Saddam's loyalists before they retreated into his hometown of Tikrit and formed the first center of the insurgency.

Before a 2005 deployment to Afghanistan, the 82nd Airborne was "begging" to break the few Armored Gun System prototypes out of storage, said MacGregor, the Army critic, who considers the cancellation of the gun system one of the Army's great missed opportunities to fill the light-armored gap. "We've wasted years."

Maybe not so coincidentally, one of the FCS variants, called the "mounted combat" version, has a 120 mm cannon and looks a lot like an updated Armored Gun System vehicle. Described by many as "the replacement for the Abrams tank," the mounted combat FCS vehicle is actually nothing of the kind. It is the resurrection of a light-armored capability that the Army had for decades and then threw away.

What "lightweight" vehicles bring to battle is not just new electronics but also, ironically, more old-fashioned mass -- not to the tank brigades, which hardly need it, but to the light infantry, which desperately does. Bitter experience in Iraq shows that even up-armored Humvees are vulnerable to roadside bombs.

Robert Scales is a retired Army major general and an influential author who has fought for more light-armored vehicles since the mid-1990s, when he started the "Army After Next" war games that gave birth to the FCS. Scales has collected data from Korea, Vietnam, and Falluja showing that "soldiers mounted [in armored vehicles] are 10 times less likely to become casualties than soldiers who are not," he said. But "there's nothing in my data to relate thickness of armor to survivability," he added. Even light armor saves lives.

"Eighty-one percent of all deaths in combat since 1945 have been [among] dismounted infantry," said Scales, who is now a consultant to the FCS program. "Yet the Army's had 23 percent of the defense budget since 1952. That's why we go to war in Humvees."

The Mobility Myth

But armor is only half of the solution to the wars of the 21st century. The other half is speed -- deploying quickly to the war zone, and then maneuvering quickly within it. How to balance the weight of armor with the necessity for speed remains the Army's dilemma.

America is the superpower of the air, just as Britannia once ruled the waves. Still, the U.S. Air Force has its limits. The Army, however, based its Future Combat System on a naive faith in its sister service's ability to transport the equipment to any battlefield. Until this year, Army spokesmen insisted that the FCS vehicles would weigh less than 20 tons, making them light enough to fly in fleets of C-130 transports, land on dirt strips, and roll off ready to fight.

"The problem with that concept is that it was developed by tankers who didn't have a clue," said Robert Killebrew, a retired infantry colonel who worked for Scales in the war games of the 1990s and is now part of his team again. Killebrew, who served with the Special Forces in Vietnam, has commanded ad hoc dirt airstrips set up for C-130s, "and I'll tell you," he said, "you beat them to pieces with that kind of traffic; they cannot be maintained, they're easy targets for artillery and rockets -- and the Air Force doesn't have that many C-130s, anyway."

The United States has 514 C-130s. With each plane carrying one FCS vehicle -- still do-able with the current 26-ton design, if crews unbolt most of the armor, fly it separately, and then bolt it back on, a process the Army says should take less than eight hours -- it would take all 514 to lift a single brigade's 332 FCS armored vehicles and a reasonable amount of supplies.

But even that unlikely scenario wouldn't keep Shinseki's promise to "deploy a brigade anywhere in the world in 96 hours." Most C-130s, fully loaded, have a range of only 1,000 miles, a third of the way across the Atlantic.

The newer, larger C-17s can carry three FCS vehicles, fully armored, around the globe. But even the Air Force's boldest budget requests only 220 C-17s, which means a theoretical maximum carrying capacity of 660 FCS vehicles or, more realistically, one brigade with a few of its hundreds of supply trucks.

The dirty secret is that Scales and company never actually wanted the C-130 for rapid deployment overseas. They knew perfectly well that the plane's range was just too short. They wanted the C-130 to maneuver brigades in 500-mile sprints once they had arrived in the war theater, outflanking ground-bound enemies in an airborne blitzkrieg. Imagine being able to "drop five brigades around Baghdad," Scales told National Journal in 2003. "The war's over in a day."

Faced with the limits of air transport, the Army now talks of airlifting only about one-third of one brigade behind enemy lines: "We could move a battalion through the air in an operationally meaningful way," said Col. Robert Beckinger, the FCS manager for the Training and Doctrine Command.

That's dialing things way down from the war games of the mid-1990s. But it is still many more armored fighting vehicles than the United States ever moved by air before it gave up its last airmobile light armor in 1996.

Supply Trains

For all the romance of airborne war, it is when the FCS vehicles reach the ground that they could really speed up operations. Built to burn jet fuel, the M1 Abrams's turbine engine makes the 70-ton tank one of the fastest vehicles ever to fight once it's on the battlefield, but the long journey to that battlefield is painfully slow because of frequent stops for gas.

"Every eight hours, you're going to burn 300 gallons, whether it's moving or not," because the engine also powers the tank's electronics, said Capt. Ray Bolar, an Army tank officer who has served two tours in Iraq. Even compared with six months of fighting in Ramadi in 2005, Bolar said, being a supply officer in the 2003 invasion "was maybe the hardest thing I have ever done."

Driving around the clock, the M1s covered 350 miles in 72 hours, nearly 120 miles a day, twice as fast as Patton's 3rd Army moved in 1944. But the M1s had to pull into improvised refueling stops three times a day.

By Scales's count, unarmored fuel trucks made 30,000 supply runs, averaging 800 miles apiece, through Iraqi territory to keep the big tanks moving. Support units got scrambled in the process. "Some New Mexico National Guard guys somehow got roped in and followed us to Baghdad," Bolar said. "It was, 'You got fuel?'

'Yeah.... '

'You're coming with us.' "

That April, at the moment of U.S victory, commanders nearly withdrew the famously successful quick-strike "thunder runs" of tank columns into downtown Baghdad because of a supply shortage. Instead, they shut down their M1s for two hours while the more fuel-efficient M2 Bradleys stood watch. Meanwhile, in the fiercest fighting of the day, the rear guard escorted unarmored trucks full of volatile fuel and ammunition into the city.

To keep the road into the city open, Maj. Harry (Zan) Hornbuckle, then a captain, held a crucial highway intersection called "Objective Curly" through eight straight hours of fighting. "I didn't have any tanks," he said, and his five Bradleys had no extra armor, just external storage racks for his troops' equipment: "The RPGs would hit the duffel bags and detonate [prematurely]."

All of his vehicles, and all of his men, survived the fight. But when the unarmored supply column drove through, "a couple of fuelers and a couple of ammo trucks got destroyed," Hornbuckle recalled. "That was the only killed-in-action of the day."

Despite desperate retrofitting with armor, the supply convoys remain the most vulnerable part of the U.S. force in Iraq. "Most people don't understand how dependent M1s and Bradleys are on that logistical umbilical cord," Scales said. Heavy armor can smash into cities, he said, "but it can't stay there and control populations."

By contrast, Stryker units routinely kept their much lighter vehicles in downtown Mosul for three days at a time without resupply, said Lt. Col. Gibler. And in the Shiite uprising of 2004, one Stryker battalion drove 300 miles from Mosul to Al Kut in the south -- fighting insurgents along the way -- in 48 hours.

The Army contends that an FCS brigade will need 10 to 30 percent less fuel than today's heavy brigades, 66 percent fewer mechanics, and one-third fewer supply trucks. Defense programs from fighter jets to warships have promised, and failed, to deliver such efficiencies before -- although the goal is more realistic this time because "you couldn't design a less fuel-efficient engine than the M1's," Killebrew said.

The FCS prototype chassis now being completed is the first U.S. military vehicle with a hybrid-electric drive. That means not only better mileage on the go but also enough batteries to run electronics with the engine off, and even a lighter transmission.

All of the mundane machinery of the FCS benefits from 30 years of refinement since the M1 and the M2 were designed in the late 1970s, said Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, the FCS program manager. Compact electric motors replace bulky hydraulic and mechanical systems. High-strength rubber tracks replace traditional steel tracks, allowing for a lighter suspension and saving almost two tons of weight.

The 120 mm cannon uses the same ammunition as current versions but weighs about a ton less and has recoil systems that enable a 26-ton vehicle to withstand the shock. Unlike today's mix of M1s, M2s, M109s, and M113s, Cartwright added, "every one of these manned ground [FCS] vehicles has the same engine, a common computer, a common chassis." And the FCS vehicles simply have less mass to move and maintain.

The Replacement Myth

In 1999, Gen. Shinseki proposed replacing the entire Army armored infrastructure with a uniform force of Future Combat System vehicles. Skeptical Capitol Hill staffers joked about a "big-bang theory" of modernization.

But the money never matched the ambition. As early as 2000, Army officials and documents acknowledged that it would take decades to replace the last M1s and M2s. Today, the Army's budget plans call for equipping just 15 of its 42 active-duty brigades with FCS vehicles, with the first brigade fully fielded by 2016 and the last by 2020. Larger tanks will remain in service through at least 2035, said Rickey Smith, an Army "capabilities integration" expert.

And the service will equip many M1s and Bradleys with FCS electronics. An all-FCS force, Smith said, is something "the nation can't afford and wouldn't want."

Even ardent FCS advocate Scales emphasizes using combined arms -- all kinds of light and heavy forces -- rather than relying on a single silver bullet to fight any war. "You don't just dump a bunch of [FCS] vehicles in the midst of the enemy," he said.

Scales's war-fighting scheme has Special Forces scouting the ground first, then airborne Rangers seizing the landing strips, then C-17s carrying FCS raiding parties behind enemy lines -- acting as the winged hammer to an overland anvil of both FCS and heavy brigades, with M1s on hand to crack the toughest nuts.

Modern armies always mix battle-tested and cutting-edge weapons, said Bruce Gudmundsson, a retired Marine major and the author of the definitive trilogy On Armor, On Infantry, and On Artillery.

"FCS aficionados feel compelled to compete directly with the M1," he said, but the two systems are very different -- and complementary. "Adding networked, [light-] armored vehicles armed with precision-guided missiles to our armored forces is a good idea," Gudmundsson said. "Replacing traditional armored vehicles with them is not."

War remains a brutal business. As long as the physics of breaking human bodies stay the same, the sheer weight of metal will have its uses, just as does the finesse provided by training, tactics, and intelligence. For all of the Army's emphasis on information technology, the future force will need mass as well.

"It won't be perfect in any environment," Killebrew said of the FCS. But it will be more adaptable across all environments, a "nice balance" between the foot sloggers of the light infantry and the fuel hoggers of the heavy armor. And, he added, the unpleasant surprises of the last five years are proof that "the Army has got to have more balance than ever, because we don't know how future wars are going to be fought."

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Infantry transformed by new tools, training

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

You've got to be aware of exactly what you're shooting at, Williams told the soldiers. Be aware of what you're not shooting at, too; don't focus on the first target that pops up and forget your flank. "Everybody wants to kill that same guy, but those guys over there," he said gesturing to the side, "would've wiped us all out!" Be aware even when the battle is won and you're searching the prisoners for weapons, insignia, family photos, Williams said. "You've got to be checking everything. Every piece of information you find is important."

Williams wasn't shouting. He did not even raise his voice. He just shook his head and said, exasperated, "You all are in week 11."

The two dozen recruits sitting on the concrete floor knew exactly how serious their situation was. Today's ambushers were pop-up paper targets, the prisoners were mannequins, the road unmined. But soon the targets, bystanders, and bombs would be live. In less than a month, these recruits would graduate from their 14-week course at Fort Benning's Infantry Training Brigade and join regular units headed, sooner or later, to Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Robert Colón, another instructor at Benning and, like Williams, a veteran of Iraq, tells his recruits that they have to get it right, because the unpredictability of warfare in Iraq might suddenly put them in the lead.

"Over there, I've had privates save my life. I've saved my privates' lives. It's just the way it goes," Colón said. "Get rid of the whole 'I'm just a private' mentality, because it just doesn't protect you from bullets," he said. "In the battle of Falluja, we lost our battalion sergeant major, our Alpha Company commander. At any given time, a private's going to have to step up to be a leader."

War is driving change across the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, and nowhere more so than in the oldest military specialty of all, the often-neglected foot soldiers of the infantry.

While air forces evolved from biplanes to stealth bombers, and navies from gun turrets to cruise missiles, the "poor bloody infantry" stayed mostly the same from the First World War to the Persian Gulf War: helmets, grenades, rifles, a few light machine guns, and leather boots. The decades added awkward flak vests that could sometimes stop shrapnel, but not bullets.

Today, however, the soldiers at Fort Benning are visibly different from their predecessors of just three years ago. They wear Kevlar jackets reinforced with rigid breast and back plates, 16 pounds per man, the first mass-produced bulletproof armor in history and all but unknown in the U.S. military before the invasion of Iraq. The soldiers carry rifles with sophisticated optical sights, tools that, before the insurgency, were reserved for snipers and commandos. They practice treating casualties with a new first-aid kit -- tourniquet, gloves, and an Israeli-developed pressure dressing -- that was derived from last year's battlefield lessons.

And these are just the tools, the visible surfaces of far more fundamental changes in how human beings are being taught to fight. "When I went through basic training, it was about four hours of 'here's a pressure dressing,' " recalled Sgt. 1st Class Michael Clay, a Benning instructor who first fought Iraqis in 1991. "Now we have two days dedicated to that alone." And trainers reinforce the first-aid skills, working casualty drills into other exercises, to make sure soldiers know how to quickly and efficiently treat a wounded comrade.

Those exercises are more demanding than they used to be. Privates practice leading squads and teams of fellow recruits -- normally an experienced sergeant's job -- and under close supervision, they devise and execute their own plans for practice missions.

They move swiftly from sterile shooting ranges to live-fire drills like the one Sgt. Williams took his recruits through, a jolting truck ride down dirt roads, with targets popping up on either side. It was a simulated ambush of a simulated convoy -- to which the recruits responded with bursts of real bullets, fired first from their lurching, moving vehicles and then as they leapt out to counterattack on foot.

"I didn't do half of this," said Lt. Col. Ricardo Mitchell after he and the recruits finished the exercise. Mitchell did his basic training in the peacetime Army of the 1980s. Today, as commander of one of Benning's training battalions, he said, "We are teaching things to privates comparable to what, five or six years ago, we were asking lieutenants to do."

Soldier as System

A revolution is under way in the American infantry. After 9/11, "the box opened up," said Staff Sgt. Timothy Howell, a Benning instructor. In the 1990s, the Army's mantra was," 'The book says -- the book says,' " he recalled. "Now it's, 'What's your experience in Iraq?' "

Survey teams went to Baghdad shortly after the city fell in 2003 to get feedback from troops on their equipment. "I'm still amazed at all the changes that have been made -- body armor, knee pads, helmet chin straps, even these boots," Howell said, "because a soldier said, 'This would be better,' and somebody listened. Now the Army is actually listening."

The institutional Army still struggles, however, to treat foot soldiers with the same focused seriousness that it treats tanks. "It's difficult because it requires us to make changes in how we fund items," said Col. Robert Radcliffe, director of Combat Developments at Fort Benning's Infantry Center.

A tank is designed, tested, and fielded as a package: "It's got a weapon, it's got communications, it's got armor. But we've never treated a soldier as a system," Radcliffe said. "We've got a rifle that's got its own funding line and a radio that's got its own funding line. As we develop equipment, we give it to the soldier, never paying much attention to how these pieces of equipment interact."

The Army has developed more than 300 individual items that a soldier could potentially wear or carry (not counting heavy equipment). Many are incompatible. Until a 2004 redesign, the standard helmet snagged on the back plate of the new body armor when a soldier looked up sharply.

Fort Benning now teaches recruits a new way to hold their rifles because the rigid chest plate restricts their arm movement. The standard night-vision sight can unbalance the helmet so much that it makes some soldiers' heads bob. A squad has to haul nine different kinds of batteries. All told, the average infantryman carries 65 to 90 pounds of equipment into combat.

This summer, the Army will issue the first set of gear designed as an integrated ensemble, called "Land Warrior," on a trial basis to more than 400 troops at Fort Lewis, Wash. The product of a difficult decade-long development process, Land Warrior incorporates not only body armor, radios, and night vision but also a tactical computer network -- all running off compatible batteries. If the soldiers like it, they will deploy with it to Iraq.

But new technology and training can help only so much. Human flesh remains terribly fragile. In an era of stealth jets, cruise missiles, and satellite-guided bombs, the world's high-tech superpower still depends on infantrymen willing to walk into harm's way.

Why Infantry, Anyway?

Out of 1.4 million military personnel on active duty, according to retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, who was an Army War College commandant, "at last count, there were 65,000 infantrymen in the Army and the Marine Corps, combined. They wouldn't fill [Washington's] FedEx stadium! With the exception of Kosovo" -- a campaign waged entirely by air strikes -- "in every war this nation has fought, we have run out of infantry. What we've had was airpower and artillery that was able, to some degree, to make up for the deficiencies of the infantry with firepower. So what have our enemies done lately? They've found ways to avoid firepower."

The insurgency began in Iraq when the ragtag guerrillas of the Saddam Fedayeen survived a U.S. onslaught that destroyed Saddam Hussein's best-armored tanks. Bombarding the cities where the Fedayeen holed up would have caused horrific civilian casualties -- without necessarily defeating the Fedayeen, as history shows. Unrestricted firepower flattened countless buildings in World War II, such as the hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino, but the defending infantry didn't just survive, the soldiers turned the rubble into fortresses -- from which only other infantry units could dig them out. Nor are today's smart weapons the whole answer: Saddam evaded missile strikes only to be hauled out of his spider hole by a foot soldier.

M1 tanks and M2 armored transports built for the plains of Cold War Europe have proven to be effective city fighters, spearheading assaults into Baghdad and Falluja. But someone still has to walk alongside to keep insurgents from sneaking up in the juggernauts' blind spots. And no tank or spy plane can search the inside of a house.

So in Iraq, technically trained troops such as artillerymen and engineers often park their heavy equipment and pull double duty as infantrymen. And with no demarcated front line in Iraq, mechanics and supply clerks and other rear-area troops end up defending their base areas and convoys.

"It didn't matter what your military specialty was," said Staff Sgt. Howell. "If you were a truck driver, you were a truck driver as long as you were behind the wheel, but as soon as that truck stopped, you were an 11-Bravo" -- the Army code for combat infantry.

Howell is a drill sergeant in Fort Benning's Basic Combat Training Brigade, which is intended to give every new private core combat skills. "We've got a radiology technician," Howell said, gesturing at one of his recruits. "He's still digging holes and doing the battle drills."

Just like the future full-time infantrymen in the more intensive Infantry Training Brigade, the future support troops in the Basic Combat Training Brigade carry their rifles all day and take turns guarding them at night, Howell said, "just like they will in Iraq." And like all military personnel who venture off base in Iraq, they wear full body armor.

"When I came into the Army," Howell said, "we had these big, clunky flak vests. You knew they weren't going to stop anything." He rounded on one of his recruits who was wearing, like all the others, 16 pounds of Kevlar and ceramic in the unseasonable Georgia heat: "You love that body armor!"

"Uh -- yes, sir!" replied the private.

"Are you lying, soldier?"

"A little bit, sir."

Howell and the other drill sergeants chuckled knowingly.

The Armor Dilemma

In early 2003, the Army and Marines began fielding thousands of sets of "small-arms protective inserts," a bulletproof ceramic plate that slips into the standard flak jacket. "The first time I had the SAPI plates was when they were issued in Kuwait" just before the invasion of Iraq, recalled Marine Corps Maj. Patrick Cashman. "We knew that pocket was in the vest for something: Maps? Toilet paper?"

For the first time in 400 years, since the perfection of the musket, the technology of protecting the infantryman had caught up, almost, to the technology of killing him. World War II troops wore no armor except a steel "pot" helmet.

The Vietnam era produced flak jackets that could stop some shrapnel, but not bullets. But with SAPI, said Arthur Durante, a developer of infantry manuals at Fort Benning, "I've got photographs of guys holding the flattened bullet that hit them in the chest: It knocked them down, but they got up and shot the guy that shot them."

So while troops in Vietnam routinely ditched their sweltering flak jackets, troops in Iraq do not. "Once, we ended up pushing 5 kilometers or so [on foot], north of Haditha," said Capt. Christopher Conner, who now teaches new Marine lieutenants at The Basic School in Quantico, Va. "It was probably 110 degrees. Not one single time did one single marine break the seal on his flak jacket."

Army Capt. Eric Hillerson, an instructor at Fort Benning, agreed. "We saw that it did work," he said. "We didn't go out the [base] gate without our helmets and vests on. It's hot and heavy, but the protection is worth it."

Body armor has kept the G.I. death toll down in Iraq. But with the military issuing more add-on armor to cover the gaps where troops get wounded -- thighs, groin, shoulders, beneath the armpit where the flak jacket fastens -- the weight of the full kit has doubled, from 16 to 33 pounds.

"The newer SAPI plates, if they're optional, a lot of guys won't wear them, because there's so much weight," said Maj. Brett Clark, a Marine Corps veteran of Falluja now on loan to Fort Benning as an instructor in the Army infantry captain's course. "At what point do we stop piling on that weight? Is the armor going to slow you down enough that you're easier to hit?"

Equipment officials are racking their brains. "The armor is one of those places where a hard choice had to be made," said Maj. Cashman, now the infantry capabilities officer for the Marine Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico. "We are at the technological limit for ceramic plates right now."

At the Soldier Center in Natick, Mass., which serves both the Army and Marines, researchers are working on next-generation armor. Today's ceramic-reinforced flak jacket fits snug and hot over the body, with its weight all on the shoulders, like medieval chainmail. Natick's new armor is supported by a rigid frame that distributes the weight and leaves room for a cool, breathable fabric underneath, like a Renaissance cavalier's suit of steel plate.

Designers are transforming today's optional add-ons that cover the shoulders, neck, and thighs into a working ensemble. Researchers are building electronic items, issued today as separate gear, into the helmet and the body armor, whose frame picks up radio signals like an antenna.

"We're putting that prototype together," said Natick Director Philip Brandler, "and we'll be out in the field next year to evaluate it." In three years, he added, experimental polymers now in the lab could provide current levels of protection for half the weight -- or could furnish more protection at the current weight.

"We have a very responsive enemy," Brandler said, "and as we provide certain levels of protection, they up the threat."

No amount of armor can make a man into a walking tank. The infantryman's first line of defense is his eyes, his ears, and his own quick thinking -- which intense training, and select technology, can sharpen.

Precision-Guided Humans

When he went through basic training just 10 years ago, recalled Staff Sgt. Howell, the drill sergeants' mantra was, "Put your head down and walk!" Now an Iraq veteran and drill sergeant himself, Howell said, "the No. 1 thing I stress for these soldiers is, you have to look around. You have to know what's normal. That way you can know what's abnormal. So if you come down the road one day and there's no kids playing where there used to be kids, you get that feeling in your stomach and tell someone, before the attack."

Today, "Know the normal" is the infantryman's mantra. "He needs to look for the absence of the normal, as opposed to the presence of the abnormal," said Maj. Clark, the Marine officer, unconsciously echoing the Army sergeant. "Children on the street -- trash on the street -- the slightest change. He is himself an intelligence-gathering device." Instructors at Benning now often leave soda cans, sandbags, or other objects out of place in the barracks to test how quickly the recruits notice.

While awareness begins with training, technology can augment it. Some of the American infantryman's most powerful tools are the least obvious. Look past their bulky body armor to their handheld radios and headsets, the scopes on their rifles, and the ungainly black attachments on their helmets -- "night- optical devices," a little revolution in themselves.

"We had 'starlight scopes' in Vietnam," recalled retired Maj. Gen. Waldo Freeman, "but they were so maintenance-intensive that a typical company" -- 50 to 135 men, depending on casualties -- "would have maybe three that worked."

The foot-long, telescope-like devices were too bulky to use on the move, in any case, he said: "When we actually had to move after dark, you'd walk all night and get maybe 3 kilometers." So while Vietnamese light infantry, like the Chinese in Korea and the Japanese in the Pacific, would slip through U.S. defenses to launch bold night attacks, the Americans would hunker down and wait for daylight to restore their firepower and mobility.

Today, it is U.S. troops who run convoys and launch attacks under cover of darkness. "We did the majority of our missions in limited visibility," said Capt. Scott Thomas, an Iraq veteran now teaching young officers at Fort Benning. "We had the ability to see at night when the enemy couldn't."

Maj. Pete Farnum, now an instructor at the Marine Corps School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton, Calif., echoed Thomas. "We went into Falluja at night and got a foothold in the city almost without a shot being fired," he said. "Then when the sun came up, all hell broke lose. But night was pretty quiet: The enemy knew we had the optics, so they'd go to sleep and the next morning pick up their rocket-propelled grenades."

The difference, however, is not just technology, emphasized Lt. Col. Chris Carolan of Quantico's experimental Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. "There was a concerted effort after Vietnam to get us better at fighting at night," he said. "You have to know how to operate at night without the aid of night-vision devices before you can slap 'em on. That's training."

"We Know Who We Kill"

Well-trained troops can "out-see" the enemy by day as well. Soldiers and marines still carry an updated version of the M-16 rifle introduced in Vietnam -- but the military has actually suspended work on a replacement weapon, the XM-8, to devote funds to what it considers the real revolution: adding gun sights to existing rifles.

After a cease-fire cut short that first assault on Falluja in April 2004, Maj. Farnum recalled, "one of the first things that the insurgents requested was that the Marine Corps pull out all the snipers from Falluja. They thought we had snipers everywhere. But it was regular marines, trained in combat marksmanship, with the advanced combat optics."

"That's not a new technology," said Maj. Cashman of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. "We didn't invent the telescopic sight." But after a trial fielding of a thousand ACOGs -- Advanced Combat Optic Gunsights -- to Iraq in 2004, he said, "word got back: These were war-winners, and we've given [them] to every single Marine infantryman."

Unlike the Marine Corps, the Army restricts the telescopic sights to one designated marksman in each squad. Regular soldiers -- including an ever-larger majority of recruits at Fort Benning -- instead get a "close combat optic," a sighting device that has no magnification but is suitable for short-range street fights.

"Five years ago," said Maj. Glenn Dean, chief of small arms for the Directorate of Combat Developments at Fort Benning, "we were an 'iron sight' army," trained to aim just like every rifleman since the 19th century: Squint and shoot, carefully aligning the post at the front of the barrel with the notch at the back (the "iron sights").

Today's optics let troops throw their rifles to their shoulders, both eyes open, for a quick, accurate shot on a fleeting target. Combat battalions which used to have no optical sights, except for those carried by their snipers, now give them to every soldier.

The new gun sights are not just tools for better shooting: They are also tools for knowing when not to shoot. "The big thing we stressed is, don't fire back unless you have positive identification," said one Marine officer. His commander in Iraq would answer complaints about civilian casualties by letting Iraqis look through his telescopic sight: "Every marine has one of these," the commander would say. "We know who we kill."

But better gun sights make no difference to troops who are too scared or enraged to use them. Especially in the first year of the insurgency, too many American patrols and convoys responded to roadside bombs or snipers by laying down "suppressive fire" in all directions -- what cynical veterans call the "death blossom." And in crowded cities, even a well-aimed shot can kill a civilian or a comrade.

"When you train, you shoot a target, and you don't ever really think about what's behind that target," said drill sergeant Colón. "But bullets actually go through things. They go through houses, and they go through people. That was a hard lesson learned in the first couple of weeks in Iraq, and that's one of the things I emphasize heavily now that I never used to emphasize before."

At Fort Benning, Army recruits routinely train with targets depicting men, women, and children -- and are scored not just on their hits but also on what they do not shoot.

"If you're going to knock at 90 houses and enter without any type of enemy action, you can't expect that the 91st house isn't going to be the one," said Staff Sgt. Brad Watson, an Iraq veteran and Fort Benning drill sergeant, as recruits rushed past him, rifles and optics ready, into a mock village. "And it's hard to tell infantry soldiers when not to flip on that switch, because they have to go in with a certain amount of aggression. You have to train them on identifying targets, and it's got to be constant. It's got to start at that individual soldier."

But it can't stop there. Commanders also need a new awareness of civilians.

Information Warriors

For decades, if military doctrine mentioned civilians at all, it treated them as just one more obstacle on the battlefield. Infantry in Iraq have learned to watch the mood of local civilians -- or their absence -- as the best clue of an impending ambush. And commanders have learned to make better use of both civilian informants and their own foot patrols' firsthand observations.

As a young officer in Fort Benning's infantry captain's course in 2000, recalled Maj. Desmond Bailey, who is now back as an instructor, "I don't think we ever discussed civilian considerations."

In the 1990s, said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, who commanded Bailey in Iraq and now heads the captain's school, civilians were mentioned in Army training only in the context of a peacekeeping mission that would follow a conflict.

When training for actual combat, Bailey said, "we just wished the civilians away." But as a commander in Iraq, Capt. Thomas said, "That was the steepest learning curve: Not having the ability to wish the civilians away and focus on a uniformed enemy. You may spend part of the day on patrol, getting in a direct-fire engagement, but four hours later, you're meeting with a local sheik."

"I tried to ignore them," Bailey admitted. "We were driving through their crops because [insurgents] were ambushing us on the roads. But if you keep ticking them off, they aren't going to give you the information that you need. Until I actually started interacting with the populace, I didn't get that information. And we would not have ended up with Saddam" -- whose spider hole was found in the area that Russell's troops patrolled around Tikrit -- "if we had not utilized the local population."

No spy plane or satellite can talk to local leaders or sense the local mood as it walks down the street. But technology can speed the flow of human intelligence from one human to the next. On one raid, Thomas recalled, he sent each of his squads to hit a different house -- and discovered that the "high-value target" they were looking for was in none of them.

An Iraqi told Thomas the target's real location: about 20 minutes away from Thomas, but just a few doors down from one of his scattered squads. "This guy was getting ready to run," Thomas said. So he called his nearest sergeant on the radio and that sergeant's squad was able to hit the house four or five minutes later.

This seems like no big deal until you realize that, until recently, Thomas's sergeant would not have had a radio: The bulky sets were limited to vehicles or to one overburdened operator in a platoon of 40 men. "When I was a platoon leader, we didn't have squad radios," recalled Lt. Col. Russell. "We would see them on occasion, but they were very short range and unreliable. I had to get where I could do hand and arm signals."

Today, compact electronics -- and a military chastened by sergeants buying Motorola walkie-talkies out of their own salaries -- allow each squad of six to 13 troops to carry at least one radio. Personal radios and even hands-free headsets are proliferating.

Before the storming of Falluja, recalled Maj. Clark, "I told my gunnery sergeant we needed to get more radios. We had radios down to the team leader level": one for every four men, the smallest "assault element" that typically makes the first entry into a house while the rest of the squad provides covering fire and reinforcements. Over gunfire and through stone walls, Clark said, "you wouldn't otherwise be able to hear [to coordinate]. Having additional radios saved lives."

Both the Marines and the Army have experimented with sophisticated information technology for foot soldiers. The trial fielding of the Land Warrior kits to soldiers at Fort Lewis this summer will include not only radio headsets but electronic eyepieces that show troops their own location and that of friendly units on a computer map, updated via a wireless network -- a capability previously limited to vehicles. The Natick Soldier Center's next-generation "Future Force Warrior" will add more sensor displays and sharing of targeting data over the network.

These technologies, however, will require additional hours of training. Retired Army Col. Richard Sinnreich, a frequent participant in Army experiments, said, "It requires a whole different type of training to make the infantryman comfortable using that technology without distracting him. The more we digitize, the more infantry have to become proficient at a whole set of skills besides aiming a rifle and digging a foxhole."

Technology plus training can make infantrymen more effective. Technology without training can get them killed. The situations that soldiers face on the streets of Iraq, or elsewhere, and the tools they use are getting more complex. But the emerging revolution in American infantry is not making the role of the infantry any less demanding.

"The vast responsibility that is pushed down to the lower levels, the combat power that is pushed down to the lower levels, the larger areas of operation, as well as the technology, requires better trained, tactically savvy, intelligent leaders," said Maj. Clark, looking at his young officer-students a few yards away. "Intelligent grunts: That's almost a contradiction. But it's definitely a thinking man's game."

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As reservists come home, Pentagon shifts burden to regular forces

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Last year, at the peak of deployments of reservists -- when citizen-soldiers were carrying perhaps 50 percent of the combat load -- the Army Guard alone had about 40,000 soldiers in Iraq. Today, its presence is down to roughly 20,000, said Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn, director of the Army National Guard, and in 2006, "we're going to level out somewhere slightly less than that."

Army Guard and Reserve troops have made up about 80 percent of all reservists mobilized worldwide, but the overall number of reservists serving on active duty -- including Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighters -- has also dropped for 12 of the past 13 weeks, according to the Pentagon's weekly tallies. In fact, a look at the ups and downs of the past three years finds that the last time so few reservists were on active duty was in February 2003, during the buildup for the invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, despite much talk of drawdowns, the total force in Iraq, regulars and reservists combined, is still about the same as it was a year ago: 138,000. It surged to 160,000 for the October elections there and has only just come back down. So the citizen-soldiers of the Reserves and Guard are not coming home as part of some general withdrawal. The Pentagon is shifting the burden back onto the regular, active-duty force.

What is driving this? Is the war going that much better? Or is the administration trying to reduce the impact on U.S. families and communities of an unpopular war? Neither, insist both top generals and outside observers.

"The plan all along was to burn through the Guard and Reserve as a stopgap measure, [since] the fall of 2003, when it finally started to sink in that [Army leaders] had a long war on their hands," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org, which keeps extensive public databases on the state of the U.S. military.

"They gave us plenty of warning," echoed Vaughn. "And we knew we were going to come back down." But for nearly two years, from the time the military reversed its initial, overly optimistic drawdown of forces in Iraq in November 2003 to the end of the Iraqi national elections in October 2005, the reservists had to hold the line -- while the regular Army underwent the most radical wartime overhaul since Valley Forge.

The unit that stormed Baghdad in spring 2003, for example, was the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, first bloodied in France in 1917 and, on paper, still organized much the same way nine decades later, as a single, solid sledgehammer nearly 20,000 strong. But on the ground, in the rapid-fire reality of modern warfare, the division had to break into smaller, nimbler brigades, much like the units sent to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. And carving self-sufficient subunits out of a division designed to operate en masse is laborious, inefficient, and disruptive.

When, as then-presidential-candidate George W. Bush noted, two of the Army's 10 divisions were "not ready for duty" in 2000, it was because of the effort required to maintain just two brigades in the Balkans. The number of brigades in Iraq since 2003 has hovered around a dozen.

The old Army could not sustain such an effort. So in fall 2003, the newly appointed chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, decided to dissolve the divisions for good and create more self-contained, and more numerous, "modular" brigades -- reforming the entire active Army in just two years.

Army leaders "moved it out faster than we've been able to keep track," said the hard-to-impress Pike. "But in the interim, they threw the Guard and Reserve in -- and the Guard and Reserve got clobbered."

Clobbered? National Guard leaders wouldn't go that far.

"I don't think you can characterize it as damaging to the organization," said Maj. Gen. Francis Vavala, the adjutant-general in charge of the Delaware National Guard and vice president of the Adjutants-General Association of the United States. "It was good strategy for us to go into the breach to allow [the regular Army] time to reset. [But now] most of our big combat units have been exhausted."

"We're not broken," agreed Maj. Gen. Roger Lempke, Nebraska's adjutant-general and president of the Adjutants-General Association. "But we were definitely being stretched; and if we'd had to sustain [such] high levels for another year or so, we'd have reached a broken state."

Now, however, the strain is easing. And the reserve component's capacity to adapt may have finally caught up with the post-9/11 world.

"The people in charge have learned from their mistakes," said Kathy Moakler, deputy director for government relations at the National Military Family Association, a support and advocacy group.

Calls to the association from confused and worried families have dropped dramatically since the invasion of Afghanistan, Moakler said, because Guard and Reserve family-support programs, from counseling to financial aid to child care, have ramped up.

"Access to programs was sketchy at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom," she said. "It has become much more robust because the Guard and Reserve realized they needed more programs and rallied more resources."

While new family-support programs cover the home front, the new "modular" Army brigades should be less burdensome to deploy abroad, in theory. And, in theory, now that the regular Army has stepped back up, and the Guard and Reserve contribution has dropped back down -- albeit to a level still far above that required for the invasion of Afghanistan, let alone anything during the 1990s -- America's citizen-soldiers should be able to keep going at this pace indefinitely.

"We can sustain that number for a long time," said Vaughn. "We'll do whatever we're called to duty for," and ups and downs are inevitable. But another surge to 2005's peak levels looks unlikely, Vaughn said -- adding, "at this time."

That assumes, of course, that events cooperate in Iraq, and Iran, and Korea, and the Balkans, and around the world. "We're telling our soldiers and families that they can probably expect some sort of deployment every five or six years," said Maj. Gen. Lempke. "But nobody can really know for sure."

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Air Force aims for fresh image with public affairs overhaul

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The service's costly F-22 fighter, he wrote, "is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon." Its plan to lease fuel tankers from Boeing was "wasteful ... pork-barrel spending." Aggressive proselytizing by fundamentalist Christian chaplains at the Air Force Academy was "evangelical jihad."

Yet just this January, Korb and his colleagues at the left-leaning Center for American Progress were paid a personal visit by none other than the new Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Michael Moseley, who spent more than an hour answering any and all questions.

"He did a great job," Korb said. "I was pleasantly astounded when Moseley came over -- and he asked to come. I couldn't imagine [Chief of Staff John] Jumper, his predecessor, doing that," or most other military leaders for that matter. "They go out and give speeches," Korb said, but to volunteer for a face-to-face, freewheeling conversation with critics? "I've never heard of it."

But Moseley's new approach goes beyond the comfort zone of many Air Force officers, most of whom are pilots and engineers who struggle to explain some of the military's most costly and complex programs to nonspecialists.

Even more than the other services, "the Air Force is a fairly insular organization," said the Lexington Institute's Loren Thompson, a consultant to major defense contractors. "It would rather preach to the choir than to proselytize. The new chief of staff of the Air Force understands he has to change the culture of his organization when it comes to communicating to outsiders. I'm not sure that any of his last five predecessors understand it was necessary. But he does."

For decades, from the atom-bombing of Japan, to the missile race with Russia, to the air war over Kosovo, the Air Force could take its strategic pre-eminence for granted. For decades, from Jimmy Stewart starring in Strategic Air Command, to Clint Eastwood in Firefox, to Kurt Russell in Stargate, the Air Force could count on the general public accepting that pre-eminence.

Then, amateur pilots armed with box cutters got four hijacked planes past all of our costly defenses, and the United States began a long global war with elusive, low-tech guerrillas.

"As long as the military is fighting in Iraq, the Army and the Marine Corps are going to get the lion's share of media coverage," said Dave Moniz, an award-winning reporter for USA Today until the Air Force hired him as its in-house media expert in December. "The challenge for the Air Force," Moniz said, "and frankly for the Navy as well, is to get people to tell the newsworthy, compelling stories they have."

Hiring Moniz is just one part of a wholesale overhaul of the service's public-affairs arm, which does everything from issuing press releases, to answering reporters' queries, to booking Air Force bands.

In October, just a month after Gen. Moseley was sworn in as chief, he issued orders to nearly double the number of airmen working in the Pentagon public-affairs, or PA, bureau (from 59 to a projected 110, according to leaked draft plans). And he formed two new internal councils (one at the major/ colonel level, the other at the one-star/two-star general level) that explicitly give public affairs a seat at the planning table alongside every other part of the Air Force's top staff.

To orchestrate it all, Moseley has not only named a new chief of public affairs, a one-star general's job, but also created a new two-star position to direct "strategic communications."

"As a one-star, you don't always have the access," said Erwin Lessel, the brigadier general named to fill the new position. His pending promotion to major general will give the new communications director equal status with the Air Force's budget and legislative affairs chiefs. His expanding staff will allow the Air Force not only to catch up with the crazed new world of 24/7 cable and Internet outlets but also to get ahead of the news cycle with more long-range planning and market research.

"We need to understand our audiences, which we haven't done well in the past," Lessel said. "And we need to be precise in getting information to these audiences," which include the general public, potential recruits, retired officers, current airmen, op-ed writers, and congressional staffers.

"In the past, public affairs has not been properly resourced to be proactive," said Lessel. "They are getting attention now."

Attention, however, does not necessarily equal respect. Neither Lessel nor his deputy -- Col. Michelle Johnson, the new chief of public affairs, who will be promoted to brigadier general -- is actually trained as a public-affairs officer. Both are cargo pilots with numerous command and staff jobs to their credit, but Lessel has only a single, eight-month tour as a spokesman in Baghdad, and Johnson has no communications experience at all.

Since 1975, noted one retired public-affairs officer, the head of Air Force public affairs has usually been a public-affairs specialist, with just three exceptions. One was Lessel and Johnson's immediate predecessor, Brig. Gen. Frederick Roggero. The two other nonspecialists were appointed by Gen. Merrill McPeak, chief of staff from 1990 to 1994.

"The two people he put in were both good," said the former officer, but with the back-to-back appointments of outsiders, "the message was, 'McPeak doesn't trust us.' "

Many public-affairs officers are hearing that message again today. "It shook up a lot of people in the career field," said a second former public-affairs officer, "and some people are considering retirement."

Lessel and Johnson insist that they come to praise public affairs, not to bury it. "We didn't blow anyone else out of the way," Johnson said. "We need to nurture this career field. One of my primary goals is to build a force of public-affairs professionals who are able to take my job. We don't have anyone postured to take that position [today]."

Johnson's tough-love assessment may not be unjustified. "The Air Force has historically underperformed in getting the word out," said Richard Aboulafia, aviation analyst for the Fairfax, Va.-based Teal Group. When top generals lobbied unsuccessfully last year for more F-22s, he noted, "the broad congressional relations and public-relations hard work was given short shrift."

It's not as if there weren't successful models elsewhere in the military. "If you talk to reporters," said Moniz, "[most] would say that the Navy does public affairs very, very well and has for a long time, [while] the Air Force has neglected public affairs."

Kenneth Bacon, a former reporter who became Pentagon spokesman during the Clinton administration, agreed. "By far, the Navy and the Marines have been the most successful at public affairs," he said.

In the Navy in particular, he added, "they get these guys as young lieutenants, they work their way up through the system, and they know one of them is going to end up as chief of naval information," the top Navy spokesman.

So while the outsiders now heading Air Force public affairs have made "a good start," Bacon said, "if you really want to improve public affairs, you need to make it a productive career path: Build a strong cadre of young officers and promote them up the chain until one of them becomes the top person in public affairs."

Until then, the Air Force must make the best case it can. A month after Gen. Moseley's meeting with Larry Korb, the administration's 2007 budget requested $439 billion for defense, including some, but not all, of the Air Force's desired F-22s. Even before the budget's official release, Korb was telling reporters that the F-22 buy should be slashed and the savings spent on more ground troops for Iraq.

"Moseley did a very good job of saying why you need the F-22," Korb said. "But he didn't change the essentials."

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