Revolution At Defense

By Bruce W. Nelan

Even more than military victories, defeats teach important lessons. After its long and bitter experience in Vietnam, the U.S. had a lot of them to learn. American commanders had too often proved unimaginative and bureaucratic, their troops uninspired and all too frequently undisciplined. After the fall of Saigon, still more fiascoes fairly shouted of Pentagon ineptitude. An attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran broke down in the desert in 1980. In 1983 a terrorist's truck bomb killed 241 American servicemen, forcing the U.S. to beat an embarrassing retreat from its peacekeeping role in Lebanon.

But even as those disasters and a plethora of defense-procurement scandals were feeding a lack of trust and respect for the military, the Pentagon was not only absorbing lessons but also beginning to repair itself. The armed forces have undergone a quiet revolution. An entirely new defense establishment has been created, its ranks filled by volunteers, its methods, training and strategy thoroughly modernized.

The payoff has been an Air Force that downed 40 Iraqi planes in air-to-air combat without a loss and an Army that destroyed or captured 3,700 tanks while losing only three. On television from the gulf, America saw articulate, thoughtful soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines glowing with obvious integrity and dedication.

This turnaround was the result of deep soul-searching. "After Vietnam," says Lieut. General Calvin Waller, deputy commander in chief of Central Command in Saudi Arabia, "most of the military men who decided to stay soldiers said to themselves, 'We have to do something different.' " The first priority was to get rid of the draft and create an all-volunteer force. By excluding from its ranks those who did not want to serve, the military hoped to get rid of troublemakers and incompetents. This strategy seems to have worked. Says Lieut. General John J. Yeosock, commander of the Army units in the gulf: "I have fewer disciplinary problems commanding a third of a million troops now than I did in 1973 commanding 1,000 men."

Congress provided the funds to make military salaries more attractive (a new enlistee earns $669 a month, vs. $217 in the Vietnam era) and to improve housing, benefits and training. The services set higher admission standards; the percentage of recruits with high school diplomas is now more than 96%, in contrast to 65% in 1973. Revamped procedures for evaluating officers and enlisted men have been put into place and rigidly enforced. Soldiers who do not quickly adjust to military life or perform well enough to earn promotions within five years are washed out of the services. Says Waller: "If you don't perform at a certain level, we don't want you."

At the same time, the armed forces reformed the way they develop and promote leaders. For many years, says retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former CIA director, "we didn't really teach military strategy and doctrine." During his tenure at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., in the mid-1970s, Turner forced classes of promising officers to read 1,000 pages of military history each week. A similar emphasis is enforced at the National Defense University in Washington, the Pentagon's most senior training school. The idea, says the war college's director, Vice Admiral John Baldwin, is to "think strategically and think jointly" -- that is, to coordinate wartime campaigns involving all the armed services.

The Marine Corps commandant, General Alfred Gray, even produced a reading list for his Leathernecks: corporals, he suggested, should read the U.S. Constitution; sergeants could sample Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage; and colonels might study How We Won the War by Vietnamese Vo Nguyen Giap. Says Washington-based military consultant Steven Canby: "Imagine, the American military used to be the antithesis of intellectualism. Now they read Mahan and Clausewitz," the classic strategists of sea and land warfare.

Such higher standards of scholarship inside the military were reflected in a study of 163 new brigadier generals by the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C. It found the officers had IQs in the 92nd percentile of the population, a ranking above that of corporate executives with comparable responsibilities. A follow-up on colonels and lieutenant colonels found that 80% had advanced university degrees, in contrast to only 20% of executives.

Among the many failures in Vietnam was a military doctrine that emphasized positional warfare and overwhelming firepower to defeat an enemy through attrition -- a lineal descendant of the methods of General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. Work on a new strategy called the AirLand Battle, which General H. Norman Schwarzkopf used so effectively against Iraq, helped change all that. AirLand relies on mobility and maneuver, speed and deception. It combines the fighting power of land and air forces into one centrally directed whole.

The new doctrine was matched by improved methods of training. The armed forces now have elaborate -- and expensive -- practice facilities like the army's 640,000-acre Fort Irwin in the California desert. Troops in battalion- size units stage extraordinarily realistic mock battles against "Red" forces highly skilled at mimicking enemy tactics.

These rehearsals worked so well that by the time American troops went into action in the gulf, many of them felt as if they had been through it all before. "Killing an enemy tank is something of a letdown," says Sergeant Tom Cavanaugh of the 2nd Armored Division's Tiger Brigade. "I got two kills, and it was just like we trained for."

Does the triumph of Operation Desert Storm mean the U.S. could duplicate it at other times and places? Not necessarily. Although the gulf is 7,000 miles from America's East Coast ports, no enemy ships, submarines or planes presented a challenge to Navy and cargo vessels as they steamed to the area. Saudi Arabia possesses some of the biggest ports and air bases in the world, and the U.S. moved into them unopposed.

None of that would have been true if the enemy had been the Soviet Union, the foe the Pentagon had in mind when it built its arsenal and doctrine. In that case the fleets would have been attacked by submarines, and huge battles for air superiority would have raged in the sky over the battlefield. And if some future battle had to be fought in the jungles of, say, the Philippines or Peru, it would have nothing like the operational clarity of last month's war in the desert.

One of the most effective tools the Pentagon used to remake the U.S. armed forces was huge amounts of money. Since the final year of the Carter Administration, when many of the largest weapons programs began, through the years of the Reagan buildup, the nation invested $2.4 trillion in the Defense Department. Some of this largesse was wisely used on well-paid soldiers and well-made weapons. Plenty was not: a report to Congress last week indicated the three-year-old fleet of B-1B bombers, which were unable to take part in the gulf war because their engines and electronics are so unreliable, will have to be overhauled at a cost of $1 billion.

Just before Operation Desert Storm began, the cold war formally ended and , the Pentagon was about to take some cuts. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney plans to trim the Army 31% over the next five years, the Navy 13%, the Air Force 28% and the Marines 14%. Taken together, those projected reductions will lop off 500,000 men and women -- or about the size of the force in the gulf -- from the 2.1 million now in uniform.

A counterattack by the services is taking shape in Washington. They have sounded out congressional support for a slowdown in the scheduled cuts. Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, says he is willing to reconsider the five-year plan. General Carl Vuono, the Army Chief of Staff, recommends a slowing of force reductions in light of the gulf war and uncertainty over the stability of the Soviet Union.

Similar offensives by the supporters of multibillion-dollar programs like the Stealth bomber and the Strategic Defense Initiative are getting under way. Everyone with a favorite weapons program, whether a member of Congress or a general, points to the gulf war as justification. Last week, for example, Democratic and Republican representatives from New York and Pennsylvania joined forces to order continued production of the F-14 Tomcat, a carrier- based interceptor Cheney says the Navy has in sufficient quantity. Price tag for the congressionally ordered continuation: $987 million.

Cautious evaluation of military plans is always a good idea, but pressure to increase spending may get out of hand. At the very least, it would make it more difficult to reduce a budget deficit swollen by the huge effort in the gulf -- even if only marginally, thanks to the allies' contributions. The coming scramble for defense dollars is an ominous sign that many in Washington are ready to learn the wrong lessons from victory.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington and Robert T. Zintl/Riyadh