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Ralph Peters is a regular columnist with the New
York Post.
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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
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