Louis Caldera

Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera took his post as the army’s top civilian last July, just as the military was becoming embroiled in a new debate over whether its readiness has slipped since the end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union 10 years ago, the Army’s active-duty ranks have been sliced from 2.1 million to 1.4 million, even as troops’ duties in peacekeeping missions and other overseas deployments have steadily expanded. Until last summer, military leaders, expecting that future budgets would be held steady, if not cut, had been trying to muddle through with what they had. But, in recent months, they have acknowledged that the cutbacks went too far and have argued that, after 14 years of shrinkage, they would need to spend more money to attract, train and equip personnel.

Since his arrival, Caldera has been trying to figure out how to improve readiness. One key question: How can the Army meet its recruiting and retention goals when a strong economy is drawing many young people to private-sector jobs?

Caldera’s job is to sell the Army’s career opportunities to young men and women it needs, to manage its continuing adjustment to the post-Soviet era and generally to represent the service and explain its needs to the public and Congress.

Other controversies are likely to boil up. Caldera’s predecessor, Togo D. West Jr., who now heads the Department of Veteran Affairs, wrestled with the sexual-misconduct controversy that arose from the mistreatment of recruits by drill instructors at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland. West also confronted allegations that the Army had allowed Democratic political donors to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Caldera may have a special advantage in recruiting young people, since the military helped him rise from a modest background in Los Angeles to a series of career successes. He is the first Latino Army secretary.

The son of immigrant parents of modest means, Caldera, 42, grew up in Boyle Heights, La Mirada and Whittier. He went to West Point, then, after service as an Army military police platoon leader and battalion intelligence and executive officer, to Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA in 1987. He practiced law at two Los Angeles law firms before entering the public sector to work as a deputy Los Angeles County counsel in 1991 and 1992. Caldera then ran for the state Assembly, where he represented downtown Los Angeles from 1992 to 1997. In the year before he took his current job, Caldera held the No. 2 post at the Corporation for National and Community Service, President Bill Clinton’s stipend-for-service program.

While in the Legislature, Caldera attracted notice as a rising star. He became immersed in controversy in 1994 when he pressed a successful effort to require young people to wear helmets on bicycles. With his military background, he was more moderate than many in the Latino caucus. Caldera said he saw his job as problem solving and compromise, rather than partisanship.

Caldera and his wife, Eva, live in Bethesda, Md., with their daughters Allegra and Sophia.

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Question: Many are surprised to hear that, despite the end of the Cold War and the absence of any overarching enemy, defense spending will be going up. Why is that necessary?

Answer: We’ve been in our 14th year of declining budgets, over which time we were downsizing the force and looking to modernize. . . . Just absorbing that amount of change means that, of late, we’ve seen that there are some strains in the readiness of our forces. We need additional resources. There are still many dangers and many threats in the world, which has become more complex with the actions of nonstate actors, such as terrorists and drug traffickers, who pose real threats to our country, including the threat of attacks on our homeland. . . .

The total amount that we’re spending today on defense, which is less than 3% of GDP, is about as low as we’ve ever spent in our nation’s history. So, we’re not, in real dollars, spending too much on this.

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Q: Should we expect the 3% to rise?

A: The president’s commitment that the military will have the resources to do its job, and the statements of our uniformed leaders, makes us optimistic that we’re going to see a much-needed increase, probably somewhere between $15 billion and $30 billion a year. It is needed, because what we’re trying to do is invest $20 billion a year more in modernization, make sure that we have ready, trained troops and take care of our troops in terms of quality of life, pay and retirement and medical care. Right now, we have been underfunding some of those. . . . Those are increasingly becoming the things soldiers cite as the reasons they are leaving the military, especially when you have such a competitive private-sector economy drawing them away.

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Q: Some in the military believe the government will need to add more than 13% to military salaries to offset a growing gap with civilian pay, and they argue that retirement pay, cut from 50% to 40% of basic pay, will have to be restored. Is this likely to happen?

A: In this coming Congress we’re going to take a very serious look at pay and retirement. That has been made clear by Secretary [of Defense William S.] Cohen and all service secretaries and chiefs. Retirement is part of the source of our challenges in recruitment and retention of midcareer soldiers. We need to address those. When [soldiers] see that we’re not supporting our military, not just in terms of pay, but in terms of the equipment that they have, and whether they’re able to train, and whether the squads are fully manned, that starts to raise questions in their minds about how committed our country is [to] national defense.

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Q: Some military officials have long wished they could bring more young Latinos into the services. But while many need jobs and yearn for the training the military can offer, only 7% of enlisted personnel, 3.5% of officers and .5% of general officers are Latino. Some analysts argue that tests should be modified and academic requirements eased to enable more Latinos to enter the services. What is your view?

A: Our army, in order to have the strong base of support it needs, needs to be representative of all the people in our country. As the demographics of our country change, it’s going to be very important to make sure that we’re doing a good job of recruiting and communicating the type of opportunity that’s available in the Army. It’s not a matter of changing our standards. But we have to make sure that quality standards make sense in terms of being able to take in people who are able to make it as soldiers, and screening out those who won’t. Our biggest challenge in recruiting more Hispanics into the Army is the low high-school graduation rate, which is, frankly, a tremendous challenge. It is a problem not just for the Army, but for the nation.

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Q: What needs to be done to increase the presence of Latinos in the officer corps?

A: We have to do a better job. We’ve got to get them in the pipeline and make sure that they get coached, mentored and nurtured, just like every other leader who has the potential to make it through the ranks. We’re going to need to have minority officers and senior NCOs [noncommissioned officers] in the leadership ranks, to help communicate to the young soldiers that they’re welcome and will be well received in the Army. We’re emphasizing with our senior leaders that they have a responsibility to see that we are treating all of our officers equally.

The demographics are going to change faster than we can change the composition of our senior leadership, if we don’t access more people today in the kinds of tracks that are going to lead to them being in those senior positions in the future. We also have to do a better job of communicating that this is a high-opportunity organization that values the contributions that people have to make.

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Q: The Army has toughened rules on fraternization--close relationships between officers and enlisted people--that used to be the most permissive in the military. The new rules will, among other things, prohibit formerly acceptable romances between officers and enlisted people from different units. Is this causing much disruption?

A: We created a one-year period for phasing in the rule with an educational process to let people know what the rules would be, and to let them know they’d now be more uniform between all the military services. In that year, those who had long-standing relationships had to make a decision to leave the Army, to get married or to break off the relationship if it was one that would be inappropriate under the new rues. But the rules against fraternization are important to maintaining good order and discipline you need in a fighting force. Our soldiers realize that the lines are much brighter and clearer, and it is now easier to stay away from ambiguous situations because of this.

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Q: What problems keep you awake?

A: Our challenge, at a time when fewer people have served or have a connection with the military, is to build a strong base of support and appreciation for what soldiers do, and to challenge young people, especially, to think about their obligation to serve and not to leave that to someone else to do. . . . A lot of people don’t think in terms of whether they have a personal obligation to be prepared, to stand up for their country. . . . We ought to challenge them and ask them what their sense of their obligation is. . . . Our country’s not going to have the luxury of trying to [quickly] draft and train forces in the future. We’re either going to be prepared to fight, and suffer low casualties, or we’re going to be unprepared, and suffer great casualties. That’s why it’s so tremendously important that we support this strong defense, even in times when it appears that the threats out there are not as concrete. . . .

Probably not well understood is how much of an investment we are making in the conceptualization of what the weapons . . . of the future are going to be. We are shedding our World War II kinds of weapons and trying to take advantage of the tremendous amount of innovation and information-age developments that have occurred in our world. We are on track to acquire systems that don’t even exist today, but that we think are going to exist in the next five or 10 years, to make sure that our forces are lighter, more lethal, more agile.