The "broken" military

We hear a lot about our "broken" Army. Sometimes the talking heads tell us it's already broken, but more often they say it's about to be "broken." Or is "breaking." Or cannot possibly be far from some serious breakage.

[sneering child voice]
George W. broke the Army! Way to go, George!
[/sneering child voice]

As near as I can tell, this "broken" line means we have, or are about to have, used it up. Worn out the people, worn out the gear. It's a non-specific term, so we're going to refine it in order to deal with it.

The Army will be broken when we can no longer field the necessary forces with the necessary training and the necessary equipment to accomplish their mission.

Well, let's attack this in reverse order.

Equipment:

Buy more.

Oh. You want more detail? 'Cause really, we're the goddam United States of America. We've got the factories, we've got the smartest and most capable workers in the world, there are damn few raw materials we can't find within our own borders.

One of the fabulous things about our society is that there are almost no problems of supply, production and manufacturing we can't solve by throwing huge amounts money at them. Whether it's the vehicles, the ammunition, or the nifty ass-saving electronics we put in the vehicles, there are no supply problems a couple of big, fat government offerings (with no-bullshit timelines) couldn't solve.

It's only money, folks, and there's nothing else we should be spending it on first. Of course, that would require the actual co-operation of our Congress and a committment to make things happen, regardless of whether or not they were happening in one's home district.

Next! Training.

I saw a news bit a few weeks ago, and I think it was in reference to the 3rd Infantry Division. T'was terrible, the talking head announced, but Our Brave Boys were going to be sent back over without being trained! A bloodbath waiting to happen, because the Army is broken.

Now, I've never been through the Army pipeline, and I've never been an infantryman, but I have been around a little bit. As I recall, everybody gets trained.

Let's look. A young guy joins the Army. Then he goes to basic training (at Fort Benning, if he's going to be an infantryman). The Army does something called "one station unit training," wherein our young man spends 14 weeks knocking out both the basic training stuff and the infantryman stuff.

If we're talking about someone who's NOT an infantryman, say, an MP, then we've got basic followed by nine weeks of specific military police training.

I'll skip breaking down the Marine Corps process, but suffice it to say there's even more training involved. So, people, we are not signing your neighbor boy up and putting him on a plane to Ramadi as soon as we find boots that will fit him.

The training the talking heads were referring to was a trip to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin that most large active units do before they deploy. Now, NTC training evolutions are fabulous and valuable, but when the vast majority of your officers and NCOs and senior junior guys have recently been downrange, and when you still conduct several weeks of pre-deployment training at your home station before departing (which 3ID did), skipping the NTC trip is really not equivalent to putting Girl Scouts on an airplane.

Let's talk about personnel.

Our military is too damn small, folks.

Now, before Charlie Rangel has a stroke, could everyone please say it with me, "the fact that our military is too small does not require a draft. There will be no draft."

Seriously. No draft. Stop trying to scare the children, Charlie.

Let's say you own your own business. Dog toys. You make 'em and you sell 'em. You've got a full warehouse, and three guys doing your packing and shipping. The orders keep rolling in, but your three guys are overwhelmed. They're pulling, and packing, and shipping dog toys, but you keep falling further behind. Do you sit on the floor and cry, or do you hire more people?

Thank you.

Very nearly six years after 9/11, we've finally gotten around to authorizing a bigger military. Yes, authorizing. See, our active Army's authorized endstregth for FY2005 was slightly over 1.4 million. That number actually incorporates a small authorized "number in excess." See, the military can't, on its own, say, "hey - we're too small!" and grow. The military can't even say, "hey, we're too small! Let's not buy helicopters this year and hire people instead!" The military must spend every dime as directed by Congress, and must maintain a size directed by Congress.

Today the Secretary of Defense announced he has recommended to the President a permanent increase to the end strength of the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps. His proposal is for an increase of 92,000 personnel over the next five years: 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines.

That's from a January DoD press release.

That's really great, but over five years? Folks, we need 'em faster.

We do have to point out that five years ago it was Spring of 2002. I don't think it required a crystal ball at that point to guess our country was going to be involved in operations in the Middle East for quite some time to come. If our Congrescritters had passed the above authorization then, it would be a done deal now. We should also point out that, fully-enacted, the above endstrength increases will still leave us with a military far smaller than we had in 1991. Food for thought.

We meet recruiting goals for the active Army and Marine Corps. The Army fell short in 2005, but added recruiters and relaxed standards and offered more money and they're doing fine now. You make Congress authorize the bodies, the recruiters will find them.

And about the "relaxed standards?" I caution you - trying to find current, non-partisan data on the subject is a challenge. I first point you to a USA today article with a useful sidebar. It's a nice summary of what exactly these "relaxed standards" are. For those of you who want more "ground truth," well...go forth and get some knowledge.

The scores are grouped into five categories based on the percentile score ranges shown in Table 2.1. Persons who score in Categories I and II tend to be above average in trainability; those in Category III, average; those in Category IV, below average; and those in Category V, markedly below average. By law, Category V applicants and those in Category IV who have not graduated from high school are not eligible for enlistment. Over and above these legal restrictions, each Service prescribes its own aptitude and education criteria for eligibility.

The Army has, effectively, increased the allowable percentage of initial accessions who are not high school graduates or GED holders with a certain amount of college credit from 2% to 4%. That's it.

Although the Services have long been aware that the completion of high school is a useful predictor of success in the first time of enlistment, that doesn't necessarily make non-graduates useless bastards.

We're not emptying the jails, folks, but the Army raised the bar quite high after the big drawdown in the 90s. A little too high to support a rapid expansion.

Meeting recruiting goals for the Reserves and National Guard is a little trickier. At least on the enlisted side, many of the folks in those two components have already served some active-duty time. They then join the Guard and Reserve because they don't want to be on active duty anymore.

We may have to look at some novel ways to handle the Guard and Reserve. If we're going to continue to disrupt civilian lives and employment with multiple, long deployments, we may have to offer some finiancial support to these guys as a sort of "retainer," beyond paying them for one weekend a month. Perhaps we can offer them the option of volunteering for a two-year activation, half in the US (perhaps training some of those newly authorized active duty guys?) and half downrange.

We are currently faced with a personnel issue. Nothing we can't overcome with cooperation and honest discussion, but we have to deal with it as it is - not as we wish it were. We need public figures to come out and encourage young people to sign up. We need them use words like "duty" and "obligation."

We need people like Charlie Rangel to shut the hell up. He is, as they say, static. We need signal.