Our Military Condition
Lehman, John
M I TAR CONDITION America's armed forces have been diverted into "peacekeeping" and domestic policing, subjected to the egalitarian schemes of social engineers, aliented from civilian society,...
...But a strong diplomacy requires a strong defense...
...of the Cincinnatus of the west, George Washington...
...M I TAR CONDITION America's armed forces have been diverted into "peacekeeping" and domestic policing, subjected to the egalitarian schemes of social engineers, aliented from civilian society, and dangerously deprived of the arms they need...
...Our credibility in dissuading those rogues from attacking our interests, from developing and then using nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, is diminishing before our eyes and the eyes of the world...
...Almost unnoticed, the historic concept of the citizen-soldier that George Washington gave to us is disappearing...
...Used as place holders between warring ethnic factions, and saddled with rules of engagement that guaranteed that they could not fight back, they were inevitably targeted by those who wished to drive us out of Lebanon in humiliation...
...Certainly there are women who have the talent and desire to be attack bombardiers or commandos skilled in hand-to-hand combat...
...By accepting that new (and I believe unconstitutional) mission, the services have become de facto police...
...Ironically, the lack of a strong military leads only to its more frequent use...
...The measures of rehabilitation as suggested above, or others like them, can flow only from a single cardinal virtue, the assertion of leadership...
...Recruiting norms are set to favor those who will commit to career service...
...Given the vast global breadth of our vital interests, obligations and entanglements, our interdepen24 October 1998 • The American Spectator dence of trade, commerce and resources, we have steeply reduced the capabilities of our forces...
...As we have cut the forces 40 percent over the last five years, the bureaucracy has not been cut at all...
...WHAT IS WRONG There are some glaring things wrong with our defense preparedness...
...We need forces that are representative of society, drawn from all social levels and welded into forces that are in the tradition of this country's founding fathers...
...Increasingly the way to rise in the armed forces is by serving as a "peacekeeper" in civic action in Bosnia or some other ethnic trouble spot, and in mollifying and mediating ,,tj disputes among warring factions...
...Constitution, in the first days of our Navy, when the original six frigates were built in different cities...
...The Navy, for instance, has cut back from over seventy drilling reserve ships to only four...
...The military must not be an employment agency of last resort, nor a closed self-perpetuating corps of janissaries remote from the rest of society...
...In the nuclear states of India and Pakistan, ethnic passions can overwhelm caution...
...26 October 19 9 8 • The American Spectator As the only superpower, our ground forces are inevitably targets and there are many other noncontroversial nations quite willing and able to provide ground peacekeepers...
...After every war we have disarmed, and by the heedlessness of those disarmaments we have usually sown the seeds of the JOHN LEHMAN iS chairman off...
...As a result the military does not include anything like a cross-section of our society...
...While we are not repeating exactly what happened after World War II and after World War I, the recent example of our inability to deter Saddam Hussein suggests certain parallels...
...And for the first time in history we have a presidential cabinet completely devoid of military experience (the only arguable exception being Vice-President Gore...
...It's the surest barometer in the world...
...The arsenal of the former Soviet Union remains partially unaccounted for...
...The broader result has been the gradual separation of our military from the society it serves, and a growing feeling of contempt in the career forces for the society that they defend...
...This is already reflected in the last class to enter Congress with only 15 percent of its members having had any military exposure at all...
...Women should be allowed into every specialty in which they can compete and win that rating or win that job against all corners...
...When you see liberal Democrats in the northeast pushing through a nuclear submarine that the Navy didn't want, you know that we have got a serious problem of distortion...
...We need to reduce the pork...
...Reorganize and reduce the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the military departments, all the defense agencies, all of the bureaucrats, civilian and military, the staff of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the proliferating unified command staffs...
...INCREASE PROCUREMENT We must have armed forces that are sustainable in cost...
...The last of the serious disorders I see afflicting our services is the de facto unilateral disarmament underway in our defense procurement policies...
...One grave error has been the excessive use of American troops for peacekeeping...
...The rising generation of corporate, professional, and educational leaders is similarly unfamiliar with the military, its virtues and peculiar limitations...
...The Reagan administration sent forces abroad eighteen times to tamp down crises...
...We should offer ROTC service academy graduates the option of performing their obligated service with a long commitment in the drilling reserves...
...This administration has required everyone from young recruits to four-star generals to pretend that up is down and day is night, and to parrot statements that clash with what they see with their own eyes every day...
...That has helped us to eliminate the annual budget deficit, and has freed up much technical and engineering talent for cornmercial and civilian technological development...
...With respect to social engineering, the solution is simple: no double standards...
...Nor is the average American any longer familiar, either directly or through relatives, with our armed forces...
...We now have only one superpower but no accepted order...
...The American Spectator • October 1998 27...
...A recent book by Thomas Ricks, Making the Corps, offers a thoroughly researched insight into the trend...
...This is not a world in which to indulge euphoria, or to resume the American tradition of drastic disarmament...
...Push out into the private sector much that is being done in those last pockets of real socialism and state ownership, the industrial facilities of the armed forces like the Naval Weapons Centers and the Army arsenals and naval shipyards...
...The lesson has not been learned...
...As fighting units have been almost halved, joint staffs have ballooned...
...We must also come to grips with the double standard in the draft...
...Every i8-year-old male has to register for the draft today, but no woman has to...
...But the scarcity of people in Congress with any military experience has meant that pork barrel runs wild and is grotesquely distorting procurement and the use of the scarce dollars appropriated to the services...
...WHAT WE NEED We need deterrence...
...Whether they can be carried out in this bureaucracy-loving administration I don't know, but they are targeted on exactly the right things: Cut the bureaucracy by a third...
...First, the mission of our armed forces is to fight wars...
...Using the armed forces for drug interdiction is yet another serious mistake...
...And indeed there are quite a few officers vocally arguing for giving the military the powers to detain suspects, confiscate weapons and conduct searches without warrants as they do on occasion in the drug interdiction campaign...
...Today's armed forces are a special caste of highly skilled professionals...
...and the U.N...
...the Bush administration, fourteen times...
...It is very hard, except in the Army, to get a two-year enlistment...
...The president charged with the sacred duty of protecting the forces under his command, from the braying political mob of partisan hacks, feminazis, porkers, and contract seekers, has instead delivered them over to these enemies who have had their way with them unimpeded...
...It is just as bad in each of the services...
...Another serious problem area, emerging in the last decade, has been civil-military relations...
...I, for one, do not believe that we need to go beyond the current percent of GDP spent for defense...
...This disorder flourishes along with a proliferation of horrendous weapons of mass destruction...
...There are currently 130,000 civilian bureaucrats, about 5,000 more than there were when the Cold War ended, in the Department of Defense inside the Beltway...
...Ricks quotes officers who believe that "American society is showing signs of serious decay," and who predict that "'the next war we fight is very likely to be here on American soil.'" "The subject of domestic peacekeeping," Ricks reports, "is now a hot topic in all of the command and staff college courses in the country...
...To involve the services in domestic law enforcement is to cross a dangerous line in the separation of powers...
...The Republicans in Congress have acted at best like the cowardly neighbors of Kitty Genovese, averting their eyes from a murder, while many have simply joined in the despoliation...
...We now know that Saddam Hussein has used biological and chemical agents, and continues to strive for nuclear capability even as he gives the U.S...
...Irrational, utterly unpredictable rogue states such as North Korea and Libya are developing access to nuclear weapons, biological agents and chemical weapons, and the means to deliver them...
...Recent American policy following the historic victory in the Cold War has been no exception to this historical pattern...
...So far in the Clinton administration, only five years old, forces have been deployed some fifty times...
...Psychological profiles have been developed to be able to select and give priority for admissions to service academies' officer programs, and technical enlisted programs to those who are most likely to serve a full career...
...Under Reagan and Bush, the Guard and Reserve fought in Desert Storm and all of the other conflicts and crises that brought victory in the Cold War...
...Secretary of Defense Cohen just came out with what I think is the best program of reforms that I have seen in the postwar period...
...We must infuse our armed forces with the same constant innovation, constant velocity of change in the use and development and application of technology and information that has characterized the tremendous renaissance of American productivity over the last decade...
...They must meet standards appropriate to their profession and specialty...
...The tremendous savings to be gained by those measures should be plowed back into new equipment and new research and development...
...Those 241 marines killed in the bombing of their barracks in Lebanon in 1983 died because—despite the express opposition of the Marine Commandant—they had been turned into diplomats...
...AN Will Rogers once said that "if you want to know when the next war might be coming you just watch the United States and see when it starts cutting down its defenses...
...Although it is highly unlikely that we will ever need more troops than the all-volunteer force can provide, this disparity is an intellectual and a moral fissure running right through this ideology of gender equality in the services...
...What can be done...
...This should not be an issue of throwing more money at the problem...
...Anyone who puts his papers in to go from the regulars to the reserves is treated as a defector...
...Now they have been cut out of all proportion in order to preserve the bureaucracy...
...loud raspberries...
...For every Captain or Colonel in operational command, there are nine in staffjobs...
...Congressmen should either require the drafting of their constituents' daughters into the infantry or drop the registration of males...
...six years is what the Air Force and Navy try to sell to every recruit...
...Only with such certain capability, and the undoubted will to use it justly, can wars be prevented...
...Perhaps the most debilitating disorder afflicting the services today is the primacy of social engineering...
...A former secretary of the Navy offers his prescription...
...F. Lehman Company...
...Bosnia is well over $9 billion per year by the most conservative accounting and still climbing...
...We all hope that diplomacy works against Saddam, the Iranian terrorist-supporting state, and against all those ethnic conflicts that are disrupting the orderly pattern of peace that we thought we had won in the Cold War...
...In order to deter our enemies, America needs forces that are recruited, trained, and directed to do not social services, not international welfare, not peacekeeping, not drug interdiction, but to rain fire and destruction on our enemies if they break the peace and seek to attack us and our close allies...
...Iran has reportedly obtained contraband tactical nuclear weapons...
...We have changed the recruitment, training, and promotion systems of our armed services to make them more socially acceptable, more politically correct, and more gender-conscious...
...We have in fact a relatively high level of spending in defense today, but spending does not necessarily produce capabilities...
...next war...
...Thomas Jefferson would be horrified...
...In so doing, we have weakened the ability of our forces to face down, deter, and if necessary smash the Saddam Husseins and Osama bin Ladens of the world...
...If they don't fit that profile no matter how otherwise talented, they are not desired...
...It is to deliver violence and destruction on our enemies when our security demands it...
...Like peacekeeping, drug interdiction also distracts from the cultivation of war-fighting skills...
...Lobbing $100 million worth of unmanned cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan while otherwise continuing diplomacy as usual suggests to the world that America no longer has the forces or the will to deal effectively with our enemies...
...The world is a virtual petri-dish of despots, disturbers of the peace and fundamentalist ethnic and economic rivalries not possible under the bi-polar discipline of the Cold War...
...As for the civil-military balance, we must increase the importance of the National Guard and Reserves, changing the way we train and pay them in order to give them a real share in the burdens of peacetime deterrence...
...But they should not be artificially pushed into quotas or allowed lower standards of physical capacity and training than men...
...He was secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987...
...One of the great dividends of defeating the Soviet Union is that we now spend only slightly more than 2 percent of the GDP, down from 6 to 8 percent during most of the Cold War...
...All of these afflictions that now degrade and debauch our forces flow from one cardinal sin...
...In his legendary lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Strausz-Hupe used to say that while history doesn't repeat itself, patterns in history do...
...The history of this country is one of great reluctance to resort to arms, ferocious prosecution once engaged, and euphoric disarmament following victory...
...The political crusade to achieve gender equality is undermining the services' ethical integrity through mandated (though unspoken) quotas, de facto double standards, and McCarthy-style blacklists such as those that followed Tailhook...
...We should be providing what no one else can: the C-5s, the satellite intelligence, the communications, the aircraft carriers, the 24-hour-a-day air cover...
...Many have become virtually permanent, like "Operation Constant Vigil," in northern Iraq...
...Haiti alone cost $2 billion...
...These are costly deployments...
...of the citizen soldiers, and citizen sailors...
...Not one even carries a pistol...
...Those who wish to serve for a period between high school and college with no apparent intent to stay permanently are not encouraged...
...REMEDY THE DISORDERS The first priority should be to restore the war-fighting culture of the forces...
...While the cataclysmic perils of the Cold War are gone, the world remains a very dangerous place...
...It has of course been a part of our system since the U. S.S...
...That's part of democracy...
...Such duty 4 The American Spectator • October 1998 25 demands very different skills from fighting in a war, and the time devoted to training units for the one directly reduces our capability for the other...
...Our forces must be trained and equipped to exploit the huge technological advantage that we as a free and innovative technological society have over every other potential adversary in the world...
...The armed services are not just another branch of the civil service...
...Moreover, trying to seal our borders against drug smuggling is hopeless, and actually aggravates the problem by giving politicians an easy substitute for effective action...
...We should do our part in international peacekeeping with the United Nations or with regional alliances, but our contribution should never be forces on the ground...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
