Another Army Division Unfit for Combat

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 27, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

How many of the U.S. Army's 10 active-duty divisions are fit for combat? Last month, to general alarm on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon announced that two divisions -- the 10th Mountain and the 1st Infantry, nicknamed the Big Red One -- were combat-unready. The explanation given was that because elements of both divisions were on peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, neither the 10th nor the Big Red One could be deployed quickly in the event of war. So that leaves eight, right? Don't be too sure.

News alert! has learned from congressional and military sources that another division, this time the stateside 101st Airborne, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., was poised in the first week of December to announce its unfitness for combat but was prevented from doing so by Pentagon top brass, who feared the political fallout the announcement would make. As news alert! went to press, the Pentagon was in the throes of upgrading the initial C4 unfit rating, entered by the 101st's commander in his monthly Unit Status Report, to one of three other higher ratings, either a C3 (not fully ready for combat) or a C2 (a mark that indicates a unit has the resources and training to perform its wartime mission).

When the 10th Mountain, based at Fort Drum, N.Y., and the 1st Infantry, now headquartered in Germany, entered the lowest of four possible readiness scores, it was the first time in more than seven years that an Army division was marked C4. The announcement was greeted as evidence of a new honesty at the Pentagon and a willingness to come clean about the sorry state of military preparedness. The behind-the-scenes scramble over the 101st's C4 rating suggests the Pentagon now regrets last month's candor, which triggered a furor. The C4 announcements prompted renewed bipartisan congressional claims that the Clinton administration has neglected the appropriation needs of the military in terms of training, recruitment and equipment and stretched U.S. forces too thinly with its current crop of intervention missions overseas.

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, warned last month: "Over the past several years, the Army has been deteriorating as a result of insufficient funding and a foreign policy that has committed military personnel to areas where we have no vital security interests."

According to retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, yet another C4 rating, and this time for a stateside division, would have proved a political nightmare for the Pentagon and illustrated clearly that the "money being appropriated for the armed services is just not sufficient for training and replenishment of equipment." Singlaub adds: "We are facing a situation similar to the 1949-50 period when we had four divisions on occupation duty in Japan. They couldn't train together and weren't combat-ready, so when war broke out in Korea they got badly chewed up. It was many months before we could garner enough strength there to make a fight of it."

The 101st is meant to be among the first units ready to be deployed in the event of war. A mobile air-assault formation heavily dependent on Apache helicopters, its commander, Maj. Gen. Robert T. Clark, believed a C4 rating was appropriate because a large percentage of the unit's aircraft are grounded as a result of a shortage of parts, say congressional and military sources. Next month's Unit Status Report almost certainly will reflect that the division's pilots have unacceptably low training hours in the air. A C4 rating may be even harder to escape then.