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Betraying Our Troops
Procuring more useless weapons systems
[Ralph
Peters] 2/3/06
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.
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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. -one-
Ralph Peters' latest book is New
Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy
This piece first appeared in the New
York Post
copyright 2006 - NY Post
