by Bruce B. Auster; Joseph L. Galloway; Fred Coleman; James Popkin; Richard Z. Chesnoff
In mid-September, on the eve of the American invasion of Haiti and with the emergency deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf to counter Saddam Hussein's ominous buildup along the Kuwaiti border just weeks away, the historic Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) at Fort Riley, Kan., had 2,000 of its soldiers scattered across nine different countries and 18 states.
Already under strength at 14,000, the division had sent almost 1,000 troops plus 11 helicopters to fight forest fires in the Idaho mountains. A cavalry squadron with both ground and air units was patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border on drug- interdiction duty. A battalion of military police and a platoon of heavy trucks were in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, helping deal with refugees from Haiti and Cuba. A medical support team was in Suriname, preparing to house refugees. Smaller groups from the Big Red One were in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Honduras and Ukraine. And one officer was on assignment for 179 days as a United Nations observer in the Spanish Sahara. "Just the normal business of the Army," says Maj. Gen. Randy House, the division commander.
With budgets falling and no end of missions in sight -- from walking the beat on Haiti's policeless streets, to monitoring the Israel-Egyptian peace in the Sinai Desert, to deterring heavily armored conventional armies in Iraq and North Korea -- many are asking whether this "normal business" is asking too much of too few. The soldiers of the Army's 10th Mountain Division barely had time to trade in the desert camouflage they wore in Somalia for the traditional green they're wearing on assignment in Haiti. Reservists who fly the cargo planes that moved troops to Haiti and food to Rwanda never sleep in their own beds. Vital training missions are scrubbed as troops are hustled off to deliver food, police refugee camps or try to keep the peace in one corner of the world or another. At the end of last month, the armed forces temporarily ran out of money to operate -- a dangerous sign, say critics, that the U.S. military is back on the old, familiar road it followed in the 1970s, to a "hollow" force that is not ready to fight.
The road not taken? But some top military thinkers believe there is another path. Even as missions grow and numbers shrink, says Adm. William Owens, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the force is improving. Owens says today's military is actually better than the force that defeated Saddam Hussein's million-man Army in 1991. And he argues it can get better still - - if modern surveillance and communication systems, coupled with weapons that can precisely strike targets, are developed to offset the fighting power lost as America's armed forces shrink.
For Owens's vision to become reality, however, the Pentagon would have to overcome the traditional infighting that has always plagued the military as the four armed services fight for scarce defense dollars. "We lurch reluctantly forward," says one senior officer. Whether the military lurches toward a future where its forces are potent or one where they are hollow is being decided now: at the Pentagon and on the ground, from Kuwait to Haiti. Stretched thin. All the services are feeling overworked and underpaid. Sailors and marines find themselves constantly in demand; the same air crews that were circling in the skies over Bosnia are now launching their jets from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, ready to strike Baghdad if Saddam Hussein turns his Army back toward Kuwait. The Army and the Air Force, accustomed to garrisoning troops and air crews for long tours of service at bases in Europe or America, are also constantly on the move now. The Army, like the other services, has a third fewer people, supported by a third fewer dollars, and is running three times as fast.
Navy officers say they will not have enough ships to perform all the missions they are being asked to do. Admirals who vowed never to send sailors out on peacetime missions longer than six months have been forced to break their pledge twice this year because of events in Somalia and Haiti. And unless the aircraft carrier George Washington departs the Persian Gulf soon, it will not make it back for its scheduled homecoming November 20. Coming home is crucial if volunteer troops are going to re-enlist in the service. The nearly constant deployments of the 10th Mountain Division have strained thousands of marriages. An Army study of Fort Drum spouses published earlier this year found that 12 percent of the married soldiers were away while their wives went through pregnancy, an experience that half of the wives reported as being "extremely stressful."
The dollar cost of missions, whether it's $50,000 a day worth of Army meals ready to eat rations air-dropped to hungry villagers in the Bosnian mountains or $20 million a month to house and feed boat and raft people in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or $170 million for Rwanda-Zaire refugee assistance or $1 billion for Somalia, too often is drawn directly from the services' operations budgets and too seldom is replenished by supplemental appropriations. The 1st Infantry, like the 11 other divisions in the Army, is doing more with less these days: In the last year, $28 million was cut out of the division's operations budget and $2 million out of a program to upgrade family housing.
Within the next few years, the force will reach its targeted strength of 1.45 million, the smallest level since the eve of World War II. This overstretched force -- with fewer tanks and ships and planes, overworked troops and shrinking budgets -- must still be able to perform its chief mission: to fight two major regional wars, in the Persian Gulf region and Korea, at about the same time. Top officers, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, on down, insist it still can. But they acknowledge that there are weak links, particularlyin America's ability to quickly moveits powerful force around the globe. The Pentagon's futurists, led by Admiral Owens, are banking on advances in three areas, which could make the smaller force a better one.
Hitting the target. Killing tanks from the air is at the heart of the high-tech vision of the future. If a Hussein or a Kim Jong Il can be largely stopped from the air, with fighters flying from carriers and B-2 Stealth bombers flying from bases in the United States, the demands on troops, sea lift, logistics and budgets are that much less. "So much of war depends on how well you do in the opening phase," says one Pentagon planner. It is the big gamble: The smart bombs cover the shortcomings in the rest of the U.S. force, particularly its continuing inability to quickly move large numbers of heavy tanks and other equipment long distances.
Today's military can strike and destroy the enemy better than the force that defeated Iraq during Desert Storm. On board the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, 55 tactical aircraft, including 22 F/A-18 Hornets, are armed with smart bombs. In its magazine, the George Washington is carrying about 700 precision munitions, five times more than the carriers USS Saratoga and USS Independence, on the scene at the outset of the gulf war, carried. The naval forces commander in the gulf, Vice Adm. Scott Redd, believes U.S. forces can now destroy a column of Hussein's tanks from the air. During the gulf war, he says, "it was a question of how many [aircraft] sorties per tank. Now, it is a question of how many tanks per sortie."
Tomahawk cruise missiles, on board the submarine accompanying the carrier George Washington, have also been improved. During the gulf war, they flew a premapped route; now, says Admiral Redd, they can fly farther and can be controlled by satellite navigation system, giving planners greater flexibility to select targets. "In the future, there won't be a reason to drop a dumb bomb," says a Pentagon official.
