Doug Henwood Talks

Wall Street Journal - December 11, 2006

Escalating Tab

Despite Its $168 Billion Budget, The Army Faces a Cash Crunch After Years of Gearing Up For High-Tech Warfare, Service Is Short on Basics

Humvees Rise to $225,000

By GREG JAFFE FORT STEWART, Ga. — With just six weeks before they leave for Iraq,
the 3,500 soldiers from the Third Infantry Division’s First Brigade
should be learning about Ramadi, the insurgent stronghold where they
will spend a year.

Many of the troops don’t even know the basic ethnic makeup of the
largely Sunni city. “We haven’t spent as much time as I would like on
learning the local culture, language, and politics — all the stuff
that takes a while to really get good at,” says Lt. Col. Clifford
Wheeler, who commands one of the brigade’s 800-soldier units.

Instead, the troops are learning to use equipment that commanders say
they should ideally have been training with since the spring. Many
soldiers only recently received their new M-4 rifles and rifle
sights, which are in short supply because of an Army-wide cash
crunch. Some still lack their machine guns or long-range surveillance
systems, which are used to spot insurgents laying down roadside
bombs. They’ve been told they’ll pick up most of that when they get
to Iraq.

The strains here at Fort Stewart — one of the busiest posts in the
U.S. military — are apparent throughout the Army. They spotlight a
historic predicament: The Iraq war has exposed more than a decade’s
worth of mistakes and miscalculations that are now seriously
undermining the world’s mightiest military force.

In the 15 years after the Cold War, senior military planners and
civilian-defense officials didn’t build a force geared to fighting
long, grinding guerrilla wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead
they banked on fighting quick wars, dominated by high-tech weapons
systems.

The result: At a time when the war in Iraq is deepening, and debate
over pulling out the troops is intensifying, the rising cost of
waging the fight is outpacing even the Army’s huge budget. The
financial squeeze is leaving the Army short of equipment and key
personnel.

The situation has the Army seeking billions more for next year, even
as younger officers, frustrated with the pace of change, say that any
improvements depend more on how the money is spent than on how much
is spent.

From 1990 to 2005, the military lavished money on billion-dollar
destroyers, fighter jets and missile-defense systems. Defenders of
such programs say the U.S. faces a broad array of threats and must be
prepared for all of them. High-tech weaponry contributed to the swift
toppling of the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has been of
little help in the more difficult task of stabilizing the two countries.

Of the $1.9 trillion the U.S. spent on weaponry in that period,
adjusted for inflation, the Air Force received 36% and the Navy got
33%. The Army took in 16%, it says. Despite the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, both dominated by ground forces, the ratio hasn’t
changed significantly.

Overly optimistic predictions by the Bush administration — and the
Army — have made the Army’s budget crunch worse. Both assumed troop
numbers in Iraq would drop significantly by 2006 and the Army
wouldn’t need as much money as it initially requested. Instead, costs
have soared, forcing front-line commanders and Pentagon generals to
try to meet an ever-growing list of demands with insufficient resources.

“Our ground forces have been stretched nearly to the breaking point,”
warned the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in its recent report. “The
defense budget as a whole is in danger of disarray.”

The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle –
helmets, rifles, body armor — has more than tripled to $25,000 from
$7,000 in 1999.

The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic
jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to
about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.

The cost of paying and training troops has grown 60% to about
$120,000 per soldier, up from $75,000 in 2001. On the reserve side,
such costs have doubled since 2001, to about $34,000 per soldier.

At Fort Knox, Ky., the cash crunch got so bad this summer that the
Army ran out of money to pay janitors who clean the classrooms where
captains are taught to be commanders. So the officers, who will soon
be leading 100-soldier units, clean the office toilets themselves.

“The cost of the Army is being driven up by [Iraq and Afghanistan].
That’s the fundamental story here,” says Brig. Gen. Andrew Twomey, a
senior official on the Army staff in the Pentagon. The increased
costs are “not from some wild weapons system that is off in the
future. These are costs associated with current demands.”

Senior Army officials concede they mistakenly assumed prior to the
Iraq war that if they built a force capable of winning big
conventional battles, everything else — from counterinsurgency to
peacekeeping — would be relatively easy. “We argued in those days
that if we could do the top-end skills, we could do all of the other
ones,” says Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the deputy commander of the Army’s
Training and Doctrine Command. Iraq has proven that guerrilla fights
demand different equipment and skills. “I have had to eat a little
crow,” says Gen. Metz.

Army officials say they are doing their best to ensure that Iraq and
Afghanistan-bound brigades have all the equipment they need when they
arrive in the war zone. But to do this, they have had to take
equipment from units training back home, which are now short of even
the most basic gear, such as body armor and rifles.

The equipment shortages explain why Gen. John Abizaid, the top
commander in the Middle East, recently told lawmakers that the U.S.
couldn’t maintain even a relatively small increase of 20,000 soldiers
in Iraq for more than a few months. “The ability to sustain that
commitment is simply not something that we have right now,” he
testified in November.

The other big strain on the Army is a shortage of people. The Army
has made much of the fact that it met its recruiting goals for 2006,
bringing in 80,000 soldiers. But meeting those goals has come at a
heavy cost. The Army spent about $735 million on retention bonuses in
2006 to keep battle-weary troops in the service, up from about $85
million in 2003. And it had to pay about $300 million more on
recruiting this year compared to the year before.

The extra cash didn’t stop the Army from having to lower standards.
Although the quality of the force is still considered good, 8,500
recruits in 2006 required “moral waivers” for criminal misconduct or
past drug use — more than triple the 2,260 waivers the Army issued
10 years ago. The Army also took in more troops who scored in the
bottom third on its aptitude test.

As it has brought in more borderline recruits, the Army has found
itself short of officers and sergeants. Today, it is down about 3,000
active-duty officers, a deficiency that it says will grow to about
3,700 in 2008. It is short more than 7,500 reserve and National Guard
officers, according to internal Army documents.

One of the most pressing personnel problems is the lack of sergeants,
the enlisted leaders who do most of the day-to-day supervising of the
rank-and-file soldiers.

At Fort Hood, Texas, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which
returned from Iraq in March, has about 75% of the soldiers it needs
to fill its ranks, but only about half of its sergeants. The 5,000- soldier unit likely will go back to Iraq in the fall of next year,
and leaders in the regiment say they will get more sergeants before
they deploy, but not as many as they would like.

“The sergeant is the one that the soldiers take after,” says First
Sgt. James Adcock, who oversees about 130 of the unit’s soldiers. “He
can make or break how effective the privates are.”

The large number of young soldiers in the unit combined with the
shortage of sergeants has led to problems, say the regiment’s
leaders. Some also blame the Army’s decision to scale back recruiting
standards and push more troops through basic training. In May 2005,
about 18% of Army’s recruits were asked to leave before completing
initial training. Today, only about 6% of recruits fail to make it
through.

The troops who a year ago might have flunked out of basic training
seem to stick with their units, according to Army statistics. But
some sergeants say they also seem to cause more problems. Sgt. First
Class Rajesh Harripersad, who oversees a 30-soldier platoon, says two
of his soldiers were caught using marijuana and methamphetamines.
Other leaders have seen an increase in accidents on and off the base.
“Discipline has been worse for me this time,” says Sgt. Harripersad.

Once units deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army-wide shortage of
officers and sergeants is felt even more acutely. Teams focused on
key jobs, such as reconstruction and Iraq governance, are “woefully
undermanned,” Col. Bill Hix, a senior Pentagon strategist, recently
wrote in the Hoover Digest, a Stanford University policy journal.
Multiple internal Army studies have concluded that the military
advisory teams, charged with developing Iraqi Army forces so U.S.
troops can go home, need to be doubled or tripled in size.

Often, the soldiers who serve on these undermanned teams finish their
year-long deployments wondering what they have accomplished. “I would
say we’re an effective force for good, but we’re struggling in a sea
of meaningless slaughter — along with everyone else with a job to do
here,” says Sgt. Mastin Greene, who serves on a reconstruction team
in Baghdad.

Some of the Army’s problems are a product of its failure to prepare
for a guerrilla fight in which there are no front lines. Just prior
to the Iraq war, the Army was buying body armor at such a slow rate
that it would have taken 48 years to outfit the entire force. It
invested huge sums in the years leading up to Iraq in Humvees with
canvas doors that are useless for war today.

“The fact that we had certain grim realities that were inescapable
for anyone who wore a uniform in a combat zone just wasn’t something
that was driving our weapons programming,” says Maj. Gen. Stephen
Speakes, who oversees equipping Army units. Army officials now say
that they entered the war short of about $56 billion of essential
equipment.

The Humvee stands as a metaphor for the problems the Army faces.
First fielded in the early 1980s, it was designed to ferry soldiers
around behind the front lines of a conventional war. In recent years,
the vehicle, which troops drive on the streets of Iraq, has been
modified countless times. The Army has bolted layers of armor onto it
to protect troops from roadside bombs. It has added sophisticated
electronic jammers, rotating turrets, bigger machine guns, satellite
navigational systems and better radios.

The result is a Humvee that is much better than the version the Army
took to Iraq in 2003. But the add-ons have driven up its cost. The
modified vehicle is top heavy and tends to tip over at high speeds.
Army officials say they can’t add more weight without overwhelming
the engine or breaking the axle.

“The Army recognizes that the Humvee has reached a limit of our
ability to improve it for the current fight,” Gen. Speakes says.

What the Army says it really needs is an all-new vehicle, designed to
better withstand roadside bombs that have become part of life in
Iraq. But such a vehicle likely won’t be ready until 2010 or 2012,
Army officials say. In the interim, the Army wants to buy something
on the commercial market — South Africa, Turkey and Australia all
make alternatives. Yet it’s not clear whether the Army, which is
struggling to equip the current force, has the money.

The Army has told the Bush administration it needs about $24 billion
more to pay its bills in 2007. Some key lawmakers, such as Democratic
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Republican Sen. John McCain of
Arizona, have called for a bigger Army. But there are also pressures
to restrain spending.

Covering Shortfalls

To cover cash shortfalls, Army posts around the country this summer
laid off janitorial crews, closed swimming pools and didn’t cut the
grass.

In the Pentagon, Army generals cut $3 billion in 2005 and 2006 from
programs for weapons that are in heavy use in Iraq, such as armored
patrol vehicles, trucks, radios and unmanned surveillance planes,
according to Army documents. In June, for example, the Army set aside
about $50 million to buy more long-range radios, which are used
heavily in Iraq. One month later, Army officials, who were short
about $1.5 billion to make end-of-year payroll, took the money back.
Army brigades are supposed to have about 1,300 radios. Today, the
average brigade makes do with about 1,100.

The shortages have been especially hard on the National Guard, which
in some states has only about 40% of the authorized equipment for
homeland defense missions, says Gen. Speakes.

Active-duty troops preparing to go off to war at bases such as Fort
Stewart, Ga., feel the crunch as well. First Sgt. Bradley Feltman,
who will leave in January for his second year-long tour in three
years, says his troop was short of Humvees to train on and had only
25% of the mounts it needed for its machine guns. The lack of
equipment hindered the unit’s ability to train as an entire 130-man
unit. Instead, they trained one 30-soldier platoon at a time.

“We got training, but not graduate-level training. In a couple of
months, my guys are going to be busting down doors, and it will be
the first time they see some of their equipment for real,” he says.

At Fort Hood, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which returned from
Iraq in March and will go back in fall 2007, is already worried about
time to prepare. The regiment will spend most of the winter receiving
new soldiers, fielding new equipment and learning to use it. The
regiment left most of its tanks and Humvees in Iraq for follow-on units.

That means troops won’t have much time to train for other critical
tasks. Junior leaders need to know everything from how to assess a
water plant to the tribal politics of the area where they are
deploying, says Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, the unit’s deputy commander.
They must know enough Arabic to interact with locals.

‘Incredibly Frustrating’

“It is incredibly frustrating for combat veterans to return to Iraq
for the third time with only minimal training on the skills we know
are essential, like language, culture, intelligence and local
security force development” Col. Yingling says. “Army units don’t
fail to train on these tasks because we’re stupid or lazy; we fail
because we don’t have the time to do it right.”

What kind of Army emerges from its searing experience in Iraq will
depend, in part, on how long the U.S. stays there and the foreign- policy goals that civilian leaders set in its aftermath. President
Bush has said that the best way to protect the nation is to spread
democracy. The experience in Iraq demonstrates that such a strategy
requires a bigger Army that is more skilled in tasks such as building
indigenous forces, fostering local government and economic
development. “Revolutionary approaches require a lot of resources,”
says Conrad Crane, the lead author of the Army’s new
counterinsurgency doctrine.

A less-ambitious foreign policy that seeks to promote stability and
preserve the status quo could reduce the pressure to build a bigger
Army with a broader array of skills.

The other big variable is how the Army — particularly officers now
in their 20s and 30s — reacts to the traumatic experience in Iraq.
“We as an Army tend to learn generationally,” says Col. Michael
Meese, who heads the department of social sciences at the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point.

Today’s four-star generals, who joined the service in the early
1970s, spent most of their careers rebuilding an Army that had been
badly damaged by Vietnam. Officers who came of age in the 1980s and
are now colonels and generals were shaped by the Cold War. Their
focus was on how to defeat a Soviet-style army.

Today’s younger officers, whose defining experiences have been in
Iraq and Afghanistan, see the world differently. The gulf was clear
last month in their reaction to the dismissal of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. Many senior officers quietly celebrated his
departure. Like the retired generals who earlier this year called for
Mr. Rumsfeld to be fired, they placed the blame for the Army’s
failures in Iraq largely on his shoulders.

Junior officers were more indifferent. They tended to view Mr.
Rumsfeld as “part of a larger problem that hasn’t been solved yet,”
says Kalev Sepp, a former Special Forces officer who worked
extensively in Iraq. Among many of these officers, there is great
frustration not just with the defense secretary but also with the
generals who serve above them.

“Junior officers know that success in these wars is about a lot more
than killing the enemy. It depends on providing security for the
people, finding friends and fixing infrastructure,” says Maj. John
Prior, who served as a company commander in Baghdad. “A lot of senior
officers just don’t get it.”

While the Army’s new draft counterinsurgency doctrine sounds these
same themes, senior commanders in Iraq have been slow to embrace
them. The doctrine says troops must live among the Iraqi people, on
small bases run by junior leaders. But since 2004, commanders have
consolidated U.S. troops on 55 large fortified bases, down from about
110 a year ago.

The new doctrine says that when battling an insurgency,
reconstruction dollars are as important as ammunition. In recent
months, though, more restrictions have been placed on how junior
leaders can spend money in their sectors. “What’s funny is that all
politics and services are local, so the [junior] commanders need the
greatest flexibility” said Brig. Gen. Ed Cardon, who returned from
Iraq this year, in an interview compiled by the Army for its oral- history archives. “Why don’t we just trust the commander who said he
spent $100?”

Some question how quickly the Army will be able to shift its
thinking. “All our organizations are designed around the least
important line of operations in these fights — combat operations,”
says Col. Yingling. “If you spend your whole career in tanks, you
tend to see the solution to every problem as a tank.”

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