Preparedness: How Many Wars Can the U.S. Fight?

By Jesse Birnbaum

During the cold war, Pentagon planners boasted that the U.S. was prepared to battle the Soviet Union while simultaneously waging a smaller conflict against another, less formidable foe elsewhere in the world. Now the cold war is finished -- and so is that 1 1/2-war strategy. Even before the outbreak of major fighting on the ground, the gulf war had severely strained U.S. military resources and raised troubling questions about America's ability to fight one war -- defending Western Europe against a Soviet onslaught -- much less 1 1/2.

Serious doubts arise from the length of time it took the U.S. to deploy the 525,000-strong forces of Operation Desert Storm. In the event of a Soviet offensive in Europe, Pentagon strategy called for reinforcing NATO with six armored and infantry divisions airlifted or shipped from the U.S. in only 10 days, but it has taken nearly six months to complete the buildup in the gulf. That buildup has stripped American bases in the U.S. and overseas of troops and war machines. More than 70,000 U.S. Army soldiers and 40,000 tanks, artillery pieces and other equipment have been moved to Saudi Arabia from Germany alone. Of the six armored or mechanized divisions that had been deployed with NATO, only slightly more than two now remain. Another two are held in reserve in the U.S.

The other service branches have also been drained. Ninety thousand Marines -- nearly half the corps's manpower -- are in the gulf. The Air Force has sent in more than 1,400 tactical aircraft, about a fourth of its inventory, as well as nearly all of its B-52Gs. Of the Navy's 13 aircraft-carrier battle groups, six are in the gulf theater. Specialized forces in the Far East and Southeast Asia have been reduced.

So have U.S.-based Reserve and National Guard units that had been assigned crucial roles in contingency planning for a European war. For the most part, they have acquitted themselves well in the gulf, but there have been embarrassing exceptions. Some National Guard brigades were simply unprepared to fight. In Louisiana dozens of reservists from the 256th Brigade went AWOL for a weekend to protest training conditions, and the commander of the 48th Infantry Brigade from Fort Irwin, Calif., was removed from active duty after his unit performed poorly in training.

Despite these strains, the Pentagon asserts that the U.S. and its NATO allies could fight the Soviets in Europe if necessary and at the same time handle a challenge elsewhere. Others are not so sure. "The gulf deployment," says Lawrence Korb, a Brookings Institution military expert and former Defense Department expert on manpower, "puts to rest that idea." Says Washington defense analyst Steven Canby: "Let us pray that we don't face any new threat elsewhere."

Given the logistical and manpower problems the gulf war highlighted, the Pentagon might be expected to argue for a bigger military establishment in the future. The opposite is true. In testimony before two congressional committees last week, Pentagon bosses Dick Cheney and Colin Powell defended their new multiyear budget, proposed earlier this month, which calls for a 25% cut in military personnel by 1995, a 4% reduction in spending and even the elimination of many of the weapons that have proved to be so dramatically effective in the gulf.

Cheney and Powell make three arguments in favor of the cutbacks: 1) the runaway federal deficit dictates smaller defense budgets, 2) the Soviet threat has declined, and 3) quality can replace quantity.

The key to the Pentagon's new approach will be a sharply reduced American "forward deployment" in Europe and the Pacific, backed by a strong, mobile capability stationed in the U.S. The Army would be reduced from 28 divisions to 20, supported by increased, speedier airlift and sea-lift capacity, and including a quick-reaction Contingency Force consisting of the XVIII Airborne Corps reinforced with two armored divisions. The Pentagon would also proceed with its plans to close 225 military bases around the world and to tighten its procurement policies. All told, the current force of 2.1 million active-duty personnel would be reduced about one-fourth, roughly equal to the number of troops engaged in the gulf war.

Oddly, Cheney also wants to phase out some of the battle equipment that the public has only begun to recognize. The M1A1 tank as well as the Bradley fighting vehicle, both hardy workhorses in the gulf, will no longer be produced. Assembly lines for the AH-64 Apache and AH-1S Cobra helicopters, so efficient in the fighting, will close; the Army wants a new heavy battle tank and a high-tech helicopter instead. The Navy will eliminate or scale back some weapons designed for battling the Soviets, including its Trident SLBM submarine program and its hunter-killer Seawolf submarine procurement, and reduce its overall carrier group strength from 13 to 12. Increased costs will almost certainly force the Air Force to cut its proposed purchase of 120 C-17 transport planes.

But Cheney wants to revive the case for other weapons whose demise seemed likely before the gulf war started. They include two costly gadgets that have played no role in Operation Desert Storm:

Star Wars. The Strategic Defense Initiative, designed to detect and intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles in outer space, was moribund until Iraq unleashed its Scud missiles. The Patriot changed all that, even though it is based on a technology that was developed long before SDI got to the drawing board. Still, SDI backers argue that the success of the Patriot teaches a significant lesson about the need to prepare against ICBMs. "All you'd have to do is watch the Scud missile battles over Tel Aviv and Riyadh," says Cheney, "to have a sense of the extent to which ballistic-missile capability is a threat to U.S. forces."

More Patriots are not the answer. Despite its gee-whiz exploits in the gulf, the Patriot flies at only three times the speed of sound and covers only a narrow swath of real estate. It has no trouble dealing with the unsophisticated Scud, a Mach 4 weapon that has proved to be the Edsel of missiles. An ICBM warhead, on the other hand, enters the atmosphere at 15 times the speed of sound. A Patriot could scarcely get off its launcher before an ICBM did its damage.

Thus SDI has suddenly gained a new respectability. The White House and Senate minority leader Robert Dole are encouraging more spending on the system. Mindful that the Soviet Union still has 2,300 ICBMs in its arsenal, and confident that the U.S. public no longer views Star Wars as an unattainable magic elixir, the Pentagon proposes to boost SDI research from its present $3.2 billion to $4.6 billion.

The Stealth Bomber. The gulf war has deepened the controversy over what was already the biggest weapons-funding debate in the budget. At $860 million apiece, the B-2 is the most expensive aircraft ever designed. Congress nearly killed the entire program for good last year, but the Pentagon now is seeking more than $4 billion in 1992 to build four B-2s.

In their attempt to justify the B-2 by providing it with a mission, advocates have argued that the bomber could be used to hunt down and destroy Soviet mobile missile launchers. But the allied air campaign's failure to silence Iraq's Scuds after four weeks of relentless searching has strengthened skepticism about the B-2's ability to locate Soviet missiles concealed in millions of acres of forests in the U.S.S.R. Opponents argue, furthermore, that the $70 million F-117A stealth fighter-bomber is not only a lot cheaper than the B-2 but also brilliantly effective; according to the Pentagon, it has had a 95% accuracy record in hitting its targets in Iraq. Another challenge to the B-2 is the Tomahawk cruise missile, which costs only $1 million. Tomahawks had a reported 90% success rate in the gulf war. Congressional critics might decide that these factors will overwhelm those favoring the B-2.

The future shape of U.S. preparedness, and its price tag, will depend on the course of the gulf war and the outcome of political events in the troubled Soviet Union. Until these matters are resolved, it is just as well that the U.S. is not fighting even a fraction more than one war at a time.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Holmes/Telek

CAPTION: U.S. FIREPOWER IN THE GULF

With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand/Tokyo, James O. Jackson/Bonn and Bruce van Voorst/Washington