By Ralph Peters
The One Republic, 03 February 2006
If you found your hilltop house on fire, would you (A) put out the flames, or (B) buy flood insurance? If your answer is "B," you're suited for a job in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).
At a time when our Army and Marines bear by far the heaviest load of our nation's security burdens, OSD proposes reducing the number of soldiers to free up funds for wasteful Cold-War-era weapons systems.
Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.
Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.
The excuse offered by Pentagon political appointees is that we must hedge our bets regarding a future conflict with China. But our military is already two generations ahead of its Chinese counterpart — and the Chinese don't want to fight us.
Yes, we could blunder into war, if we're phenomenally stupid (always a possibility in Washington). But our military already overmatches Beijing's — and, besides, the Chinese would fight us asymmetrically: You don't dog-fight the Big Dog, you poison his food.
OSD wants a force that's all fantasy and no fight, a military designed to cope with a threat that might come someday — if we wish hard enough — but that ignores the gory reality our soldiers and Marines are facing every day right now.
Even the one promising recommendation — to increase our special-operations capabilities — hasn't been thought through in the least.
As proposed by OSD, the Army's active and reserve components would lose at least seven of the already-lean combat brigades proposed for its future force structure. The National Guard and Reserves — who've performed so selflessly and courageously in Iraq and Afghanistan — would give up tens of thousands of soldiers.
Why? Despite the utter failure of the high-tech, from-the-skies model of war during Operation Iraqi Freedom, OSD remains ideologically committed to fantasies of remote-control combat. According to the pretzel logic employed by Pentagon civilians (and in the Air Force), if we reduce the capabilities of our ground forces, we'll have no choice but to rely on technology — thus justifying the technology purchases.
In an age when ground-force missions will only continue to increase, and after suffering chronic troop shortages in Iraq, OSD recommends cutting Army and Marine combat units. Faced with the urgent need to replenish Marine and Army equipment destroyed or worn out in Iraq, we're buying high-tech toys that have no missions.
Your tax dollars are being squandered while our troops are being betrayed.
It isn't about combat effectiveness. It's about contractor profits.
Confronted with the new shape of war, from terrorism to insurgencies, we're gutting the finest military we've ever had to prepare for imaginary conflicts designed by contractors.
The fundamental problem is that, after all the hot air on Capitol Hill has been expended, few legislators really care about our troops. They love photo ops with our soldiers, but at budget time they vote for Lockheed Martin. The average American working a construction job or a cash register cares far more about those in uniform than the average senator — of either party.
Don't expect it to make sense. Just follow the money.
In support of this massive scam, the Air Force-dominated Joint Forces Command is pushing an outdated concept that only works on PowerPoint slides. It's called Effects-Based Operations, or EBO. Originally hatched to attack Soviet-style air defenses, EBO's now being hawked as the answer to all our battlefield needs (Zarqawi's radar installations better look out, to say nothing of Osama's aircraft carriers).
Learning from Iraq? Forget it. According to the technocrats, we'll never get into a mess like that again.
I heard the same thing said after the Clinton-era debacle in Somalia. Then came Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Khobar Towers, the Cole bombing, 9/11 and Afghanistan. But those who believe we can just buy our way out of history continue to insist that perfect, sterile, high-tech wars are coming — as if the enemy doesn't have a say.
Meanwhile, with cynicism to spare, the new QDR plays a shell game, pretending that we're cutting platinum-plated Cold War weapons programs — while the plan actually increases the buys: It simply shifts the funding from one year to another.
This is disgraceful. Our troops deserve better. While every service will get its turn at protecting our nation and our interests, the gory evidence attests that our ground troops will continue to bear the heaviest burdens for many years to come. The least we can do is to provide them with the numbers and practical equipment they so badly need.
If the Democrats want a legitimate security issue to fight for in mid-term elections, the Rumsfeld Pentagon's giving them a gift. The only winners from the latest QDR are our enemies and our most powerful defense contractors — and it's getting hard to tell the difference between them.
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Citation: Ralph Peters. "Betraying Our Troops: Procuring more useless weapons systems…," The One Republic, 03 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Peters/20060203PetersBetraying.html
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