Analysts: Air power crucial upon new threat

Analysts: Air power crucial upon new threat

 

By William H. McMichael - Staff writer

Posted : Tuesday Jan 15, 2008 6:19:03 EST

 

If the U.S. were to face a new conventional threat, its military could not respond effectively without turning to air power, officials and analysts say.

 

That is the ultimate upshot of the war in Iraq: a response elsewhere would consist largely of U.S. fighters and bombers — even, perhaps, some degree of nuclear strike — because so many ground troops are tied up in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

 

And that leaves at least some senior U.S. leaders and analysts crossing their fingers.

 

“I believe that we, as a nation, are at risk of mission failure should our Army be called to deploy to an emerging threat,” Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee, said last year, basing his assessment on classified Army readiness reports.

 

“Iraq is sort of sucking all the oxygen out of the room,” said Tammy Schultz, who studies ground forces for the Center for a New American Security, a relatively new Washington think tank dedicated to “strong, pragmatic and principled” security and defense policies.

 

“My huge fear is that ... we’re really putting the nation at risk,” Schultz said. “It could reach absolutely tragic levels if the United States has to respond to a major contingency any time in the near future.”

 

The Army is bearing the brunt of the fight, and senior leaders readily acknowledge that.

 

“We are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight and unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other contingencies,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 15.

 

The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2006 that Army readiness rates had declined to the lowest levels since the end of the Vietnam War, with roughly half of all Army units, active and reserve, at the lowest readiness ratings for currently available units. Casey told the Senate committee that training and readiness levels for nondeployed units have “actually stayed about the same since last summer — and it’s not good.”

 

The Marine Corps isn’t as heavily committed in Iraq in terms of raw numbers, but leathernecks’ shorter deployments come more frequently. And as the heavy requirements of Iraq shorten the time back home to train for missions other than counterinsurgency, most nondeployed forces simply are not ready for other types of combat, be it amphibious assault or combined-arms warfare.

 

“While the readiness of deployed units remains high, we have experienced a decrease in the readiness of some nondeployed units,” Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, told Ortiz’s subcommittee March 13.

 

The Corps has “a limited ability to provide trained forces to project power in support of other contingencies,” Magnus said.

 

Beyond the ground forces

But readiness problems are not limited to the ground forces. Air Force operational readiness rates are 17 percent below the level before Sept. 11, 2001 — only 53 percent of Air Force units, many using aging aircraft that require more frequent repairs, were considered “green,” or fully mission-capable, as of March, according to service data.

 

“The Air Force’s case is a lot different than the other services,” said an Air Force officer with extensive Pentagon staff experience who asked not to be identified. “This is not an air war. This is a ground war that is being fought with a lot of air power.”

 

Only the Navy, not heavily tasked with Iraq war duties, feels like it’s ready to take on another contingency.

 

“The Navy’s current readiness remains excellent,” Adm. Robert Willard, vice chief of naval operations, told the House subcommittee in March.

 

But even that service’s budget has been trimmed to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in fewer steaming days for nondeployed forces.

 

The Navy and Air Force also have been heavily tasked to provide individual personnel with skills uniquely suited to supporting the wars — including Seabees, medics, loadmasters, explosive ordnance disposal experts, civil affairs specialists and special operations troops.

 

Most spec-ops specialties are chronically underfilled, according to a June CNAS report by Schultz and Michèle Flournoy, “Shaping Ground Forces for the Future.”

 

They also note that 85 percent of all deployed Army Special Forces troops are working in the U.S. Central Command area of operations, leaving few available for other missions.

 

National Guard and reserve forces also are getting a sustained workout that is causing major strains on what were once known as “weekend warriors.”

 

As Casey put it: “Our reserve components are performing an operational role for which they were neither originally designed nor resourced.”

 

The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, agrees the U.S. lacks “full-spectrum capabilities across all our forces,” and he says he wants the military to “rebalance strategic risk.” Mullen acknowledges the U.S. has assumed a posture of higher strategic risk, but says that has been done “consciously,” given the demands of the current wars.

 

But like his predecessor, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, Mullen is emphatic that the U.S. could effectively respond should an unexpected conflict arise.

 

“We’ve got a lot of reserve capability and capacity in our Air Force and in our Navy,” he said while returning from an October visit to Army bases in the Midwest. “That is a big risk-reduction capability. And from a strategic reserve, that’s the case.”

 

But ground troops are a different story.

 

“Clearly, if we had to do something with our ground forces, a significant substitute would be a big challenge,” Mullen said, adding that the response “would obviously depend on the circumstances of what happened in what part of the world.”

 

“But you’ve also got to think about the probabilities of [a contingency] happening,” Mullen said. “And right now, in many parts of the world, those probabilities are pretty low.”

 

Despite the demands of the current wars, Pace insisted earlier this year that U.S. forces have “enormous power and capacity” and could defeat any potential enemy.

 

“There’s zero doubt about the outcome,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. “It would simply take us longer than we’d like.”

 

To some extent, the story is cyclical. Similar concerns were expressed 10 years ago during the post-Cold War drawdown, in which droves of midlevel leaders left or were forced out of service and money for equipment maintenance shriveled up.

 

The same held true after Vietnam, when the quality of the new all-volunteer force suffered during a massive drawdown and did not significantly improve until two double-digit pay raises were approved in the early 1980s.

 

The Navy and Air Force are shrinking once again. U.S. ground forces are growing, but slowly. Meanwhile, all are consumed to some extent with the trying and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which continue to weigh on each service’s ability to respond elsewhere.

 

Equipment shortfalls worsen

Top officials, typically reticent to admit shortcomings, have finally started to publicly highlight problems, mainly in an effort to get Congress to fund needed repairs.

 

“Overall, we’re consuming our readiness as fast as we can build it,” Casey said.

 

There’s also a lack of ready equipment back home on which to train. Casey said that since 2003, equipment has been used at five times the normal rate.

 

About 40 percent of Marine and Army ground equipment is in Iraq. Over the past three years, Marine gear has been used at nine times the planned rate. And the Corps had a $12 billion equipment shortfall in fiscal 2007.

 

The Pentagon says it needs a big chunk of change to reverse the overall situation: $46.4 billion for the Army’s next two years of “reset and reconstitution,” $10.2 billion for the Corps and $20 billion over fiscal 2008-2013 for the Guard and reserve.

 

Providing air support for the twin wars is wearing down the Air Force, as well. Old planes are being heavily used, driving up maintenance time and costs. And 42 percent of airmen who deploy are going for six months or longer, when the standard air expeditionary force rotation is four months.

 

Recruiting is not an issue, nor is the quality of the current crop of recruits.

 

But airlift specialists and in-lieu-of forces, drawn from across the Air Force, are heavily deployed.

 

“You have to rely on airlift,” the former Pentagon staff officer pointed out. “The forces have to be moved in and out of theater.” That’s keeping loadmasters, pilots and other specialists on the go. And, in the longer term, the age of the fleet is an issue.

 

“Despite our best efforts, we face declining readiness and soaring re-capitalization rates,” said Gen. John Corley, Air Force vice chief of staff.

 

Meanwhile, the Army National Guard and Army Reserve are trying to recover from the practice of pooling gear to equip combat forces, sometimes leaving their gear behind in the war zones for use by follow-on forces.

 

That policy has “increased the un-readiness in our next-to-deploy forces and limits our ability to respond to emerging strategic contingencies,” Lt. Gen. James Lovelace, Army deputy chief of staff for operations, recently told Congress.

 

“All reserve component units have been either partially or completely mobilized in support of the global war on terrorism,” Lovelace said. “Undermanned to begin with, they had to rely on volunteers and extensive cross-leveling from other units to fill their ranks.”

 

Even backup ground forces have been consumed.

 

“We’ve always kept one brigade of the 82nd Airborne [Division] at home — even in Korea and Vietnam,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as Pentagon personnel chief during President Reagan’s first term. “That was our strategic ground reserve.”

 

Now, he said, all four brigades in that division are deployed.

 

The way ahead

Uniformed officials speak carefully about the Iraq war’s effect on readiness because such comments could be construed as a criticism of administration policy.

 

But others note that drawing down the Iraq war is the obvious first step in improving readiness in the short term. As that continues, and even as the Army and Marine Corps grow, Schultz said she sees three “tensions” that must be resolved to truly resolve the readiness crisis.

 

First is the issue of quality vs. quantity. Army recruiters are signing up the required 80,000 troops each year needed to grow the force, Schultz said, but only by allowing in a larger number of less-qualified recruits with lower test scores, and by draining its delayed-entry manpower pool, raising the maximum enlistment age and making other concessions to depth and quality.

 

“They might be getting numbers, but there’s certainly a quality issue at stake here,” she said. “The future contingencies ... are going to require more skilled soldiers, not less skilled. So if you are hitting quantity targets at the sacrifice of quality ... that could have some pretty disturbing implications.”

 

Air Force Gen. Lance Smith, who stepped down as chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command on Nov. 9, is convinced that end-strength growth ultimately will increase dwell time and, in turn, help solve the readiness problem.

 

“The answer ... is to grow the force so that you have sufficient time with your soldiers and your units between their deployments into theater to be able to train in all the responsibilities that you have,” Smith said. “You can’t do that adequately in 12 months for a normal combat brigade.”

 

Unfortunately, there is no near-term fix; such growth takes time — several years, at least.

 

“We would have had to start growing the Army and Marine Corps five years ago for it to have made a difference today,” Schultz said.

 

The second tension Schultz said she sees is the schism between combatant commanders in the field and senior leaders in Washington. The most recent example, she said, was when Casey appeared on Capitol Hill on Sept. 26 to talk about the broader readiness issues in his service — barely two weeks after Gen. David Petraeus, who succeeded Casey as Multi-National Force-Iraq commander, talked to Congress about security improvements in Iraq and asked for more time and money for that specific mission.

 

“Iraq requirements are demanding a large commitment of soldiers,” Schultz said. “Those in the field are being hit with different pressures of ongoing operations, while those in D.C. are really looking at the health of the future volunteer force.”

 

The third tension lies between the need to “reset” the force — which Schultz said involves personnel as well as equipment — and the need to modernize.

 

“When our deployments in Iraq do start going down — which they will in the spring, no matter what, because we just can’t sustain it unless we want to risk the all-volunteer force — when the supplemental [funding bills] start going down and/or away ... a lot of technology innovations are sort of tucked in those supplementals,” Schultz said.

 

Defense officials will have to persuade Congress to approve funding for those programs in the regular annual defense budget.

 

Even if these tensions are addressed, Schultz and Flournoy wrote that in a strategic sense, a fundamental shift in orientation needs to take place; the Pentagon needs to create a force “that is truly full spectrum — with greater capacity for irregular operations while retaining the ability to prevail in high-end war fighting against conventional or WMD-armed foes.”

 

For the moment, Schultz said, “there is a crisis — and I think it’s only going to increase.”

 

She talks with many officers about these issues for her studies.

 

“All of them are terrified that we’re currently on the third rotation” in Iraq, she said. “This is unprecedented for an all-volunteer force, with the exception, I think, of the Revolutionary War.”

 

As the new senior U.S. officer, Mullen hasn’t yet shown his hand, but he says he will not stand by and watch the force be broken.

 

In comments after his first post-confirmation speech, Mullen told a Washington gathering that he is “eager to work with our service chiefs, our combatant commanders, as together we ... reset, reconstitute and revitalize our armed forces, especially our ground forces ... and we properly rebalance our risks around the globe.”

 

Find Marinecorpstimes.com article here.