Nuts, Bolts, and Death

...Visit the Pentagon today and you will find the halls jammed with majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels spending the majority of their time as grossly overpaid filing clerks...

...But training for war is expensive...

...That's why we keep them around...

...Across-the-board cuts in the O&M budget won't solve this problem...

...In his new book, The Straw Giant, long-time defense journalist Arthur Hadley tells of flying on a 20-yearold B-52 bomber with bald tires, a leaking hydraulic system, and a gyro system repaired in flight by a crumpled fruit juice can...

...The "Reforger" exercise of NATO troops in Germany in 1985 cost $115 million...

...the Navy, 22 percent...

...It's not as if we don't know better, for the military has gone through this drill before...

...Writing in The New York Times last July, Adam Yarmolinsky pointed out that the fiscal 1987 Pentagon budget that was prepared in February, when compared with budget plans for fiscal 1987 prepared in 1985, "cuts spare parts purchases for the Air Force by 39 percent...

...Studies by the Pentagon, Congress, and the General Accounting Office (GAO) show that sharing maintenance facilities can save hundreds of thousands of dollars...

...Take a letter, General "Every time we have a budget cut," one Pentagon office worker told me over a decade ago, explaining another way wrong-headed cuts can undermine battlefield effectiveness, "they fire the indians and keep the chiefs because the chiefs are able to protect their jobs...

...But now they're to the point where the chiefs are the indians...

...Moving in the right direction, the Pentagon recently announced that if it had to, it was prepared to eliminate an entire Army division, an entire Navy carrier task force, and stretch out the procurement of 25 major weapons systems...

...Not surprisingly, House and Senate conferees on the fiscal 1987 defense authorization bill agreed last September to cut an additional $2 billion from O&M, despite acknowledging the fact that such a reduction would hurt combat readiness...

...That price was paid in blood by somebody's son at Bataan and at Kasserine Pass in the opening days of World War II...

...Welltrained soldiers can make up for deficiencies in equipment, but even the most modern and sophisticated weapons systems are just so much useless junk without those with the skill to operate them in the face of the enemy...

...She was absolutely right...

...Joint training exercises are even more costly...

...Then conducting a study of the duties of majors and lieutenant colonels working on the Army General Staff, I found that almost 70 percent of their time was spent on clerical duties—filing papers, standing in line at the Xerox machines, writing memos in longhand to be fed to the typing pool...

...NUTS, BOLTS, & DEATH by harry summers The unofficial motto of the tank company in Japan I was assigned to in 1949 was "on requisition ." Among many things on back order was a starter-solenoid for the company's tank retriever...

...This is as true today as in the days of George Washington, who once said, "There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy...

...The folly of this approach is, of course, that preparation is the most important thing our armed forces do in peacetime...

...Better they were in the National Guard," I told my brigade commander...

...Individual services, for instance, normally refuse to share maintenance facilities, even for identical vehicles...

...And too many of my friends paid that same price in the Pusan Perimeter in Korea...

...But cut back too far and modernization itself is meaningless...

...Just a month after commanding a regiment made up of thousands of men and millions of dollars worth of equipment, complained one Marine colonel recently, he was just another desk clerk...

...Fuel to run tanks and airplanes and ships costs lots of money...

...Because the company had done no cold-weather exercises in five years, time-consuming training would be required "if we were called upon to deploy to a cold weather region ." Developing marksmanship, whether riflemen, artillerymen, tankers, fighter pilots, or naval gun crews, takes a lot of extraordinarily expensive missiles and ammunition...

...the Army, 32 percent ." Certainly there is fat in the operations and maintenance (O&M) budget from which spare parts are purchased...

...The nation is better served by openly accepting such an increased risk to its worldwide interests than by surreptitiously returning to the "hollow" military of the 1970s that gave Americans—but not America's enemies, who knew better—the dangerous illusion that we possessed power that in fact we did not really have...

...What began as an attempt to cut costs ended up with a situation where officers were paid $40,000 a year to perform tasks better performed by an $8,000-a-year Private First Class...

...An aircraft carrier, for instance, costs $500,000 a day out of port...

...It still hadn't arrived when our company was sent into combat in Korea...

...If the budget crisis forces military cuts, then America must also cut back on its commitments to use military force as an instrument of its foreign policy...

...At Fort Bragg, Los Angeles Times reporter James Gerstenzang recently found that a training exercise in central Alaska had been cancelled for budgetary reasons...

...As The Washington Post's Rick Atkinson .and Fred Hiatt recently found, "munitions are so expensive that it is common for even experienced pilots never to have fired some of the most important missiles in the arsenal...

...They Harry Summers is the senior military analyst at U.S...

...This kind of thinking is long overdue...

...The usual justification for cutting training costs is that to protect modernization we can afford to cut back on readiness...

...simply create another one: impaired readiness of combat units in the field...

...My company commander and two of my garrison roommates were killed as they tried to escape—all because of a missing piece of wire that cost about seventy-five cents...

...We should not exact that price again...

...At least they'd have had two weeks summer training ?' It wouldn't have been enough, but it would have been two weeks more than they got at Fort Hood...

...Since solenoids, unlike military bases and weapons systems, don't have a constituency, these funds have few champions in Congress...

...The only way the retriever, a kind of armored tow truck, could be started was by being towed itself, and when in the midst of a combat recovery operation it stalled after the driver was shot, the crew couldn't get it going again...

...For too long Defense Department budget-cutters have ignored the ugly effects of cuts in readiness accounts...

...A decade later nothing has changed...

...News and World Report...

...There are few people in the unit who know how to fight in a winter environment," the commander of the unit told Gerstenzang...

...As the operations officer in the mid-1960s of a mechanized infantry battalion at Fort Hood, I felt I had blood on my hands when the troops under my command—who had spent all their time pulling maintenance on Armored Personnel Carriers—were later sent to Vietnam as rifleman...

...Sadly, that's not just ancient history...