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

If the Clinton Administration believes its budget projections, it had better face facts and cut the force structure further. To do that it will have to muster the courage to ask, for example, whether the Marine Corps should continue to retain, as mandated by law, three divisions and three air wings. Indeed, the Marines themselves should desire to shrink in size, because otherwise they will find themselves with a large but increasingly primitive force. The steady trickle of crashes of Marine helicopters reported in the corners of American newspapers reflects not the decaying skill of Marine pilots, but the increasing age of the aircraft they fly.

At the same time, the Marines' deployment requirements make even the three-division structure and 174,000-man strength extraordinarily hard to sustain. Most Marines spend most of their time deployed away from home, with stresses on family life that led General Carl Mundy, their commandant, to an ill-advised but well-intentioned attempt to prevent the marriage of young Marines. The Marines face only somewhat more severe problems than the other services. Air Force personnel, formerly accustomed to a relatively stable home life, now deploy frequently to the Middle East and elsewhere. Army units similarly rotate forward more than previously, and all from a smaller manpower base. As force structure comes down, so too must the pattern of regular overseas deployments that makes the life of many members of the armed forces a source of steady, but all too often unnoticed, family misery.

2. Nonetheless, force structure is less important than people, organization, and doctrine. Force structure is, no doubt, important. The Pentagon will consume itself in battles about numbers of divisions, wings, and carrier battle groups, and the senior military leadership may continue to define institutional success in terms of their preservation. But the more important issues for the future are intangible. Before he left office, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell supervised a review of roles and missions of the armed forces. No one outside the services noticed very much---a symptom of the decay of civilian control of the military over the last few decades. The issues of who does what, and how the armed forces are organized, are at the very heart of what civilian control should be all about. The secretary of defense or his civilian subordinates, and not generals, should supervise such a review. The issues are many and contentious. Should a separate service be created to conduct space operations? Should the Army leave whole mission areas exclusively to the Marines? Should the Navy (as it wishes) really abandon all deep-strike missions to the Air Force? General Powell secured the creation of a single command to organize joint training, without determining the role of the services. Did any civilian monitor this, and investigate whether it really makes sense? He also left as a legacy a new, and often simplistic, orthodoxy of jointness, which has led to such absurdities as the placement of a battalion of Marines on an aircraft carrier, at the expense of many of the carrier's combat aircraft, shortly before a deployment to the Yugoslav coast. Here, too, a large dose of healthy civilian skepticism would have helped.