Somebody's listening
PoliticsDaily.com
December 27, 2010
Analysis
Busy With Afghanistan, The U.S. Military Has No Time To Train For Big Wars
By David Wood
We have learned through painful experience that the wars we fight are seldom the wars we planned.-- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Feb. 1, 2010
Just after a cold, rainy dawn, a U.S. Army battalion under the command of Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith took up positions along a low Korean ridgeline with orders to stop the enemy tank columns racing toward them. The Americans were lightly armed draftees assigned to peacetime occupation duties in Japan. They'd never trained for major combat. But they wore the uniform of the most powerful nation on earth.
They expected a short skirmish: When the enemy saw who they were dealing with, the soldiers told themselves, they'd turn tail and flee. But the North Koreans who came lunging at them were not deterred that July morning in 1950. The GIs held out valiantly but finally shattered, stumbling into a retreat so hasty that they left their dead and wounded behind.
The painful story of Task Force Smith is once again being told amid growing anxiety that the United States is so focused on today's missions that it has neglected to prepare for what may come next.
The risk of being unready for major combat operations is partly a matter of choice: Defense Secretary Robert Gates has directed the military to focus its time, resources and energy on winning the counterinsurgency struggle in Afghanistan. That's the kind of conflict the United States is likely to be entangled in for the foreseeable future, according to current Defense Department plans.
It is also true, senior officials acknowledge, that the armed forces lack the time to train for and equipment to fight a major conflict that might ignite from friction with Iran, say, or China, or deal with a completely unanticipated crisis that requires American forces to quickly intervene -- like Korea, 1950.
"There's a belief that the president of the United States can pick up the red phone and order forcible entry operations'' like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said Army Maj. Gen. Dan Bolger, who commands the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. "But that takes practice, and we don't get a lot of practice.''
Since 2003, the Army and Marines have focused almost exclusively on learning and conducting counterinsurgency operations, which rely heavily on language and cultural knowledge and the ability to work with local police and tribal elders. But commanders have increasingly fretted that their troops have lost skills that the military used to practice all the time: fast-paced "kick-in-the-door'' attacks across a border, with armor columns, intelligence and logistics support coordinated with artillery and air strikes.
With the drawdown of troops in Iraq, the Pentagon finally is able to begin rebuilding its strategic reserve, the battalions and brigades and equipment normally kept on standby for sudden crises. But the continuing demands in Afghanistan, where the Pentagon is sending 25,000 fresh troops in the coming months, leaves virtually no time for anything but Afghanistan-focused training.
Moreover, the two wars have seriously depleted stockpiles of combat-ready vehicles, weapons, communications equipment and other gear. So, even if troops had time to practice big-war operations, they don't have the stuff to do it with.
"At a certain point,'' said a frustrated Bolger, "you can't do more with less.''
In the past year, for instance, only one unit, the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, was able to break from counterinsurgency to practice an air assault to seize an airfield, a critical maneuver that would come at the start of a major combat operation. "It was a new set of challenges,'' the division commander, Maj. Gen. James Huggins, said in an interview.
Before 2001, dozens of Army and Marine Corps battalions cycled each year through the three major ground combat training centers, mastering high-intensity maneuvers with tank and armor formations, artillery, attack helicopters and fighter-bombers in grueling battles that went on day and night for weeks.
But with Iraq and Afghanistan demanding different kinds of skills, the training centers were converted into mock villages of Iraqis or Afghans, where troops could practice searching cars at checkpoints, chatting with the local "mayor,'' and walking foot patrols with native troops.
That only one unit was able to break away from this counterinsurgency training "gives you an idea of how close to the margin we are,'' said Bolger.
The Army training centers at Fort Polk and Fort Irwin, Calif., each have one exercise scheduled for 2011 to train troops in what the Army calls "full-spectrum operations."
"We are trying to get back to full-spectrum operations,'' Army Secretary John McHugh said in an interview. "That is difficult given the high operational tempo we continue to face. ... We are rapidly deploying troops to Afghanistan and even the troops in the [reserve] pool are scheduled to go.''
The Marine Corps is in a similar predicament. Senior Marine officers often lament that a decade into counterinsurgency operations, the Corps has midcareer officers and non-commissioned officers who have never been on a ship, let alone learned the complex art of amphibious operations, the Marines' central mission.
In an attempt to correct that shortcoming, the Marine Corps just completed its first major amphibious exercise in a decade -- by simulation. An exercise involving real Marines and actual weapons and ships is planned for 2012.
A shortage of equipment is as big a problem as shortage of time. A decade of combat operations has worn down tanks, Humvees, radios, aircraft engines and almost every other piece of gear. The Marines think it will cost $8 billion just to fix its equipment. So much of the Corps' equipment is in Afghanistan that what it has on hand for training and any crises is "seriously deficient,'' the then-commandant, Gen. James Conway, told Congress last spring. The bill to fix the Army's equipment may reach $36 billion, according to Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the service's vice chief of staff.
The Air Force is short about $2 billion a year to fix its combat aircraft, a deficit that is building year after year and significantly shrinking the pool of planes not already committed in Afghanistan that could be sent into a come-as-you-are war.
Ironically, the problem will get worse if U.S. troops and equipment begin pouring back from Afghanistan to be fixed. For instance, the Pentagon has sent 15,000 heavy-armored MRAP vehicles to Afghanistan, and an additional 10,600 are being built and rushed there to protect troops against IEDs.
All those vehicles will have to be overhauled when they return, a daunting task for Mark Sheffield, a senior official at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where much of the work will be done. "We have no history of what parts will be needed'' for these relatively new vehicles, Sheffield said in an interview. "The big question is whether the supply chain will give us the parts.''
All these problems are reason for a decisive shift at the Pentagon, according to an outside bipartisan task force chartered by Congress to challenge current Defense Department planning. The group, co-chaired by William Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Stephen J. Hadley, national security adviser to President George W. Bush, said in a report issued earlier this year that Gates had "focused too greatly on the short-term'' threats and not enough on big-war challenges.
Those challenges could come, their report said, from the rise of new global superpowers in Asia -- India and China -- and the continued struggle for power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East. But it documented "a significant and growing gap'' between the U.S. military's current capabilities and "the missions it will be called upon to perform in the future'' and warned that a failure to correct these problems is "not acceptable.''
Aside from new thinking at the Pentagon, what is needed is more money, the independent task force concluded, an urgent recommendation not likely to be welcomed next month by a new Congress elected to slash, not increase, federal spending. But fixing war-damaged equipment and modernizing ships, aircraft and vehicles can't be done simply with the budget efficiencies Gates has ordered, the report said. It will require "immediate and long-term'' investment.
"The potential consequences for the United States of a business as usual attitude ... are not acceptable,'' the task force said. "We are confident that the trend lines can be reversed, but it will require an ongoing, bipartisan concentration of political will in support of decisive action.''
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