Houston Review
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
January/February 1999
Clinton Dangerously Compromising Military Readiness
For the past several years, I and many of my colleagues in the Congress
have argued that missions such as Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, combined with a military drawdown that has occurred too fast and gone too far, is creating the type of hollow military we experienced before the Korean War and again in the late 1970's.
Even the generals are starting to publicly acknowledge this. After years of minimizing our readiness problems as "manageable," the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently testified before Congress that our readiness has degraded since 1991. Despite administration reluctance, in October Congress added $9 billion in additional defense spending to begin reversing that decline.
The numbers tell a terrible story. Here are just some of the objective indicators of our readiness problem:
- Last year, the military had its worst recruiting year since 1979. The Army failed to meet its recruiting objective for infantry soldiers, the single most important specialty in the Army. Navy recruiting is 13 percent below its annual goal and highly skilled sailors are leaving the service in record numbers leading to a shortage of 18,000 sailors in fleet manning.
- More than 350 Air Force pilots turned down the $60,000 bonuses they were to receive for another give years in the cockpit. They had a 29 percent acceptance rate for that bonus this year compared to 81% in 1995.
- This year, only 10 percent of the Navy's eligible naval aviators decided to take bonuses and remain on active duty.
We are reducing our forces at the same time we are taking on new peacekeeping missions. Since Desert Storm our military forces have been slashed to the bone. But the military is committed in several "operations other than war" that do not represent vital national security threats. By some estimates, these missions have increased more than 300 percent under President Clinton.
This affects our ability to meet legitimate threats to our own security and is making it harder for us to respond to situations in which our forces are uniquely capable of responding. Nor are we modernizing the forces we have. There's no greater national security failure than the administration's continuing refusal to deploy defenses against ballistic missiles.
The administration's assessment of the ballistic missile threat is that we'd have 15 years warning before we would face an incoming missile. Unfortunately, recent events demonstrate that assessment was far too optimistic. North Korea celebrated its 50th anniversary by launching a three-stage space launch vehicle over Japan, where tens of thousands of U.S. troops are stationed. It had a range capability that could reach Alaska.
The North Korean launch also demonstrates that a "let's make a deal" foreign policy, coupled with the dramatic decline in military has left the United States potentially vulnerable less than a decade after winning the Cold War.
This pattern continues today and was fully exposed by former U.N. Iraq inspector Scott Ritter's allegations that the Administration had ignored Saddam Hussein's frequent violations in order not to provoke a conflict.
At the same time the Administration is appeasing countries of proven terrorist pedigree, it is sapping the strength of America's armed forces in places where our vital interests are not at all clear, such as Bosnia.
The 1999 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill includes an amendment I added
requiring the President to assess our overall readiness. As we await the President's assessment, there are several things we can do now to arrest this alarming trend:
- Immediately deploy available technology to provide a national missile defense system.
- Transfer a fairer share of the burden of the Bosnia mission to our European allies. The United States has twice as many troops there as our nearest European ally. The billions we are spending in Bosnia could be used for missile defense.
- Restore our military readiness with an increase in defense spending on new, modern weapon systems and better pay and health care for military personnel to encourage retention. The $9 billion added in October is a down payment.
Truly reversing the decline in America's global influence and our military readiness will require a change in policy by an administration that has become accustomed to bluster and empty admonitions when resolve and commitment are in order.