Army Woes
Major General Scales’ lament in “The Military Budget Pie” (Washington Times, January 10, 2007) is eccentric, if not discouragingly familiar.
Scales begins with a melancholic elegy; his beloved Army breaks whenever it is sent to war. I disagree, but were this true I would be hard-pressed to advocate, as does Scales, “a huge infusion of money [just] to keep it from total collapse” for the third time since 1979. Successful business models and military strategies assert that investments ought to be funneled to reinforce areas of success, not of repeated failure. To his credit, Scales makes an impressive case that the Navy and Air Force have been so successful that they are no longer even challenged in the air and on the sea, but his recommendation that these two most flourishing components of our joint forces can now be sent off to savor their victories while the Army and Marines pick their budgetary bones is hardly sage. It is consistent, however, with his broader argument of blame.
The Army shoulders no fault in its own demise, claims Scales. That belongs to the American “society’s approach to war,” which is to avoid “excessive” casualties, an affliction keyed by a former five-star general’s decision to choose “firepower over manpower” in prosecuting its wars. With all due respect to Gen Scales’ displeasure, I think Eisenhower and America got it right. If dying is the metric for honor and success in modern war, then Scales’ recommendation to plus up Army and Marine foot soldiers at the expense of Air Force and Navy firepower and support is cruelly efficient.
If the proper metric is not dying in battle—such body-count mentalities are easily manipulated—but achieving positive political outcomes, then the best way to employ American soldiers and marines is to provide them with preeminent support and supplies, to prepare the battlefield with intense air and sea bombardment, to provide continuous air and space cover and intelligence—and never, ever send them into harm’s way without it.
As for Scale’s budgetary recommendations, comparing fighter aircraft to infantry squads in costs is not just bad math, it is the devious accountant’s sleight-of-hand. It costs more to control the sea, air, and space than it does to contest the ground. That is a simple fact. And without control of these mediums, US control of ground overseas is just not possible. That modern aircraft, satellites, and ships cost more than rifles, tanks, and artillery is obvious enough, but the expenditure Scales cites discounts outlays for long-term research, development, and training associated with modern weapons systems—amounts that have taken significant hits over the last half decade to plus up the Army. Indeed, expenditures on naval and airpower appear to provide a fantastic return compared to the same expenditures for land-centric capabilities. America simply cannot achieve an equivalent overmatch of force on the ground (without ubiquitous air and space superiority) to that which it has in the air and at sea, making ground-centric investments relatively poor over the long term.
It is also worth emphasizing that much of the Army’s and Marines’ most critical combat support is provided via the budgets of the Air Force and Navy. There is no quid pro quo, or equivalent expenditure in the other direction. The Army’s budget is its own, not so for the other services. The largest user of space navigation, weather, indications and warning, and communications assets is the US Army, yet the entirety of funding for space procurement, launch, and maintenance is funded by the Air Force. The Predator and Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles have proved essential to Army and Marine operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet these two are part and parcel of the Air Force’s Budget. Remove these two programs from the budget figures Scales cites, and the Army has a larger portion of the pie than its sister service. And that is just part of the real math Scales should consider. B-52’s dropping space-enhanced precision-guided munitions are acting as the Army’s super-mobile omnipresent artillery. Massive expenditures on self-propelled guns that can no longer even keep up with the front lines of the modern battlefield are gone. Airlift and sealift are the elements that get the Army and Marines to the battlefield, in addition to all of their supplies, and yet the user services pay nothing for the ride.
It is time to stop squabbling over budget allocation “fairness.” Money should go where it gets the best return.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:22 am
The view of Scales, a bona fide Army-centric Air Force basher for a long time, dovetails with other recent articles regarding the state of the United States Army and the Fat Scottish Bastard’s recent posting on Old Dead Carl and the Air Force. Institutionally, the Army doesn’t want to fight an insurgency, just like the Air Force doesn’t. The quote provided in the post sums it up as much today for these institutions as Clausewitz did when it was first written. However, the Air Force has never been more than a supporting force for countering an insurgency. Fighting insurgents is the job of Land Forces, such as the Army. The Army has been wrestling with its relationship to that type of war for at least 4 decades. The Big Green Machine simply does not want to fight that type of war. A recent article in Jane’s Defense Weekly (24 Jan 07, p11), highlights this dilemma. GEN William Wallace of TRADOC cites “anecdotal evidence” that high-end combat skills are being eroded by the focus on the war in Iraq. When is the Army going to stop focusing only on one type of combat and resource for the spectrum of conflict it is supposed to prepare for? Boots on the ground mean nothing if you can’t control the terrain across the spectrum of potential operations.