A Radical Plan for Cutting the Defense Budget and Reconfiguring the U.S. Military

Total savings: $279.5 billion.

BY DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
APRIL 26, 2011



In the spirit of spending wisely, here is my plan to reconfigure the military for the demands and threats of the 21st-century world and, in doing so, dramatically cut the Pentagon budget:

Estimated annualized savings resulting from withdrawals from overseas garrisons and restructuring the United States' forward military presence: $239 billion.

The place to start reducing defense spending is with U.S. overseas commitments, which are vast.

Today, there are more than 317,000 active-duty U.S. military personnel stationed or deployed overseas. In the Central Command theater of operations, encompassing Iraq and Afghanistan, there are approximately 180,000 active-component personnel as well as over 45,000 reservists. Approximately 150,000 active-component U.S. military personnel are officially assigned to Europe and Asia. And some estimates note that there are two civilians and supporting contractors for each service member in certain locations.

The United States long stayed secure without this kind of sprawling imperial apparatus. But as the Cold War drew to a close, instead of adjusting force structure and spending to a strategic environment newly friendly to U.S. and allied interests, the U.S. military began a dramatic expansion of its overseas presence into areas where, historically, it had been episodic at best. America's Cold War commitments, meanwhile, continued without interruption. After expelling the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. military was directed to stay in the Persian Gulf and build massive facilities. And following the 9/11 attacks, the global war on terror resulted in major new Army and Air Force installations from Europe to Central Asia.

Why does America need all these facilities? The original Cold War goal of protecting European and Asian societies from communist threats and internal subversion has long ago been met, and many overseas U.S. bases are now redundant. What better time than now, when the United States faces fiscal calamity but few real military threats, to judiciously sort those that are truly needed from those the Pentagon can live without? It's time to declare victory and go home.

Of course, the United States often has multiple aims in mind when it stations troops overseas. U.S. politicians tend to think of forward-presence forces as "critical enablers" -- soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who train with the host country and others. But another, usually unstated reason for their presence is that allies want to ensure the United States automatically becomes a co-belligerent in any future regional conflict, something that made sense when America's allies confronted an existential threat from the Soviet Union, but not today. Future conflicts won't look like those of the Cold War.

U.S. troops remained ashore in Europe and Asia long past the point when it was clear that a military presence was a needless drain on American resources. Today, new technology and a different mix of forces enables a lighter, less intrusive footprint. For instance, area control is no longer a mission that demands a large surface fleet on the World War II model. The U.S. nuclear submarine fleet augmented with fewer surface combatants employing long-range sensors, manned and unmanned aircraft, communications, and missiles can dominate the world's oceans, ensuring the United States and its allies control access to the maritime domain that supports 91 percent of the world's commerce.

In the Islamic world, the U.S.-led interventions were and remain speculative investments with questionable returns on taxpayers' investments. For the moment, operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently over Libya, have resulted in less and less funding available to reorganize and replace obsolescent, unsustainable, or worn-out Cold War-era forces designed for aerospace, maritime superiority, and ground combat -- one more reason to end or drastically reduce U.S. involvement in those conflicts as soon as possible.

Fortunately, as U.S. ground forces withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the appeal of the Islamists' anti-American recruiting pitch will dramatically weaken, de-escalating the conflict. International cooperation combined with effective police action, border defenses, and immigration control is a far more economical way to prevent future large-scale terrorist action.

Estimated annualized savings from reorganizing the Army and Marine Corps: $18 billion

The changes in America's overseas commitments must of necessity involve reductions in force structure and personnel inside the country's general-purpose ground forces, currently bloated by the misguided and historically disproven counterinsurgency model. While U.S. ground forces withdraw over the next three years from their overseas garrisons, Congress should establish new end-strength ceilings for the combined active strength of the Army and Marine Corps: 600,000 active-duty service members (480,000 in the Army and 120,000 Marines).

As noted earlier, the proliferation of new strike weapons, conventional or nuclear, makes the massing of large ground forces extremely dangerous. Consequently, future ground combat forces must mobilize organic combat power that is disproportionate to their size and numbers and execute mobile, distributed, yet coherent joint operations. This description points toward Army and Marine ground forces designed for operations of limited duration and scope, forces that can be organized, trained, and equipped at far lower cost than mass armies created for long-term territorial occupation that beget second- and third-order budgetary effects we see in the current bloated "services and logistics" contracts, contracts that run into the billions of dollars over time.

Reductions in ground forces should also preserve and, where possible, increase the numbers of professional soldiers and Marines who can actually deploy and fight. This force transition must also be accompanied by an overall reduction in redundant or unnecessary overhead, support, and services force structure to increase the tooth-to-tail ratio and operational returns on military investments.

In a fiscally constrained environment, the country must re-examine the roles and missions of its land warfare services -- the Army and Marine Corps. Reorganizing the manpower and capabilities in these large forces within an integrated, joint operational framework to provide a larger pool of ready, deployable ground forces on rotational readiness that can perform a range of missions is essential.

Estimated annualized savings from reductions in naval surface forces and Marine fixed-wing aviation: $10 billion

Command of the sea, which today includes the air and space above the surface and the water beneath it, is still the precondition for the exercise of effective influence beyond U.S. borders. Fortunately, there is no other power in the world that is able, or likely to be able, in the next quarter-century to build a fleet that could seriously challenge U.S. naval supremacy. This includes China.

However, the Navy needs a different mix of capabilities than it had during the last years of the Cold War, a mix based on reconfigured strike platforms, new platforms, and manned and unmanned submersibles with an increasingly deep operational focus. Ideally, the mix should include fewer giant aircraft carriers and more flexible ships -- ships that are more easily sustained "forward" without the support of friendly, modern, deep-water harbors to improve operational agility and flexibility.

These points suggest Congress should direct the reduction of the Navy's surface fleet from 11 to eight carrier battle groups over a period of 36 months and rebalance their home porting in acknowledgement of national priorities in the Pacific Command and Central Command areas of responsibility. This action would include concurrent "right-sizing" of all associated combatants, supporting vessels, forward deployed naval forces, and shipyards, depots, and other support facilities, excluding submarines. Combatant commanders should be directed to re-evaluate "presence versus surge" naval requirements given improved long-range precision strike and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities of smart presence alternatives.

Simultaneously, the Department of the Navy should be directed to disband the 20-plus Marine Corps F-18 fighter jet and AV-8B Harrier jet squadrons. Retire all the AV-8Bs and the older F/A-18s, retaining the newer F/A-18C/Ds and EA-6Bs until replaced with Navy aircraft. Reassign the carrier Marines to naval air groups until the remaining Marine jets are retired; and require the Marine Corps to call on the Navy and Air Force for tactical fixed-wing air cover. Marine manned aviation should be limited to an appropriate number of V-22 Ospreys or rotor-driven aircraft within the new end-strength limits. This approach enables reorganization of the United States' three manned air forces -- the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps -- into two affordable air forces, one sea-based and one land-based.

Estimated annualized savings from eliminating the F-35B: $2.5 billion

Between 2003 and 2009, the U.S. Air Force cut 160 fighter/attack and 19 bombers from its active component. As a result of authorization bills in 2010, the Air Force will be required to retire about 300 older F-15, F-16, and A-10 aircraft without replacements until 2015. The cuts mandated as part of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) will probably result in the loss of a few more bombers.

Further cuts in U.S. aerospace power would seem ill-advised given the need to rely on air power during America's withdrawal from its overseas commitments. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, however, bears serious re-examination. At an average $92 million per plane, the JSF is very expensive for the capabilities it promises versus the performance it has delivered to date.

In practical terms, the JSF is an investment issue. Will Congress flush $44 billion of investment down the drain when the U.S. Armed Forces stand to receive at least some number of aircraft that are more capable than the very old F-16s and early-model F/A-18s? On the other hand, scaling back the complexity and size of the total buy is very reasonable and still saves a great deal of money. One way is to eliminate the F-35B version of the JSF for the Marines, especially given the disbandment of the Marine Corps jet aircraft wings. The development of a naval unmanned deep-penetrating strike capability mitigates operational risk in this approach.

Estimated annualized savings from reducing the number of unified commands and single service headquarters: $1 billion

Withdrawal of most of U.S. garrison forces (particularly its ground forces) from overseas will necessitate the elimination of many military commands. It also offers opportunities for savings through a modification of the current Unified Command Plan and U.S. Code Title 10 to reduce the current number of regional and functional unified commands from six to four. U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command would remain, but Mexico would fall into Southern Command's area of responsibility. U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command should be reintegrated and relocated to the facilities formerly used by U.S. Joint Forces Command in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to be renamed U.S. Atlantic Command. Then, Central Command should be divided between Atlantic Command and Pacific Command by the end of fiscal 2012.

This approach would eliminate the four-star combatant command headquarters outside the United States and negate the flow-down justification of three-star and four-star single-service component commands aligned within, an action that is long overdue along with the deflation of the services' general officer/admiral rank structure. As Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn notes, each of these commands have become beset by "requirements creep" without regard to the cost of capability, a pernicious effect of having so many people "in charge," demanding staff, resources, and authorities commensurate with their rank, instead of what the country needs.

In response to these actions, Congress should reduce all flag ranks in the bureaucracy by one star effective immediately. Exceptions to this mandate would be limited to the chiefs of service, regional unified commanders, and commanders of functional commands. Combined with the reduction in command overhead, this will assist in eliminating redundant single-service bureaucratic overhead and administration (uniform and civilian), especially in the setting of requirements and management of acquisitions. Again, U.S. Code Title 10 must be modified through new legislation to prevent continued duplication and inefficiency created by competitive bureaucracies. Simplified command structures that emphasize responsibility and accountability are always the keys to success in crisis or conflict.

Estimated annualized savings from eliminating the Department of Homeland Security and restructuring national intelligence and the Army National Guard: $7 billion

Inside the United States, it's time to consider legislation eliminating the inefficient experiment that is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agencies combined under DHS at the time of its inception should return to their former departments, and its former national security responsibilities should shift to the Defense Department. Some may argue that this is not the role of the Pentagon. But the defense of the country includes land and sea borders -- and employing the armed forces to secure those borders from threats originating in the nexus between transnational criminal and violent extremist organizations is explicitly stated in the preamble and Article I of the U.S. Constitution's language of the "common defence." Defense of the country's borders should not be hampered by a misapplication of posse comitatus, the prohibition on armed forces conducting law enforcement.

It also makes sense to begin disestablishing most of the armed forces' duplications in separate intelligence services, transferring these capabilities to national intelligence agencies -- retaining only operationally unique and tactical intelligence within the branches of the armed forces. Intelligence and related "black" programs have exploded in costs post-9/11 with dubious returns on these investments.

In addition, new federal legislation should be considered that prohibits the Army and Air National Guard from mobilizing for deployment beyond the borders of the United States -- except in the event of a formal declaration of war. Once this legislation is on the books, the Army National Guard should discard most of its war-fighting equipment and convert its formations to a light, wheeled constabulary force designed for border security and domestic emergency/disaster relief inside the United States.

Estimated annualized savings from reducing political appointees and changing acquisition and military education: $2 billion

Other sources of potential savings in national defense exist and should be pursued. Given the current fiscal pressure, the Defense Department should consider affordable alternatives to meet threat requirements in the Air and Missile Defense portfolio. One option is to cancel the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS). The Affordable Near-Term Patriot solution is less than 10 percent of the projected $18 billion MEADS cost.

Congress should explore a one-third reduction in the number of political appointees to the Defense Department. In most cases, these appointees simply build larger bureaucratic empires underneath them to justify their activities. It would also help to disestablish service component acquisition executives, the individual service bureaucrats who buy equipment and services for the use of their respective services (Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps), and combine these staffs under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and legislatively abolish service-centric acquisition autonomy. It is disappointing how many times competing "service equities" are raised in arguments that end up trumping national strategic interests within the Pentagon. Fragmented acquisition authorities, granting a degree of autonomy to each service, are the principle enabler of this bad, inefficient behavior.

Finally, it is high time the armed forces consolidated the single-service war colleges into one integrated national defense college. At the same time, Congress should implement a merit-based selection system that requires examinations for entry, as well as graduation. Military education is expensive -- and officers should be held accountable for their performance in it. This action would also set the tone for a much-needed reform movement to hold officers accountable across a range of military activities. Joint professional military education should not be a "check the box" exercise or an opportunity to lower one's golf handicap. It should prepare future senior military leaders and weed out those who are intellectually and professionally incapable of meeting the challenge to perform.

Lean, Mean Fighting Machine

How to slash the Pentagon budget? Declare victory and go home.

BY DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
APRIL 26, 2011





Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said it best, "When waves of change appear, you can duck under the wave, stand fast against the wave, or, better yet, surf the wave." Today, the same tsunami-like wave of debt that threatens to sweep away American economic prosperity is headed for America's defense establishment. President Barack Obama signaled as much with his April 13 budget address, in which he warned: "Just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense."

Obama gave no specifics, promising instead to work with the Pentagon to "conduct a fundamental review of America's missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world." But given the poor track record such reviews have -- both Quadrennial Defense Reviews and Roles and Missions Commissions -- and Obama's failure to even address the need to reduce defense spending, the president's words don't deserve to be taken seriously at all. Meanwhile, the Republican failure to take on defense spending -- the 800-pound gorilla in the room -- means the political discourse that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his colleagues seek may degenerate into pointless shouting matches with Capitol Hill's Democrats.

But the message for Republicans and Democrats alike should be that cutting defense doesn't mean going defenseless. It means reducing America's commitments overseas -- the latter-day version of "imperial overstretch" -- and changing the way the United States thinks about warfare. There's a way to do this, one that will allow for deep spending cuts, but in a manner that will preserve and enhance the U.S. military's competitive advantages while improving American national security.

Dealing with defense is admittedly a huge challenge. If directly questioned, the military brass will insist that given the missions they are obligated to undertake (along with a host of classified war plans they could be ordered to execute), reduced spending will put the Armed Forces and by implication the American people at grave risk. Then there's the chorus: a host of defense think tanks inside the Beltway that point out that the opportunity costs associated with cuts in spending and force structure are either unknown or too high; that unless specific alternative military options or tradeoffs are identified up front, capability gaps will emerge with potentially serious consequences for U.S. national security. These arguments are not entirely without merit. But they hardly justify keeping defense spending at current levels.

For one thing, there is no existential military threat to the United States or to its vital strategic interests. The nuclear arsenals in Russia and China could be used against the United States and its forces, but Russian and Chinese leaders have no incentive to contemplate suicide in a nuclear confrontation with the United States. Russia's diminished million-man armed forces are hard-pressed to modernize, let alone secure their own country, which borders 14 other states. For all its rhetoric, Russia's military focus is on restive Muslim populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia, not on NATO.

As for China, its top concern is not military confrontation with the United States, but domestic growing pains, especially the potential for its 1.3 billion people to overwhelm the Communist Party's internal political structures. China's internal focus on modernization and stability militates against external aggression, and this condition is unlikely to change for a very long time. Despite China's ability to steal or buy sophisticated technology, the military establishment cannot quickly or easily translate these technologies into new capabilities, and Beijing knows it.

Other possible threats are even less threatening. The North Korean regime, the poster child for the failure of state socialism, is on the road to extinction. In recent months, China has taken steps to secure its border with North Korea to ensure that millions of starving Koreans cannot rush north into China when the inevitable collapse occurs. Iran is a long way from possessing a nuclear weapon it can deliver, and its general-purpose forces are incapable of action beyond Iran's borders. Lastly, the world's leading scientific-industrial states -- most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the leading English-speaking powers, Britain, Australia, and Canada -- are close U.S. allies. All of their economies can and do support powerful military establishments.

What about the possibility that U.S. forces will be needed once again in the broader Middle East? Events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other parts of the Islamic world demonstrate that while many of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa are broken and their people are angry about it, these problems have nothing to do with the United States. The complex cultural problems plaguing the region, from state failure to persistent social pathologies to trouble adapting to modernity, will not be solved through U.S. military occupation and counterinsurgency operations aimed at exporting democracy at gunpoint. The million dollars a year it costs to keep one U.S. soldier or Marine on station in Iraq or Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. government could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism, and illegal immigration washing in from Mexico and Latin America.

Future conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America will not be insurgencies directed at unwanted U.S. military occupations. They are more likely to resemble the Balkan wars of the early 20th century, except that fights for regional power and influence will overlap with competition for energy, water, food, and mineral resources -- and the wealth they create. The United States can probably avoid involvement in these conflicts, but if its strategic interests compel intervention, America can do so with fewer, more potent ground forces than the ones it has today, capitalizing on its aerospace and naval supremacy.

Military strength is no longer based on the mass mobilization of the manpower and resources of the entire nation-state. Fewer, smarter soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines -- with intelligent technology -- can accomplish more than masses of troops with the brute-force tools of the past. Precision effects (kinetic and non-kinetic) utilizing a vast array of strike forces enabled by networked intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities point the way to a fundamental paradigm shift in the character of warfare. For example, today a military contest on the model of Kursk in July 1943, a battle that involved nearly 940,000 attacking German and Allied forces and 1.5 million defending Soviet forces in a geographical area the size of England, would result in catastrophic losses for the Soviet side. That's why those numbers you read about Chinese or Russian troops are less worrisome than they seem. Any future ground combat force that immobilizes itself in prepared defenses on the World War II model will be identified, targeted, and annihilated from a distance. Naval forces that concentrate large numbers of surface combatants risk similar losses in a future increasingly dominated by accurate strike weapons from various manned or unmanned platforms at sea and ashore.

What's needed now is more political courage, not more defense spending. It will fall to America's elected and appointed leaders to direct the Defense Department to aggressively accept more risk in reconciling defense expenditures with the country's urgent fiscal situation. Above all, members of Congress must have the fortitude to challenge the misguided hand-wringing inside the Beltway and put the country's long-term economic and defense interests ahead of winning the next election.

What is to be done?

Before turning to specific cuts, members of Congress should acknowledge that it is unacceptable to expend trillions of dollars for defense when the Defense Department cannot conduct an audit, let alone pass one. The only way to address this problem is to implement a statutory prohibition halting funding for defense beyond fiscal year 2014 until an audit is passed. If the Pentagon doesn't know where the money is going, how can American taxpayers feel confident that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely?

It's high time for something new. What follows here is a plan -- arguably, somewhat radical -- to finally spend wisely and reconfigure the military for the threats of the 21st century. The annualized savings presented here would reduce the current U.S. defense budget by almost 40 percent, some $279.5 billion. This isn't just an accounting exercise, however. What's needed is new strategic thinking, thinking that avoids direct U.S. military involvement in conflicts where the United States itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at risk.

As French sociologist Émile Durkheim said, "Society is above all the idea it forms of itself." For Americans who have lived in a world with only one true center of military, political, and economic gravity -- the United States -- changing how their country behaves inside the international system is not an easy task. The temptation to meddle in the affairs of others is huge, especially when the perceived risk-to-reward ratio is low.

Put in the language of tennis, the use of U.S. military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of "unforced errors." Far too often, national decision-making has been shaped primarily by the military capability to act, not by rigorous risk assessment. Regardless of how great or small the military commitment, if success is ill-defined and the price of intervention is potentially excessive, then the use of force should be avoided.

America has waited too long to learn this hard lesson.

Obama and Eden, kindred connivers

MACGREGOR: Obama and Eden, kindred connivers
President repeats British leader’s Mideast blunders 60 years later
By Col. Douglas Macgregor

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/31/obama-and-eden-kindred-connivers/

6:37 p.m., Thursday, March 31, 2011

In 1956, Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, saw Egypt’s new president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as a fascist riding a dangerous new wave of Arab nationalism. When Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal from its British and French owners, Eden was sure Nasser was an Arab Hitler and rejected any alternative to direct military action as “appeasement.” Guy Mollet, the French premier at the time, shared Eden’s opinion and joined with Britain and Israel in the attack on Egypt to remove Nasser.

When Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, of World War II fame, discovered Eden’s plan to intervene in Egypt, he asked Eden to explain his objective. Eden famously replied, “To knock Nasser off his perch!”

Montgomery scoffed, warning, “That’s not good enough.” He insisted that British and French military commanders needed more; they needed to know what the political aim was after Nasser was removed in order to plan the right kind of operation.

Ultimately, Eden, not Nasser, was removed from office. President Eisenhower, a lifelong opponent of European imperialism, withdrew American support for the intervention. Though Eisenhower shared Eden’s distrust of Nasser, he insisted that military means should be used only as a last resort. British and French forces withdrew. Not only was Eden’s reputation as a “man of peace” and a respected statesman destroyed, but Britain’s two centuries of predominance in the Middle East was ended.

As in Egypt 60 years ago, as in Vietnam and, more recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little evidence of a coherent military strategy at work in Libya. Why?

To those advising President Obama, little Libya, with a population of less than 7 million on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast, not only looks like an easy target for American military power but also is the perfect laboratory for democratic experimentation. Put differently, remove the morally repugnant dictator - in this case Col. Moammar Gadhafi - and a new, more humane “social democracy” will emerge in Libya under Western tutelage - a new society devoid of poverty, scarcity, inequality, coercion and repression. This may be a wish-based strategy because it imagines a Libya with the cultural and economic foundations to embrace Western-style democracy. It is a Libya that does not exist, but its attraction to the president is real.

The neoconservatives harbor no such illusions. For them, the opportunity to intervene with American, British and French military power in a Muslim Arab country - one that borders Egypt, another troubled Muslim society with the potential to unravel the Camp David Accords - is too tempting to ignore. What unites Mr. Obama and the neocons, however, is the resolve to use U.S. armed forces as envisioned by the late Secretary of Defense Les Aspin: “to punish evildoers” at the whim of whoever sits in the White House and regardless of cost.

In London and Paris, more concrete interests may be at stake, including BP’s oil infrastructure and a desire to contain a crisis that otherwise might propel more unwanted Muslims in Europe’s direction. Whether direct military action is the best solution for Britain and France - the two powers most likely to commit ground troops in Libya - is, of course, very much open to debate. But it’s worth remembering in all three capitals - Washington, London and Paris - that the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Egypt in 1956, have all failed to deliver the promised strategic benefits.

Where Iraq is concerned, the American people will pay a heavy price for decades to come. In addition to financing American military operations in Iraq with a trillion dollars of borrowed money from China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, U.S. military power installed a Shiite Islamist, pro-Khomeini-type regime in Baghdad tied to Iran, an outcome that threatens the security of the entire Arabian Peninsula. In Afghanistan, the human, financial and strategic costs to American power and prestige continue to rise with the daily erosion of Pakistan’s fragile cohesion, involving dangerous implications for all of Central and Southwest Asia.

Military action is always a series of actions designed to induce the opponent to collapse, capitulate or negotiate. It’s too soon to know what the impact of events in Libya will be for President Obama. However, if the outcome he wanted was Col. Gadhafi’s removal, as he stated weeks ago when Libya’s civil war began, he should have asked what steps were required and whether they would actually work and then carefully measured what he and his country might gain against what he and his country might lose.

Today, Mr. Obama is on Eden’s path, and that is disastrous for the United States and its allies.

Col. Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, is executive vice president of Burke-Macgregor Group. His newest book is “Warrior’s Rage” (Naval Institute Press, 2009).

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC.

Thoughts on Losing Our Way

Herbert sounds like a classic New Left socialist -- the evil capitalist warmongers are ensuring there are, few if any quality, good-paying jobs for liberal arts graduates. The military/IC and its perpetual wars of intervention are indeed a significant waste of money, but what's spent is still a small fraction of what is spent on social welfare, income redistribution, and health and education programs. While some of those services are very important, they are being produced or delivered very inefficiently. We spend more per capita on medicine and education than most of the world does on food, clothing, and shelter.

Maybe that is because even rich America can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year per student in our extremely inefficient, unresponsive, and un-competitive State-run primary and secondary schools, nor can afford to spend $50-100K to send a kid to college so they can "find themselves" or "self-actualize" in arts and letters from State-run or State-subsidized and -regulated universities. For that sort of money, they need to become lawyers, engineers or medical doctors.

There are plenty of decent paying jobs out there, but they're not for college grads -- they're for technical trade school grads -- "gray collar" jobs that everyone needs, but no one wants to do. There is a global glut of college educated people, and usually with the wrong sort of degrees -- it is a major cause of the upheavals in much of the 3rd world, where what are needed are productive farmers, civil engineers, entrepreneurs, production managers, transportation specialists, etc., not more lawyers, managers, heavy industrial engineers, professors, bureaucrats, or military officers, etc. They need more doctors, etc., but can't afford them because their societies don't produce enough and people can't earn enough no matter how hard they try.

www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html

March 25, 2011
Losing Our Way
By BOB HERBERT

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone. The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family. There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn't be, and didn't used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now. The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation's wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: "G.E.'s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether." Despite profits of $14.2 billion - $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States - General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times' David Kocieniewski reported, "Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."

G.E. is the nation's largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home. New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

Whither Army: A Frontline View

DoDBuzz.com
March 14, 2011

By Colin Clark

The Army is trying to figure out how to take advantage of the coming period of retrenchment and restructuring. The presumptive Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey started the early stage of the discussion during Unified Quest, the annual Army war games designed to figure out what
to do down the road. There was talk of another battalion for each Army brigade and much worrying about just what constitutes a full spectrum force.

The 22,000 people brought in to cushion the Army for the Iraq and Afghan surges and help its troops recover from the grueling pace of the last decade will be vanishing. The fights in Afghanistan and Iraq will be waning for the U.S. over the next five years, raising the question of just how should the Army be structured to cope with the future. One of the most original thinkers on the issue of Army organization has been retired Col. Doug Macgregor. Knowing an opportunity when he sees it, Macgregor has been pushing his ideas within the Army and to senior Pentagon leaders.

But his reputation as a disruptive influence has often blunted the impact of Macgregor’s ideas, along with the Big Army’s deep and abiding reluctance to engage in major change, especially in time of war. (Of course, Army leaders have also resisted change in time of peace; just
look at the Clinton era.)

We got a glimpse at the internal Army debate from an email sent from a lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan, who said “the same forces of obstruction and unwillingness to make meaningful change that held sway then still do today.”

If the service had adopted Macgregor-style changes in organization and weapons, this officer says he thinks the Army “would have saved tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars and had a significantly more capable
military.”

This officer wonders what it will take to get the Army to change as he and others believe it must to ensure the service can respond effectively and rapidly to the nation’s needs. “So on that inevitable day when we plunge off the cliff, once the wreckage has come to a halt and the pieces have settled from their tumult, those who survived will say, ‘you know, that Macgregor fellow seemed to have warned about this in the past. Had we followed his recommendations, maybe we wouldn’t have crashed and burned just now. Hmmm, maybe it would be a wonderful idea if we listened to him NOW and tried to rebuild on the ashes of the disastrous past…”

We hear senior OSD officials are considering proposals derived from Macgregor’s work as they struggle to rebuild the Army. More on this later this week.

Fix the Army, Now!

Fix the Army, Now!

By Douglas Macgregor

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 11:59 am
Posted in Land, Policy

EDITOR:

Doug Macgregor is alternately revered, respected and ridiculed by his Army colleagues and senior Pentagon officials. Ever since then-Army Chief Dennis Reimer made his book, Breaking the Phalanx, required reading for the general officers corps, his ideas have stirred passions in the largest U.S. military service. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' West Point speech elicited strong reactions from Macgregor. In the following op-ed he calls on the next defense secretary to remake the Army in truth--and not just to give the idea lip service.

He calls his piece:

Generals: The Truth will set you free!

By Douglas Macgregor

Nowhere in the world does stating the obvious provoke more shock and alarm than inside the beltway in Washington, DC. Defense Secretary Robert Gates's recent speech at West Point is a case in point.

In what was an unambiguous reference to the commitment of large Army and Marine ground forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates said, "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined." Do you think so?

Events in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the Islamic World demonstrate that while many of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa are broken and their people are angry about it, these problems have nothing to do with the United States. These societies struggle with dysfunctional cultures and severe socio-economic problems that will not be solved through American military occupation and counterinsurgency operations aimed at exporting liberal democracy at gunpoint. The million dollars a year it costs to keep one American Soldier or marine stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. Government could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism and illegal immigration pouring in from Mexico and Latin America.
Gates did not stop there. He went on to say "the need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest." However, Gates suggested the future would not involve the employment of Army divisions warning the Army's generals they "must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements."

In 1997 I published a book, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Land Power in the 21st Century. In it, I advocated the dissolution of the Army's World War II industrial Age warfighting structure arguing instead for a new paradigm with a flatter command structure designed to tightly integrate Army ground forces with air and naval power. The design I set forth replaced conventional Army brigades and divisions with a new formation, the Combat Group; a permanently organized, all arms formation commanded by a brigadier general with the staff and the critical links to plan and execute decisive operations under a Joint Headquarters that replaced the WW II Corps and Army headquarters. I also implored the generals to harmonize readiness training and deployment schedules with the Navy, Air Force and Marines on the Navy's rotational readiness model to ease the burden on the individual soldier and to reduce the costs.

In 2003, I extended this analysis in Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights, arguing for the employment of the Combat Groups outlined in Breaking the Phalanx under a joint integrative command structure that crossed service lines to drive critical warfighting capabilities to lower levels. Instead of organizing around its anachronistic branches, I urged the Army generals to reorganize the ground force around the functions of maneuver, strike, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and sustainment (logistics) to facilitate its integration with the capabilities in the air and naval services.

Gates, like his predecessors in the office of the Secretary of Defense, was well aware of these works, works widely supported inside the armed forces. But neither Cohen, Rumsfeld nor Gates did anything. Why?

The Army's active and retired four stars were certainly not interested in changing the Army. The politicians who were nominally in charge of overseeing the military were much more concerned about getting their share of the defense budget than in changing the way we organize to fight.

Sober analyses like the ones in my books were pushed aside in favor of purchasing new and ever more expensive silver bullet equipment like the Army's Crusader Artillery System or the Future Combat System (FCS) - systems designed to support vacuous programs like the Army After Next and the Objective Force - preferably for delivery in the indefinite future and heavily classified so their effectiveness could not be judged. Meanwhile, the number of professional combat Soldiers declined while the numbers of generals on active duty increased and the contractors got rich.

Hundreds of billions of dollars and years later the retired four stars who launched these flawed programs are wealthy men, but the Army is poor; stuck with huge inventories of broken equipment developed in the 1970s for use in the 1980s and armored trucks designed to chase men with rifles through alleys and valleys.

Churchill insisted Americans eventually do the right thing after they've done everything else. It's time for a new Secretary of Defense to do the right thing. It won't be easy, but the alternative is to risk a repetition of the bloody and cripplingly expensive debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran and the author of four books. His newest book is Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting published by Naval Institute Press.



Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/03/02/fix-the-army-now/#ixzz1FTxEqAtV

So, Who Won the War in Iraq? Iran

By Mohamad Bazzi

BEIRUT, Lebanon - In February 2003, as he marshaled the United States for war, President George W. Bush declared: "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."

Now, as the U.S. military concludes its combat role - which President Barack Obama will formally announce from the Oval Office on Tuesday - Iraq is indeed a dramatic example for the Middle East, but not in the ways that Bush and his administration envisioned. Iraq did not become a beacon of democracy, nor did it create a domino effect that toppled other dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Instead, the Iraq war has unleashed a new wave of sectarian hatred and upset the Persian Gulf's strategic balance, helping Iran consolidate its role as the dominant regional power.

The Bush administration argued that its goal was to protect U.S. interests and security in the long run. But the region is far more unstable and combustible than it was when U.S. forces began their march to Baghdad seven years ago. Throughout the Middle East, relations between Sunnis and Shiites are badly strained by the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. Sunnis are worried about the regional ascendance of the Shiite-led regime in Iran; its nuclear program; its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership; and its meddling in other countries with large Shiite communities, especially Lebanon.

Iran is the biggest beneficiary of the American misadventure in Iraq. The U.S. ousted Tehran's sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shiite government for the first time in Iraq's modern history. As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq's Shiite factions.

Today's Middle East has been shaped by several proxy wars. In Iraq, neighboring Sunni regimes backed Sunni militants, while Iran supported Shiite militias. In Lebanon, an alliance between Washington and authoritarian Sunni Arab regimes - Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries - backed a Sunni-led government against Hezbollah, a Shiite militia funded by Iran. And in the Palestinian territories, Iran and Syria supported the militant Hamas, while the U.S. and its Arab allies backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement.

In 2007, at the height of the insurgency and sectarian conflict in Iraq, I went to see Marwan Kabalan, a political scientist at Damascus University. He explained the regional dynamics better than anyone else. "Everyone is fighting battles through local proxies. It's like the Cold War," he told me. "All regimes in the Middle East recognize that America has lost the war in Iraq. They're all maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American defeat."

With U.S. influence waning and Iran ascendant, Iraq's other neighbors are still jockeying to gain a foothold with the new government in Baghdad. For example, Saudi Arabia's ruling Al-Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, but Iran is challenging that leadership right now. Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran's potential influence over a sizable and sometimes-restive Shiite population concentrated in the kingdom's oil-rich Eastern Province. In Bahrain (another American ally in the Persian Gulf), the Shiite majority is chafing under Sunni rulers who also fear Iran's reach.

Even worse, the brutal war between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunni minority unleashed sectarian hatreds that are difficult to contain. This blowback has been most keenly felt in Lebanon, a small country with a history of religious strife. During Lebanon's 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990, the sectarian divide was between Muslims and Christians. This time, the conflict is mainly between Sunnis and Shiites - and it is fueled, in part, by the bloodbath in Iraq.

After Saddam was executed in December 2006, Sunnis saw the U.S. and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government as killing off the last vestiges of Arab nationalism. Although Saddam was once a dependable ally of the West, by the 1990s he was among the few Arab leaders who defied the United States and European powers. In the Sunni view, America and its allies eradicated the idea of a glorious Arab past without offering any replacement for it - other than sectarianism.

In 2007 and 2008, Lebanese Sunnis felt besieged as they watched news from Iraq of Shiite death squads executing Sunnis and driving them out of Baghdad neighborhoods. At the same time, Hezbollah was trying to topple the Sunni-led Lebanese government by staging street protests and a massive sit-in that paralyzed downtown Beirut. In January 2007, as they confronted Hezbollah supporters during a nationwide strike, groups of Sunnis waved posters of Saddam and chanted his name in front of TV cameras.

It was a rich contradiction: American-allied Sunnis in Lebanon carrying posters of Saddam, a dictator the U.S. had spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives to depose. But it was also a declaration of war. Saddam, after all, killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq. Many Lebanese Shiites have relatives in Iraq, and the two communities have had close ties for centuries. Lebanon's political factions eventually compromised on a new government, but the underlying sectarian tensions are still in place, with everyone keeping a wary eye on Iraq.

As Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds argue over sharing power and the country's oil wealth, violence is on the rise yet again. The latest elections produced a deadlocked parliament in Baghdad that has not been able to agree on a new government. Far from becoming a model of freedom and religious coexistence, Iraq remains a powder keg that could ignite sectarian conflict across the Middle East.

Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Douglas Macgregor, PhD

www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100829/iraq-war-iran-US-military