Beyond 'bottom up.' - failure Secretary of Defense Les Aspin's "Bottom Up Review" on US military readiness

National Review, Nov 15, 1993 by Eliot A. Cohen

LES ASPIN, then Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, discomfited the Bush Administration in 1992 when he berated it for failing to come to terms with the end of the Cold War. The Bush Administration's "Base Force," he argued, represented nothing more than an across-the-board reduction of the American military, not a thorough rethinking of America's defense needs for a new world. The criticism stung, and for good reason. The Base Force had indeed shrunk the Cold War military, rather than recast it.

Ironically, when Aspin recently issued a "Bottom Up Review" he attracted the same criticism, and with no less cause. This 17-page document (including pictures and graphics) projected a force of ten active and five reserve Army divisions, eleven active aircraft carriers and other warships, twenty active and reserve Air Force fighter wings, and a three-division Marine Corps. Somewhat smaller than the Bush Administration's Base Force in some areas (e.g., Army divisions) and larger in others (most notably, Marines Corps end strength), the Bottom Up Review structure satisfied no one.

The Review had as its distinguishing analytical feature the setting of a standard of "forces sufficient to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts." Each contingency envisioned "an armorheavy combined arms offensive against the outnumbered forces of a neighboring state." The wars foreseen in this document resembled nothing so much as the peculiar war fought two years ago in the deserts of Arabia. In other words, defense planners anticipated fighting wars against enemies who had learned nothing at all from Saddam's debacle. Nothing about playing on American senitivity to casualties, nothing about using weapons of mass destruction to scare off America' allies, nothing about engaging in ambiguous aggression rather than Saddam's incompetent brutality.

What is worse, the Bottom Up Review promised a capability to cope with two regional fights almost simultaneously. In private, few generals or admirals will agree that any such thing is possible. During the Gulf War the United States Air Force sent two-thirds of its precision-guided bombs and missiles to the fight, and committed well over 50 per cent of its airlift and aerial-refueling aircraft to supporting the deployment and sustaining the force. Moreover, the modern military's need for specialized units or pieces of equipment creates real bottlenecks for forces trying to fight a war. Over 90 per cent of the gear (including even fuel pumps) that the Air Force had stockpiled for operating off unprepared air bases went to the Gulf. There are not many water-purification units, or stevedore outfits, or munition-assembly organizations in either the active forces or the reserves, and without them, you cannot fight a war. The Bottom Up Review assumes that after a quick victory in one part of the world, the military can put their men and women on board airplanes and their equipment on board ships and immediately sail off to fight another. This reflects lamentable ignorance about what combat does to military organizations.

Post-Cold-War Muddle

THE Bottom Up Review failed to grapple with many of the real problems facing the Defense Department. It will take years to forge a true post-Cold War military, which is a far more difficult task than either this Administration or its predecessor has let on. Here are five suggestions for a beginning.

1. Reduce force structure--and deployments. Small as the Bottom Up Review force looks in comparison to its Cold War predecessor, the structure has not shrunk in numbers comparable to the projected slide in the budget. Military forces, including equipment, pay, spare parts, munitions, and all the rest, tend to rise in per-unit cost over time. A military force that soaked up roughly 6 per cent of the gross domestic product during the Reagan years will soon see its expenditures shrunk in half, to only 3 per cent of GDP, and yet it will remain about three-quarters the size of the Reagan-era force. Something has to give, be it pay, training, replacement of major items, or war stocks. Civilian leaders would rather not make their cuts look too sharp; military leaders will hope against hope that if they keep a lot of units around, sooner or later someone will fund them fully. Thus the nation returns to one of the oldest and most debilitating practices of our peacetime military.

Already, the Pentagon has begun to cut corners, with proposals for keeping military pay raises 1 per cent below inflation--a pennywise policy that would erode the quality and morale of the military over the coming decade. The intensity of training may also begin to fall off, which could weaken the quality of the force and its ability to retain young people who came into the service to shoot tank guns, not paint rocks. In another false economy the Pentagon plans to spend money on research and development, but hold back on large-scale purchases of equipment. Sooner or later, though, major items--planes, ships, tanks--require replacement. Many airplanes in the Gulf had already had over a decade of service (and some two or three) when they began bombing Iraq. Metal fatigue waits for no man. To defer major purchases is merely to ensure a ruinously expensive need for acquisition in 10 or 15 years. A long period of small acquisition orders will mean the loss of manufacturing ability in some industries, and a dramatic (and politically difficult) rise in unit costs of the items the Pentagon does buy.