This shameful cycle of institutional death in peacetime and rebirth in combat repeated again after Vietnam. I lived through this era, and it was horrible. The post-Vietnam Army fought to maintain its existence in the midst of growing apathy, decay, and intolerance. Forty percent of Army personnel in Europe in the seventies confessed to drug use. A significant minority was hooked on heroin. Crime and desertion were rife; 12 percent of U.S. Soldiers in Europe were charged with serious offenses. Near-mutiny reigned in the barracks as gangs extorted and brutalized Soldiers. Barracks became battlegrounds between blacks and whites, and officers were frequently “fragged” by Soldiers seeking to kill their leaders. I recall vividly one night entering the barracks with a drawn pistol, expecting to be ambushed and assaulted by my own men.
A few who stayed in the ranks sought to overcome the shame of Vietnam by rebuilding the Army virtually from scratch. We vowed that “never again” would we be part of a broken Army. Sadly, the United States still failed to learn. In the late seventies we suffered through the “hollow Army” era, when President Jimmy Carter’s defense budget cuts left the Army with inadequately manned and trained combat units. This “hollow force” was humiliated in its failed attempt to rescue Americans held hostage by the Iranians in 1980.
President Reagan committed himself to rebuilding, reinforcing, and modernizing a broken and dispirited service. The Reagan years were the golden era for U.S. ground forces. The “Big Five” fighting systems gave the Army a truly dominant capability for the first time in its history. “AirLand Battle,” the Army’s new fighting doctrine, fully exploited the service’s newly modernized divisions. The Army constructed the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, as the first truly objective, force-on-force facility for sharpening the fighting abilities of battalions and brigades.
I remember the spirit and confidence of the Army of the late eighties. My Vietnam-era colleagues were enormously proud of what we had accomplished with the wealth donated to us by the U.S. taxpayer. The nation got its money’s worth in the burning sands of Kuwait and Iraq, as Norman Schwarzkopf ’s legions utterly destroyed Saddam Hussein’s army in less than four days of unrelenting ground combat in Desert Storm.
Then the Army broke again. Gurus in the technical services read from our Desert Storm victory that future wars would be won by technology alone, principally from the air. The popular theorists at the time concluded that air forces would be able to “give the gift of time,” holding off a future foe long enough for a mobilized National Guard and Army Reserve to destroy them. Future enemies would be “shocked and awed” into surrender by aerial systems that would “lift the fog of war” and win solely from the air. By 1999, both presidential candidates had concluded that the Desert Storm Army of sixteen divisions could be reduced exactly in half.
Then came 9/11. The United States had two totally unexpected land wars on its hands and too few Soldiers and Marines to fight them. To this day I will never understand how the Army and Marine Corps fought two wars in the most inhospitable and inhumane circumstances without breaking again. That they did not is a testimony to the fortitude of a generation of ground Soldiers, some of whom served as many as ten back-to-back deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet it was not until America was four years into these wars that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld finally acquiesced to public pressure and allowed the recruitment of a hundred thousand more Soldiers to fight his wars. But by then, too many wars fought for too long by too few Soldiers had left a deep, hidden scar in the soul of the Cinderella service. We may never know the full consequences of this tragic neglect. I have seen and spoken to too many of our young men and women, a force that constitutes less than 1 percent of our nation, not to be repelled by the horrible miscalculation and institutional and political ignorance that have led us to such a shameful state.
Now the Army is breaking again, for the fifth time in my life. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently announced that the Army will not have enough money to train above the squad level until 2020. The Army’s new Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, has stated that, regretfully, the Army cannot afford any new systems for at least a decade. In fact, the Army has simply given up on modernizing its antiquated equipment. In the past four years the Army has cancelled 20 major programs, postponed 125, and restructured 124. Put in layman’s terms, the Army will not replace its Reagan-era tanks, infantry carriers, artillery, or aircraft for at least a generation. The number of regular Soldiers will decline from 520,000 to 420,000 in the next 4 years.1
So, again, the service that sacrificed the most is rewarded the least. Why? Part of the problem is cost. The air and sea services consist of large machines manned by sailors and airmen. The ground forces consist of Soldiers and Marines who man machines. Manpower-intensive services do not appeal to politically connected big-machine makers. It is much quicker and easier for Congress to eliminate Soldiers than it is to cancel big-budget weapons. To many inside the Beltway, the Army represents the seedy side of military reform. After all, until very recently women were banned from joining the infantry. In spite of evidence to the contrary, Washington gurus still regard the Army as the lesser service, made up of losers who cannot get decent jobs in the civilian world. They consider Soldiers to be machine-age survivals in an information age, muscle-powered antiquarians in a techno-centric universe, men (mostly) who are too prone to die and, after fourteen years and two trillion dollars, are still unable to show success in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To be fair, the Army leadership must share in some of the blame for the Army’s fifth breakup in my lifetime. Since World War II, Army leaders have been reluctant to engage in the Beltway food fight for resources. They view themselves as representing “America’s Army,” a force of the people whom the people trust and support. This might have been true in 1945, but it is not now. More than 99 percent of the American people have never served, and many do not know the difference between an F-16 fighter and an M16 rifle. The tradition of avoiding resource fights in Washington too often leaves Soldiers last in priority. Sadly, some of the criticisms of politicians about the Army leadership ring true. For whatever reason, the Army does not do public relations very well. Listen and compare testimonies from the services; the Army seems at times to be intellectually outflanked. Too many congressional briefings are killer exercises in “death by PowerPoint.” When on camera, too many senior Soldiers come across as wooden and humorless. Their speech is heavy with acronyms and Soldier jargon. The Air Force takes congressmen and the media on thrilling fighter rides, and the Navy lands them on aircraft carriers; the Army gives them briefings at Fort Hood.
Next time you see a news video of Americans in action on television, listen to the anchor call them “Marines” although, as those of us who know can tell from their uniforms, they are Soldiers. Even my own network, Fox News, occasionally and inadvertently makes this same mistake.
In strategy as in science, nature abhors a vacuum. Someone always comes along to fill it. Vacuums in warfare are usually filled by people who seek to do harm. We are again creating a global vacuum. Our Soldiers are being given pink slips, and many of the best and brightest are voting with their feet. As our Soldiers disappear, really bad actors like ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Iranian Quds force, and many other Islamic extremists are filling the vacuum. Eventually, “ground truth” will force America to rebuild a ground force to take them on. It will take time, of course, to fix the Cinderella service, and, sadly, the handsome prince holding a glass slipper is nowhere in sight. Soldiers will die needlessly, and when that happens, Washington defense insiders will look for someone to else to blame. “I told you so”s will not count any more. After three hundred years of sordid history, we know who the culprits really are.
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“The Curse of Colonel Yahara”
How sad to watch the Kiryan Cape
Now