If President Bill Clinton decides to invade Haiti, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the country's military leader, can only hope the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit isn't assigned to track him down. The 2,000 marines, just back from six months at sea off Europe and Somalia, barely had time to regain their land legs in North Carolina before they were ordered back aboard their cramped ships to steam toward Haiti. "I wouldn't want to get in their way," says one Marine officer. "They're pissed off and they want to go home."
Faced with foreign-policy crises in Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, Korea and elsewhere, the shrinking U.S. military is being stretched thin: The Army's 82nd Airborne Division can't be everywhere at once. Forces with special abilities -- such as the 82nd, Marine amphibious units, airborne command-and-control squadrons, missile defense batteries, special operations troops and others -- are constantly on call, and Secretary of Defense William Perry fears that in time military morale and readiness will suffer.
A Pentagon investigation released last week found that the crew of an AWACS surveillance plane, which failed to warn two Air Force fighter pilots that two American helicopters were flying over Iraq, had been deployed overseas far more than the 120 days each year that the Air Force recommends. Mistakenly thinking they were Iraqis violating a United Nations no-fly zone, the Air Force pilots shot down the two helicopters, killing all 26 people aboard.
Selective strain. Despite steady budget cuts, the Clinton administration is still spending $261 billion on defense this year; and not everyone in the 1.6 million-person active-duty force is feeling the strain of world events. But a number of specialized units are being overtaxed. "Elements of our military are being particularly pressed because of real-world contingencies and crises," the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Owens, told U.S. News last week.
For example, the 2,000 marines led by the USS Inchon, an amphibious assault ship, were the only force available when the Clinton administration called on the Pentagon to beef up American forces around Haiti. Of 13 large Marine amphibious ships, eight were already at sea: The USS Peleliu had just completed a mission off Somalia; the USS Guam had replaced it in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast; two other Marine "gator" ships were afloat near Korea. And five ships were being overhauled or being decommissioned. That left the Inchon, just home from its six-month mission. The chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Boorda, who insists that he will not permit any deployment to last more than six months, has rejected two recent requests from four-star commanders to extend tours.
Sinking spirits. A new Navy study of its operations has concluded that extra missions -- such as Haiti and support for the war on drugs -- are forcing sailors to spend too much time at sea, which hurts morale. And with 48 percent of the fleet now at sea, the Navy intends to ask Perry to allow it to keep some ships that were to be decommissioned.
Lengthy missions away from home base, long familiar to naval forces, are new to the Army and the Air Force. Army Patriot antimissile and multiple-launch rocket system battalions have been sent to Korea. Flight crews of some aircraft and their maintenance squadrons have been spending more time overseas than they have at their bases.
The Air Force wants missions to last no more than 120 days, but HC-130 Combat Shadows, aerial tankers for special operations forces, were away from home nearly 200 days in the past year. The nine AC-130 Spectre gunships, the special forces aircraft used in Somalia and on call in Haiti, were in similar demand. Crews of AWACS airborne command-and-control aircraft, which patrol the no- fly zones in northern and southern Iraq and in Bosnia and also assist in the drug war in Colombia and Peru, spent 170 days overseas last year.
A war in Korea could force the Clinton administration to renege on its promises to send 25,000 troops to enforce a Bosnian peace settlement and to contribute some 10,000 more to maintain order and train police in Haiti. "We have commitments for forces in the event we have a full-blown major regional contingency, so you have to keep those forces in mind as you make commitments [to] these various [small] crises around the world," says Admiral Owens. Making commitments, in other words, is often easier than keeping them.
