Fractured Force III
[Phillip Carter,
Tuesday April 10, 2007 at 4:42pm ]
As a young lieutenant, I read "Prodigal Soldiers," by James Kitfield, because it was recommended by a friend and mentor of mine. The book tells the story of the generation of Army officers who emerged from the crucible of Vietnam, stayed in the Army through the difficult 1970s as it moved to an all-volunteer force, and then rebuilt the Army during the 1980s. Prodigal Soldiers easily ranks among the best histories I've read in the national security field; it explains a great deal about where the U.S. Army finds itself today.James Kitfield specializes in long-form dispatches about complex topics which would probably be too "Inside Baseball" for the major newspapers, though they seem to be finally giving some ink subjects like military manpower and equipment. Kitfield has a new article in the National Journal (reprinted by GovExec.com) that provides even more detail about the Army's current strain:
Amid the camaraderie of Fort Hood's military community, however, the signs of war's stress are evident. Consider the acute shortage of barracks space. Because the Army is restructuring itself into smaller, 3,500-4,500 troop brigades instead of larger, 10,000-12,000 troop divisions at the same time it is pulling units back from Cold War bases in Europe and Asia, and sending units repeatedly to Iraq and Afghanistan, the shuffling of personnel is intense.If federal copyright law allowed me to reprint the whole thing, I would. This is a thorough piece of journalism that should be required reading for anyone concerned about national security. Kitfield's article adds a great deal of detailed reporting to pieces in TIME, Slate and the Washington Times I've cited in earlier notes on this subject. And though the article stops short of declaring that the Army is broken, it paints a clear picture of a force in great distress. So too does this dispatch from Greg Grant about the 3rd Infantry Division's third deployment to Iraq.
So Fort Hood has resorted to "hot-cotting." Units no longer have permanent designated barracks that they lock up and leave when they go abroad; as they deploy to the wars now, soldiers must put their personal items in storage and surrender barracks rooms and sleeping berths to new units or to those just retuning from combat.
Fort Hood is also seeing a sharp increase in demand for marriage-enrichment counseling for spouses who cannot understand why their partners are willing to leave them for a second, third, or even fourth combat tour. An Army survey revealed that soldiers are 50 percent more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress if they serve more than one tour.
Reliable figures are not available for the mental stress put on soldiers in the 11 Army brigades that have served three or more yearlong tours in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. However, according to a Pentagon health study released in January, the rate of binge drinking in the Army ballooned by 30 percent between 2002 and 2005, and the increase in illicit drug use nearly doubled between 1998 and 2005.
The number of soldiers who killed themselves in Iraq and Kuwait from 2004 to 2005 nearly doubled, rising to 22 from 12. Because of the strains of multiple yearlong deployments, whispers about affairs and divorces are also heard frequently at Fort Hood.
"We've seen indicators in our mental health care system that some families simply do not understand why their loved ones want to go back downrange and join their peers in Iraq and Afghanistan again, even though as a soldier I absolutely recognize that as part of the warrior ethos of not wanting to leave your comrades in battle," said a senior officer in the 1st Cavalry Division.
Or consider for a moment the peculiar lack of tanks and armored Humvees in the Fort Hood motor pools. An acute and worsening equipment shortage has robbed soldiers of stateside training opportunities and decimated the readiness of units that have not gone to Iraq or Afghanistan.
For the past few years, units such as the 4th Infantry Division have been forced to leave behind much of their equipment in Iraq for use by their replacements such as the 1st Cavalry. That leaves the soldiers little equipment to train on when they return to Fort Hood.
The Army and Marine Corps have also depleted their stocks of equipment pre-positioned overseas, which will hamper their ability to respond quickly to emergencies elsewhere. That same equipment shuffle has left nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States unready to respond to domestic emergencies, according to a recent report by a congressional commission.
If anything, equipment shortages are arguably worse today than in 1980, when the Army was recovering from Vietnam. Judging by their recent actions, Iran, North Korea, and other potential adversaries have taken note. "On the equipment side of the equation, the Army is pretty much broken," said Tom McNaugher, the longtime Army expert at the Rand think tank.
In Kitfield's earlier books, there is a mantra often repeated by Army officers: "never again." Depending on the speaker, the mantra may refer to Kasserine Pass, to Task Force Smith, or to Vietnam. But the meaning of the phrase is the same: never again shall we send untrained, unprepared, or unready troops into harm's way. The generation of officers who rebuilt the Army during the 1980s designed a military built around this mantra of training and readiness. It established the National Training Center, developed new doctrine, adopted a rigorous task-based training model, and instituted other systems to ensure that the U.S. Army would be ready for the first battle of the next war, and that American blood would never again be spilled in the name of tactical or operational ineptitude.
Unfortunately, Kitfield's generation of officers did not design a military well-suited to the task of fighting protracted wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, the task now falls to the current generation of Army leaders to fix it.
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