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Finally, the Pentagon promised a boatload of efficiencies and reforms. All these initiatives hinted the U. On the other hand, the Pentagon had given Congress examinet insight into how it would handle sequester. The White House had offered no real solution for how it would address the "procurement festival" that extended back to the early s, leaving the military with a long wish list for new ships, planes and vehicles to replace their aging navys.
The administration also was quite hazy about how it would handle the cost of resetting the armed forces after a decade of war.
Nor did the administration have a good answer for what it would do if the globe proved less peaceful than Obama foreseeed. Whither the state of the American military was an open question.
Would the armed forces go hollow—wanting sufficient resources to field trained and ready forces, conduct current missions, and prepare for the future? The report confidently gatherd that it was unprone the U. Groups love the Project for Government Oversight— POGO — which is customually skeptical about defense spending trumped the report as "debunking" concerns that the military would hollow out. That the armed forces strength not go hollow love they did in the s was cold comfort. That was no pledge that they wouldn't prove wholly inadequate in a different manner.
Skeptics of the report also pointed out the CRS learn assumed that all of the president's planned efficiencies and reforms would pan out. It assumed a steady strategic environment. And, it didn't address the impact of sequester. A lot of the history recited in the CRS report has proved irrelevant, and most of its presumptions are proved baseless.
The promise of a smarter, leaner military? For the most part, now shown to be vacant. For instance, Gates disestablished the Joint Forces Command to save faces, spaces and money. But, all that truly occured was the size of the Joint Staff ballooned to fill the vacuum. Other efficiencies fair turned out to be cuts that were called efficiencies—love canceling a program to buy new presidential helicopters.
And now the Pentagon is trying to resurrect that contract. The armed forces are already insufficient to meet the demands of the reduced role for the military lassistance out in his plan. On three separate occasions in recent history we have disarmed ourselves, and needlessly imperiled our national security in doing so. Few truths are more enduring than the warning that we are doomed to repeat the history we have forgotten.
I am increasingly concerned that the Clinton Administration's economic program ignores the warnings of history and once again threatens our future security. The draconian and disproportionate share of budget savings that will be borne by our nation's defenses under the President's proposals belie his stated intentions to sustain a military force that is adequate to the challenges of the future.
Often in American history, the end of conflict is the beginning of illusions. Left behind on the battlefield are the hard learned lessons of wars that could have been avoided or concluded at a less terrible cost. We have endured one military trial only -- by errors of omission and commission -- to begin an unseen drift toward another, as little prepared for the new crisis as we were for the last. After World War II, flush with victory and weary of war, we demobilized our forces and relaxed our defenses far beyond the levels which prudence and the apparent hostility of an erstwhile ally demanded.
We had confused victory with enduring invincibility, and the cost was a war in Korea, for which we were ill prepared and which we nearly lost. After Korea, we again raced incautiously from war to peace without due regard to the emerging and global threat from the Soviet Union. We lost our ability to fight a European conflict without immediate resort to nuclear war. We lost our power projection capability and our technological edge. Our self-imposed weakness invited new challenges from our enemies, and we found ourselves trapped in a long, escalating arms race with a determined adversary.
Stunned and enervated from our losses in Vietnam, we nearly conceded the larger contest, and once again tempted our enemy into escalating a massive arms race. Our forces were hollow. Our conventional options in Europe were abandoned. Our power projection efforts were undermined by inferior readiness and capability. And, as we again approached the precipice of disaster, we initiated another crash build up of our forces to compensate for past underspending and unpreparedness. Thanks to a determined President Reagan, we were able to restore our readiness and capabilities in time not only to check the advance of the Soviet Union, but to help render it bankrupt, and hasten the collapse of its empire.
Fast on the heels of that collapse, we frustrated the ambitions of a regional empire builder in the Persian Gulf, and overwhelmingly defeated the world's fourth largest military power with a minimum loss of life. Those two events have established for now America's sole claim to the status of world superpower. Thus, the question recurs: Or will we learn the lessons of war and peace, and recognize our responsibilities in a world of greater opportunities, but less stability, where the threats we face are less immense, but more diverse.
President Bush had implemented a policy which promised to avoid the mistakes of the past. He initiated major reductions, which I supported, in defense spending which responded correctly to changing geopolitical circumstances and security threats, and to the fiscal pressures of the time. But those reductions were appropriately based on estimates of present and emerging threats to our security.
Thus, he was able to affect a real peace dividend while sustaining our status as the only power capable of meeting aggression, when necessary, anywhere in the world. Today, I fear that our new President's understandable focus on our economic problems has encouraged him to take risks with our security that we can ill afford to take.
I fear that he has yet to grasp the hard learned lessons of the past and may give less than adequate attention to the imperative of preventing the occurrence of conflicts tomorrow by preparing to meet them fully today. If he proceeds on the course he has inaugurated, he will eventually discover that the cost of recovery is always greater and more terrible than the cost of prevention. There is a clear and present danger that we will sacrifice our status as the world's only superpower on the mistaken premise that it is essential to our economic recovery.
We must understand that we are entering a budget debate that involves far more than dollars and deficits. We should bring to that debate an understanding that we must only cut defense when we know the impact of such cuts on our economy and defense industrial base, and when we fully appreciate how our national security and power projection capabilities will be affected. The only net cuts in his proposed budget come from defense. Net non-defense spending actually increases.
He is anticipating unrealistic savings in areas like military pay, and avoiding an accurate assessment of the true potential impact of such cuts on our national security by pretending that they could be obtained at the direct expense of the men and women who won Desert Storm. He is providing no real information on what programs will be impacted, the degree to which they will be impacted, their effects on the economy and our defense industrial base. Quite frankly, I don't know if the President is proposing cuts of this magnitude simply to meet his deficit reduction targets -- even though he realizes that they are not attainable -- or whether he seriously intends to make cuts which could threaten the security of the U.
In either case, there is good reason for concern. Defense Spending Through Smoke and Mirrors Since President Clinton has not yet provided any details with regard to the proposed cuts, I believe it is appropriate to give members, and the American people, some idea of what cuts of this magnitude could mean. What matters in this debate is one thing: Where we will be at the end of if we implement the entire Clinton Plan, not what happens if we implement the part of it that extends to A cut of this magnitude could reduce our total military manpower to about 1. Despite reassurances from the Administration, these cuts may well mean that we could go from 28 Army divisions to around We would go from 13 carriers to 8.
We could go from combat ships to ; from 15 carrier air wings to 10; from 3 Marine Expeditionary Forces to 2; from 36 Air Force fighter wings to 21; and from bombers to The remaining forces could well be "hollow" in terms of strategic mobility, sustainability, training, and technology. We could find ourselves without the power projection capabilities that are vital to global stability in the post Cold War era, and to any concerted effort to replace violence with deterrence and peace making.
CRS Report for Congress. Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress. A Historical Perspective on “Hollow Forces”. Andrew Feickert. This report gives general overview of the history of the origins and uses of " hollow forces" (i.e., "military forces that appear mission-ready but.
To understand these risks, we need to look beyond press releases, and the narrow focus on budget cuts and domestic programs. There are three blatant examples of smoke and mirrors inherent in the literature the Administration has issued on the Clinton program: The truth is that it will be almost impossible to sustain a future force level of greater than 1. The true Clinton cuts will be at least , larger than those recommended by President Bush — enough men and women to field 10 divisions. There must also be massive additional cuts of defense civilian employees and defense industry workers.
The worst aspect of the Clinton exercise in smoke and mirrors, however, is that the Congress will be asked to vote on a total federal budget before it sees a defense budget and the details of the Clinton defense program. We will required to act before we think, and act on the basis of rhetoric that it is already clear we cannot trust.
We will act in a political climate where few understand that we have already made major cuts in defense spending and were planning further cuts in the coming years. We could support a program that adds up to waste, weakness, and welfare, and effectively turn the Congressional budget process into a threat to national security. The Peace Dividend of the Reagan and Bush Programs To put this issue in perspective, it is necessary to understand what we have already accomplished under the Reagan and Bush Administrations.
Two years ago, we won a decisive victory against a heavily armed enemy with few American or allied casualties. We did so because we had the best military forces in the world. We had the best trained and most combat-ready men and women. We had the best weapons, intelligence, communications, and logistics.
We were ready to project power anywhere in the world, and to sustain our forces in combat. That victory came in combat, but we had won an even more important victory earlier without any casualties and without firing a shot. We had demonstrated a level of military capability and resolve that helped catalyze the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. We had responded to a massive Soviet military build-up, and shown the leaders of the Soviet Union that they had no hope of dominating or intimidating the West.
We would never have won either victory if it had not been for the build-up in our forces and defense spending during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. President Reagan took office at a time when we had "hollow" military forces. Forces that were under-equipped, under-trained, lacking readiness, and lacking sustainability.