Are we really "out of Schlitz"?

Out, plumb used up, kaput and depleted like an empty beer keg. "We're out of Schlitz." That's how the Army summarized its user-friendly manpower assessment before a congressional commission yesterday.

Now that we've had the adults in charge for six years, don't you feel safer?

But rather than posing the question of how much more we should spend in pursuit of safety, the dire assessment, it seems to me, raises the question of what in hell have we been doing with what we've had?

"In particularly blunt testimony," the Army's chief of staff said his forces "began the Iraq war 'flat-footed' with a $56 billion equipment shortage and 500,000 fewer soldiers" than 15 years ago, when Pops had the good sense to get out immediately after getting in.

These shortages, said the chief, put "future missions in jeopardy."

A $56 billion equipment shortfall? A half-million fewer soldiers than the budget allows? Future missions at risk?

Current U.S. military spending accounts for more than half of all global expenditures on things that go boom and the folks who bring them to you. Put another way, we spend more on destruction than the rest of the entire world put together.

Depending on how you add it all up, we spend nearly 10 times what China does -- that military behemoth of hair-raising proportions, we're warned; and it's further implied we should start catching up.

Lordy, lord, to hear the neocons and Pentagon tell it, the little buggers are outdistancing us in every firepowered category. We are woefully, dangerously behind.

But they don't mention just how far ahead we are in being behind.

No, instead we're told we entered this idiotic war with a $56 billion equipment shortage.

But let's be fair. That's only because, as was reported into Congressional oversight oblivion in 2003, the Defense Department "couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars [as in 1000 billion] in financial transactions, not to mention ... Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units."

Oh well, that's why they put erasers on pencils, as my father was fond of saying when pondering our military's gargantuan waste.

And you won't hear the Pentagon highlighting the fiscal fact, as budgetary things stand now, that its "spending, not including funding for the Department of Energy or for actual combat operations for the period FY’07 through FY’11 will exceed $2 trillion."

In this case, let's be prudent as well as fair. Perhaps we should kick in another trillion, since half of that two trillion is likely to vanish somewhere, somehow, by FY '11.

Frustrated with this relentless underfunding, the Army chief of staff "banged his hand on a House committee-room table, saying the continuation of today's Pentagon policies is 'not right.'"

How right he is. Throwing more money at the Pentagon is like feeding a one-armed bandit. The statistical odds of a profitable outcome are less than confidence inspiring.

Comments

[Ken Larson]

There are good points in your article. I would like to supplement them with some information:

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.

If you are interested in a view of the inside of the Pentagon procurement process from Vietnam to Iraq please check the posting at my blog entitled, “Odyssey of Armaments”

http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com

The Pentagon is a giant, incredibly complex establishment, budgeted in excess of $500B per year. The Rumsfelds, the Administrations and the Congressmen come and go but the real machinery of policy and procurement keeps grinding away, presenting the politicos who arrive with detail and alternatives slanted to perpetuate itself.

How can any newcomer, be he a President, a Congressman or even the Sec. Def. to be - Mr. Gates- understand such complexity, particularly if heretofore he has not had the clearance to get the full details?

Answer- he can’t. Therefore he accepts the alternatives provided by the career establishment that never goes away and he hopes he makes the right choices. Or he is influenced by a lobbyist or two representing companies in his district or special interest groups.

From a practical standpoint, policy and war decisions are made far below the levels of the talking heads who take the heat or the credit for the results.

This situation is unfortunate but it is absolute fact. Take it from one who has been to war and worked in the establishment.

This giant policy making and war machine will eventually come apart and have to be put back together to operate smaller, leaner and on less fuel. But that won’t happen until it hits a brick wall at high speed.

We will then have to run a Volkswagen instead of a Caddy and get along somehow. We better start practicing now and get off our high horse. Our golden aura in the world is beginning to dull from arrogance.