War Games Target Tomorrow’s Enemy

The Army came here Saturday to kill its own. Pitting unit against unit, war games raged across 200,000 acres of Louisiana bottom land constructed to mimic the real world.

There were villages with homes, restaurants, graveyards. Mortar rounds exploded overheard. Even a riotous population demonstrated against the invaders.

But unlike war games of old, when U.S. troops pretended to battle the Soviets, the approximately 5,000 troops here were fighting the fictitious Cortina Liberation Front, a well-trained guerrilla army.

The Pentagon’s decision to battle a guerrilla force rather than a superpower in these war games underscores a fierce debate taking place in the presidential race concerning the nation’s ability to wage war. The fundamental question is not whether the military is ready, experts say. The question is: ready for what?

“The real readiness debate is, ‘Are we ready for yesterday’s battles or the ones we will have to fight tomorrow?’ ” said Andrew F. Krepinevich, head of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The Republican presidential nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, repeatedly charges that the Clinton administration has allowed the military to lapse since its modern fighting peak during the Persian Gulf War. Equipment is in disrepair, he claims, and troops’ morale is low.

But experts say the most vital military questions for the next president go beyond pay and parts to a critical judgment about the military’s future mission. And while both Bush and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, have promised to review U.S. deployments abroad, neither has taken a stand on whether to fundamentally retool the nation’s military goals.

Ability to Fight Two Major Wars

The choices are framed by the Pentagon and military traditionalists, on the one hand, who insist that the U.S. armed forces must be able to fight two major wars simultaneously, a goal that has long served as the cornerstone of American defense policy.

On the other side are some military strategists and a handful of politicians who say the military should ready itself for conflicts that will be smaller, faster and geographically diffuse. Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman has long been a leading voice in pushing for just such a force.

Few analysts outside the Pentagon believe the United States today is ready to fight two massive wars against two opponents--no matter how improbable that scenario may be.

But take the small-war goal standard--with enemies such as the Cortina Liberation Front--and the picture changes. Nearly everyone in the military community believes the U.S. is ready to fight the small conflicts it is most likely to face. But that readiness soon could deteriorate.

Experienced officers are fleeing the ranks for more rewarding private sector jobs. Ships and tanks are getting old. Soldiers are serving long, dangerous missions far from their families.

“Today’s readiness is good, but tomorrow’s is in jeopardy,” said Michael O’Hanlon, an informal advisor to Gore and a military scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “There are some troubling signs in the next 10 years.”

Further complicating the picture is money. The Pentagon’s $291-billion budget for next year is greater than the combined defense budgets of the next 10 largest countries, including Russia, China and Germany.

Bush has pledged to add $9 billion for military pay raises and $36 billion more over 10 years to the research and development budget. Gore has pledged a total of $100 billion over 10 years to address everything from pay to technology.

Smaller Wars Mean Smaller Budgets

Military experts point to the vast amounts of cash involved, and the politics entwined with that money, as part of the reason why it is so hard to change the nation’s overarching military goals.

Smaller wars mean smaller budgets for Pentagon officials. And less money for politicians to devote to pet military projects in their districts.

“It’s not a lack of resources, it’s how the resources are used,” said John Isaacs, head of the Council for a Livable World, which favors reduced defense spending.

The abstract debate about readiness played out in plain view of hundreds of journalists, military officials and Defense Department contractors during the war games this week in “The Box” at Ft. Polk, one of the Army’s premier training centers. The experiment was one of the most technologically advanced war games ever staged.

Long after night fell Friday, C-130 aircraft carrying the 82nd Airborne Division flew low over the piney woods, dropping nearly 500 paratroopers. They drifted across the night sky toward a landing field, their parachutes appearing like ghostly jellyfish through the green glow of night-vision goggles.

The simulated attack was part of an ambitious experiment in modern warfare designed to gather real-time battle information and provide it simultaneously to all branches of the armed forces, at all levels, from general to foot soldier. For instance, some personnel carried helmets outfitted with eyepieces that displayed computer images not only of maps, but of fellow soldiers as they moved about.

No more will blinded armies clash by night. At least one side, the U.S., will fight smart. And night will be a friend.

Staff Sgt. David Barron touched down near a landing strip late Friday night. By Saturday morning, the veteran paratrooper was squatting on his helmet near a strand of concertina wire. He had no doubts about his, or his unit’s, readiness to fight. But he was less sure of who he may be asked to kill in future wars.

“It used to be, it’s the guys in a different uniform. I shoot him before he shoots me,” Barron said. “Now, it might be an old lady with a car bomb. You don’t know anymore.”

Regaining Status as Election Issue

Military readiness has not been such an issue in a presidential race since the Cold War ended. President Bush and his Defense secretary, Dick Cheney--now the GOP nominee for vice president--started cutting the military’s budget from its Reagan-era peak.

The cuts stopped in 1998 when a Senate hearing first raised the issue of readiness problems. The Republican-controlled Congress added $9 billion to the 1999 defense budget, which President Clinton approved. And the Pentagon’s budget has increased each year since.

At almost $300 billion a year now, the military’s budget in real dollars is approaching what it was during the 1970s, a time when the U.S. was facing the threat of the Soviet Union.

But those in Congress who share Bush’s view of a deteriorating military, despite the increased funding, can supply a stream of anecdotal evidence.

One recent survey found that Army captains are voluntarily leaving the service at a far greater rate than 10 years ago. The Air Force is short more than 1,000 pilots. Almost all branches of the armed forces have had trouble meeting recruiting goals.

Many independent assessments agree that the U.S. would be hard pressed today to battle on two major fronts simultaneously.

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who heads the armed services subcommittee on military readiness, is blunt. He dismissed as “lies” recent claims by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Henry H. Shelton that the military is ready to fight.

“These people at the Pentagon are saying what they’re saying because the president wants them to, and they’re lying,” Inhofe said. “Clinton has caused us to be in the most vulnerable position we’ve been in in the history of America.”

That contention is vigorously disputed by military analysts who say that, fundamentally, there are few nations left with armies that can pose a realistic threat to U.S. forces.

North Korea and Iraq usually are cited as the most probable opponents in a two-front war. But North Korea is barely able to feed its own people, and Iraq still is struggling to recover from its devastating loss in the 1991 Gulf War.

Then there are a host of other statistics to counter the evidence of a decline in military readiness.

Retention rates, for example, a measure of soldiers’ willingness to sign up for more duty, have remained more or less consistent during the late 1980s and 1990s, according to a Government Accounting Office study.

Moreover, there is the record of success. With the exception of Somalia, in which 29 soldiers were killed in 1993, U.S. forces have waged a decade’s worth of successful missions--from Panama to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo.

“I’m pretty confident they can do everything that they will realistically be called upon to do,” the Brookings Institution’s O’Hanlon said.

Much Confidence, but Some Concerns

More than a dozen soldiers, officers and contractors interviewed during the war games echoed that assessment, though some expressed concerns about the frequency of their missions and the quality of the training.

At noon Saturday, the 10th Mountain Division came roaring in on three specially equipped C-130s, the prop blasts raising gusts of dust on the dirt airfield.

Just 10 months ago, the 10th Mountain, out of Ft. Drum, N.Y., had been declared unfit for duty, a fact Bush referred to incorrectly as an ongoing problem during his acceptance speech at the recent Republican convention in Philadelphia.

But now, as dozens of men swarmed out of the belly of the C-130s, they confidently took positions around the airstrip. The planes were full of an experimental computer network that allowed constant communication between ground troops and each individual plane simultaneously.

This was the wave of the future, said Sgt. Matthew Smith, as he hunkered down on the ground, M-16 rifle in hand. And he was looking forward to it.

“It’s more advanced than what anyone else has got,” Smith said. “It’ll be like our eyes and ears without us being there.”

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Defense Dollars

The Pentagon’s annual budget under five presidents, excluding spending on nuclear weapons.

Source: Department of Defense