The United States military is the best-trained, best-equipped, most-capable fighting force in the world; one that President Trump boasts is “getting stronger and stronger and stronger.”
It’s also a force that’s undermanned, over-stretched, undertrained, overworked, and underfunded; one that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford says risks being at “a competitive disadvantage” with its rivals within the next five years.
The mixed message is more than just a case of the ammo box being half empty or half full. It underscores the tension between those who believe Congress is shortchanging the military with harmful budget caps, and those who believe the Pentagon has failed to adapt to the new realities of modern warfare.
Despite the president’s pledge to embark on a massive campaign to rebuild the U.S. military after five years of congressionally-imposed spending limits, and Trump’s oft-repeated claim that his initiatives are already producing results, gridlock on Capitol Hill means so far the Pentagon has yet to see the $52 billion in new money.
And this month, unable to agree on a budget, Congress passed another stopgap continuing resolution that locks the Pentagon into last year’s spending levels, a move that prompted paroxysms of protest from the heads of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, who argue that degraded readiness has become a matter of life and death.
“Over the past three years, a total of 185 men and women in uniform have been killed in non-combat accidents. During the same period, 44 service members were killed in combat,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on the floor of Senate last week. “The bottom line is this: We are killing more of our own people in training than our enemies are in combat.”
Clearly, the U.S. military is in readiness crisis, and more money is the answer. Or maybe not.
“People are just crying ‘crisis’ and asking for resources,” said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a year ago with retired Gen. David Petraeus, headlined, “The Myth of a U.S. Military ‘Readiness’ Crisis.”
O’Hanlon stands by the argument that while there are real readiness issues, it’s hardly a crisis.
“That’s the danger in this debate over the years, because who can be against improving readiness? And who can be in favor of poo-pooing any problems we have? And so you almost risk sounding unpatriotic,” O’Hanlon said.
But he argues the solution may be more about adjusting priorities, and finding ways to work smarter.
“I would still prefer not to use the word crisis,” O’Hanlon said, “because that implies everything else must wait.”
There is no denying this was a deadly summer for the U.S. military, marked by a series of high-profile accidents, including the June collision involving the USS Fitzgerald that killed seven sailors, the July crash of a Marine KC-130 in Mississippi that killed all 16 troops, and last month’s collision of the USS John S. McCain that killed 10 more sailors.
Last week, one soldier died and seven more were injured during a training accident at Fort Bragg, N.C. The incident occurred a day after 14 Marines and one sailor were injured in a yet another training accident involving an amphibious assault vehicle.
Even when there was no loss of life, such as when two Air Force pilots ejected after their A-10s crashed into each other during training this month, the accidents are costly.
The loss of the two A-10s cost more than $100 million, and for the two at-sea collisions, ship repairs are estimated to cost more than half a billion dollars.
But focusing on clusters of incidents can be misleading, especially when relatively small numbers are involved.
With the exception of the Navy’s 7th fleet, this has not been a particularly bad year for ship-handling accidents, and apart from the Marine Corps, military aviation is not showing a significant trend.
The statistics for what the military calls Class A mishaps — accidents that result in loss of life, serious injury, or damage in excess of $2 million – show Air Force had a safer year in fiscal 2017 (10 accidents with five deaths), compared to 12 accidents with 16 deaths in 2016. The Army saw an increase from 25 to 26 accidents, with eight deaths recorded for both years, while the Navy recorded no fatalities from aviation accidents.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense policy expert with the American Enterprise Institute, admits that comparing accidental deaths to combat deaths could simply illustrate how with fewer troops on the battlefield there are fewer casualties, rather than show a spike in accidents.
“We are going to have planes fall out of the sky, unfortunately. Pilots crash,” Eaglen said. “There are all kinds of things that can be readiness problems that don’t signal a bigger iceberg under the water.”
But she argues the fact that two Navy destroyers collided with commercial vessels was a huge red flag that something more disturbing was going on.
As was the case in some recent Marine Corps aviation accidents, inadequate training is being cited as a potential factor.
“I separate ‘typical and to be expected’ from ‘cause for concern,’ the two baskets of readiness problems,” Eaglen said. “I’m starting to see too many in the basket of ‘cause for concern.'”
An updated Government Accountability Office report presented to Congress this month found that Navy crews on ships forward-deployed to Japan were overworked and undertrained and the ships were not properly maintained.
“We aren’t big enough to do everything we’re being tasked to do our, and our culture is, we’re going to get it done because that’s what the Navy is all about. And sometimes our culture works against us,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran testified before a House committee this month. “Perhaps we’ve asked them to do too much.
Or perhaps the service chiefs need to be looking for innovative solutions that don’t necessarily involve more money, such as double-crewing ships, the same way the Navy does for ballistic missile submarines, argues Brooking’s O’Hanlon.
“They shouldn’t think dollars are going to be their complete rescue, and they shouldn’t repair readiness at the expense of sustaining innovation of modernization,” O’Hanlon said.
“The North Korea situation is a crisis. A fighter jet fleet being at 75 percent mission-capable rate rather than 85 percent is not a crisis. It is a significant issue, but not a crisis.”
