military

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Why Is America Always Trying to Disband Its Military?


When Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office in 1801, one of his first moves was his attempt to entirely disband the Federal Military Forces.  Were it not for some powerful opponents who had gone to great lengths to bring a US Navy into existence, he would have succeeded.  Jefferson considered a professional military a luxury, and one the nation could ill-afford.  His successor, James Madison, in 1812 had to deal with the result of his efforts.  British troops encountered little resistance on their way to Washington D.C. and had little trouble in burning down the nation’s capitol building.  The heroes and military leadership of the Revolution were either aging or dead, and were of no use in the War of 1812.  It must be remembered that the war was started over the United States objecting to the impressment of American merchant sailors into the British Navy.  The U.S., however, lacked the force to prevent such impressments.

Some view the Civil War as the campaign of two great armies against one-another.  But nothing could be further from the truth, at least at the beginning.  Even though most of the professional soldiers wore Union Blue at the start of the war, they were largely unprepared and lacked for good leadership.  Conversely, Confederate troops were largely irregulars but were fortunate to have a lot of good and professional military leaders in their midst.

Again, when Japan brought war to our shores in December of 1941, the US Army had a little over 100,000 regular troops.  Had Japan and Germany been able to bring a large contingent of their professional armies to our shores, we most certainly would have suffered far longer before getting ourselves properly positioned.

It seemed we had finally learned our lesson because at the start of the Korean War and then again Vietnam, we had a sufficiently large standing army, at least for the start of hostilities.

Then, not too long before the first Gulf War, a curious thing happened.  President George Bush and congress decided we had too much military, that our country could no longer afford all the men and facilities.  Enter the Base Closure Commission.  It was the mission of this commission to identify duplicate efforts, little needed facilities, and excesses and either close or combine them in the name of economics.  At its heart it was a good idea, but they had a side-agenda that received little to no publicity.  That agenda was to re-organize the American Military into what was termed “leaner” units.  The was political double-talk for troop reductions at all levels.

To be truthful, the American military mission has changed in some respects greatly from World War II.  We fought WWII as a war of attrition meaning we could throw more men and material at you than you could at us.  We could easily overwhelm you, and that is exactly what we did.  But Vietnam taught us that our WWII philosophy was simply no longer efficient.  In spite of our saturation bombing of North Vietnam, we were simply unable to overwhelm them with our might.  The North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong fought in small and dispersed units who used guerrila tactics.  They knew how to kill us using the old Chinese maxim of dying from a thousand cuts.  Afer 1975 we knew we had to fight smarter.  Americans became amused with the idea of fighting a war of technology that used machines for the close-up work and men would largely stay well behind the lines.  The first Gulf War, however, if anything, should have taught us that this view, while fanciful, was unrealistic.

In 1991 we had just enough full-time soldiers to effect a quick liberation of Kuwait and the ability to turn back the Iraqi Republican Guard to behind its own borders.  But at that point we were forced to stop until our logistics could catch up with our lines.  Simply put, there were not enough men on the ground to continue the charge, as it were.  Pres. Bush quickly activated reservists and national guard troops to help fill the breech.  Fortunately our reserves and national guard were at much higher levels on manning than exists today.  Reservists made a single six month or less rotation and were not called upon again.

I think the sign of Washington’s ever-present folly in its thinking came to bear when it was decided during the first base closures to close Fort Ord California.  The 7th Infantry Division of Fort Ord had been deployed to Iraq in 1992 to help win that war.  Not long after its return, the 7th Infantry Division was deactivated and then in 1994 Fort Ord was closed.  Fort Ord’s 28,600 acres comprised the US Army largest maneuver facility in the United States.  That was significant because, as anyone who had served in the military knows, armies need large tracts of land to practice their tactics and work out their problems.  Congress had deprived the American military of its best facility for that.

At the same time the federal government informed state governments that their national guard forces would be seeing a considerable reduction.  How, you ask, can this happen if nominally the national guard serves the individual states first, Title 32 of the U.S. Code, and the Federal Government during times of emergency, Title 10 of the U.S. Code?  Simple, the Federal Government pays for the lion’s share of the equipment the state governments use for their national guard troops.  Congress informed the states that, for example, it would no longer put up $1 billion for their state’s forces, but would now only give $400 million, and the state could make up any differences.  While that is a little over-simplified, it is what basically happened.  By the year 2000 many states’ national guard had been reduced by 50% or more, usually more.

Enter September 11, 2001.  George W. Bush quickly sends America to war with Afghanistan, and not too long afterwards, Iraq.  But America’s standing army is small, and its reserve and guard forces a mere shell of what they had once been.  Why is that important?

During World War II the impact of combat fatigue came to bear.  No one in America had any idea of what it was or how to deal with it.  Even though our active military forces exceeded 2 million troops during the war, our troops were being ordered to stay longer than any had signed up for.  Now in fairness, most enlistees literally signed up for “the duration,” as stated in their contracts, but few understood that to mean 2 continuous years or more of fighting on the front.  Yet that is exactly what happened to too many of our troops.  Post-war the American military dedicated itself to the ideal of requiring any person to serve no more than one tour of duty, one calendar year, in a war zone.  To that end we were entirely successful during and through the war in Vietnam. The only troops who ever served more than one tour in Vietnam requested to do so.  Americans seemed to understand, congress as well, that we needed to have a sufficient supply of active and reserve troops to fill such an objective.

We now live in an age where reservists and national guardsmen are required to serve 2, 3, and 4 tours of duty in a war zone.  It seems to have become acceptable to require part-time soldiers to do the job of a regular standing force.  We seem to have forgotten that our National Guard, originally called state militia, were meant to be called only in times of national emergency.  What, pray-tell, is our present national emergency that such a large percentage of our reservist must regularly be called to active duty and sent to a war zone?

The solution to this is simple yet expensive.  But the American public needs to come to grips with the idea, and the ideal, that a formidable standing force, full-time soldiers, is necessary to guarantee our peace of mind.  At this very moment congress is making plans to yet again reduce the strength of our active duty military.  As the old maxim says, “penny-wise and pound-foolish.”  If anything, we need to increase the size of our active military force as-well-as our reserves and national guard forces.  The type of freedom and liberty we enjoy here in the United States does not come cheaply.  Why is it then we are not willing to put forward the level of funding  necessary to insure our peace and tranquility?

“Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it.”  It is not, therefore, impossible that we could suffer another “Pearl Harbor” or even worse.  Do we really want that?  Have we become so complacent that we truly believe that to be impossible?  For those of you who think the answer “yes,” we cannot possibly have another Pearl Harbor, I entreat you to read a book called “The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell” and see if you cannot find parallels to his warnings of 1925 and the conditions that exist today.

 

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Political Identity Crisis


For my entire adult life I have been a registered Democrat.  I am not certain what in my childhood pushed me in that direction as both my parents were registered Republicans.  I loved my parents.  Politics was never discussed in our house so that was not an influence.  But I know my parents supported Eisenhower and Nixon.  In 1968 when Nixon was elected president I was in the army but I did not trust him for reasons I am not certain of.  I was not of age to vote but I remember having strong negative feelings about him, even though I was already in the military.  Those feelings did not change some years later when he was responsible for a huge increase in our military pay.

I bring up my military background because I have very strong feelings about the military.  I am very proud of my service and feel very protective towards it when I see anyone threaten any part of their existence.  That is, I have never fully embraced the base closures and reductions that started under the first Bush and have continued to this day.

Among conservatives, it seems to me, there is a belief that if you are a registered Democrat you are not strongly in the military’s corner.  Nothing could be further from the truth for me.  I guess that means that my beliefs about the military are extremely Republican.  I have no desire to change that in the least.

Then there is my somewhat strange stand of being anti-abortion but pro-choice.  For me there is nothing conflicting about such a stand.  I think abortion to be morally wrong, reprehensible.  But since I view it as a moral issue I also believe in the idea that each person must have the right to make a decision about the morality, or lack of morality, associated with abortion.  Every woman must be given the right to decided if having an abortion is the right thing to do.  Were I to be asked by such a woman, I would always tell her that I think she should not have an abortion, regardless of the condition that made her pregnant or of any implication of the state of the child upon birth.  I simply believe that upon conception there exists a human life.  We as a society decry the taking of a human life and I extend that to mean “at any stage of life.”  To differentiate is to abrogate responsibility.  This, quite sadly, includes cases of rape, incest, and where it is reasonable to expect that a live birth will result in a child with substantial physical and/or mental problems.  I am also against the death penalty for the very same reasons.  I believe in consistency and I think it inconsistent to believe in one but not the other.

I think that we as Americans have a responsibility to the unfortunates of our society.  That includes programs such as welfare and other such government sponsored programs.  But that said, I also think we have gone beyond the point of reasonableness in the administration of these programs.  We have made it easier for some to continue on such welfare programs than it is desirable for the individual to remove themselves from its roles.  The size of social programs need reduction, desperately.

We are one of the most violent nations in the world.  We want all deserving Americans to be afforded the right to possess the fire arms of their choice but we are unwilling to take the responsible task of clearing each person for their right to possess any single arm.  It seems to me reasonable that any law-abiding person would not mind a background check to ensure they have not at some point in their past given up the right to legally possess a fire arm.  I do not think there should be any restriction, with a very few exceptions, on the type of fire arm a person might purchase, just on how that comes to pass.  Any reasonable person who truly desires to have responsible purchase and sale of fire arms necessarily wants safeguards in place to restrict the criminal element from gaining access to such arms.  That does not exist in America today.  That means Americans, right now, do not mind criminals purchasing fire arms since they refuse to allow reasonable background checks.

In that same vein, Americans are also unwilling to provide for the proper incarceration of criminals, particularly violent criminals.  America’s laws in the prosecution of violent criminals can vary greatly from one state to the next.  A criminal can commit a murder, admit to it, and walk free because of certain deals that prosecutors make.  If we are ever to get a substantial reduction in our crime rate we must do several things.  One is a more uniform sentencing criteria from one state to the next.  Part of that would include a universal minimum sentence requirement in all states, to include cases where a criminal makes a plea deal.  Minimum sentencing would eliminate any criminal from getting “a walk” on a serious crime because of his help in prosecuting another criminal.  But this also means we are going to have to build more facilities to accommodate the increased prisoner population.  We also have to increase the size of our police forces and their budgets of course.

There is no place for God in our American government.  God is a purely religious concept that has as many variations as there are people in the United States.  To allow God into the government, regardless of the level, necessarily requires definition.  The creates the problem of what definition is accepted, and ultimately, how is that definition fair to all the people of the United States.  To be fair, there are millions of people, other than atheists, who do not believe in God as the Judeo-Christain concept goes.  Ultimately those people are opted-out when such a definition is decided upon.  Our government must be better than that.  It is better that all religious definition be removed from our government than to allow even an amalgam in.

I believe in my state that my district US representative and both my state’s US Senators have failed us.  The are more concerned with political expediency that constituent desires.  I have heard nothing out of the Elizabeth Warren camp in her opposition to Scott Brown, the incumbent Republican.  My tendency now is to vote for Brown even though I am a Democrat because I think the arrogance of the Democrat party in Massachusetts has resulted in too much failure.  I can only think Warren is displaying some of that arrogance now, thinking Massachusetts Democrat tendencies will propel her come November.  She will be surprised if she continues to think that way.

I am disillusioned with America’s Republican and Democrat political parties because I think it painfully obvious that each has allowed PACs to rule its positions, to select its candidates in some cases, and to ultimately become insensitive to the needs of its constituency.  Each party has with lies, which it euphemistically calls spin, to justify positions it takes.  Each party uses various fear tactics to reel in voters to the positions they desire, even when such positions are at the peril of the very voters they represent.  As Pogo said so eloquently, and so long ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 

 

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Reducing the Size of the Military a Big Mistake


I remember some years ago hearing that the 26th Infantry Division was going to be reduced to a single brigade.  The 26th, the Yankee Division, was the army component of the Massachusetts National Guard.  At the time I did not think too much about it.  I recognized the desire of many to reduce the size of the military.  The mistake in my thinking was that the reduction was coming at the expense of reserve units.

Let’s start with the active duty force.  There are about 522,000 men and women in the army today.  During the Vietnam era the army was more than a million men and women strong, to put this in perspective.  After Vietnam, as was true after every other war, the size of the entire military was reduced.  But what is different this time?  The difference is simple.  There was no military build-up during Iraq and Afghanistan.  To meet requirements the burden was shifted to Army Reserve and National Guard units.  And it was early in Iraq that it was realized how unprepared the National Guard units in particular were.  That has changed.  The point is, our active duty force was too small to handle the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Now our politicians have pressed the Pentagon to reduce an already lean active duty force.

I expect the Pentagon will push back by suggesting how to further reduce reserve and national guard forces.  This is a very dangerous tact.  The reason is very simple.  Regardless of how mechanized, how computerized, how modernized you make our armed forces, it still comes down to soldiers, not computers and machines, to win the wars.

I am certain that the Pentagon will push to keep our reserve forces better trained than they were prior to Iraq.  If there is one thing Iraq taught us, it is that our reserve forces were poorly prepared for extended active duty.  One has to remember, these forces train one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer.  That limits how much training you can do regardless of how hard  you try.  To think you can take these forces from their peacetime reserve status and throw them into a wartime stance as quickly as you can an active unit is absurd.  Short of doubling the training time allotted to the reserves, you are going to need a substantial ramp up period from peacetime to wartime stance for any reserve unit.

I think if anything our active ground forces need to be increased.  I think a 200,000 man increase, to about 750,000 troops is much more reasonable and gives us a much better defense force.  An additional investment into increasing the size of our reserve forces is also called for.

A standing army has always been an expensive item.  People are quick to look at the defense budget and think it is bloated.  I can assure you, nothing is further from the truth.  Another thing Iraq made painfully obvious was how woefully underfunded our reserves were.  They had too much obsolete equipment or equipment requirements that had not been filled due to budget constraints.  Having a well equipped army is not something that we can compromise on.

It is impossible to predict when and where the next conflict we will be involved in.  It is just as impossible to predict how much of a force we will need.  We cannot afford to be penny wise and pound foolish with our military.  We have to be fully prepared to meet the demands on our military in the future.  We can only have that with a reasonably sized military.