[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 55 (Friday, March 24, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E679-E680]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                LAWRENCE KORB: THERE IS NO READINESS GAP

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                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 23, 1995
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, it has occurred to me that 
people who are thinking of launching military action against the United 
States are probably likeliest to do it in November of every year, 
because it is in November, just before the budget is prepared and sent 
to us, that our friends in the Pentagon and their supporters often 
argue that America is militarily vulnerable and must spend billions of 
dollars more than we were planning to spend to defend ourselves.
  Most recently, this came in the form of an argument that our 
readiness was below where it should have been. Lawrence Korb, who was 
in part responsible for maintaining readiness during the Reagan 
administration as an assistant secretary of defense, very effectively 
refutes this argument in the article he published in the Sunday New 
York Times of February 26. Lawrence Korb has done his country enormous 
service, both when he was in government, and even more so afterward by 
his willingness to speak out forcefully and honestly, even when this 
has unfortunately been at some cost to his own professional career. His 
refutation of the most recent arguments that have been advanced to send 
an already excessively high Pentagon budget even higher make an 
extremely contribution to our national debate and I ask that they be 
printed here.
                [From the New York Times, Feb. 26, 1995]

                           The Readiness Gap

                         (By Lawrence J. Korb)

       To listen to Republicans and the military brass, you would 
     think America's armed forces have fallen into the same 1970's 
     morass that spawned the term ``hollow military'' and gave 
     Ronald Reagan a potent issue for the 1980 campaign. Is it 
     possible that just four years after one of the most stunning 
     military triumphs in modern times the services could be 
     suffering from inadequate training, shortages of spare parts 
     and poisonous morale? Just to pose the question in those 
     terms points strongly to the common-sense answer--of course 
     not. This is not the 1970's and the Clinton Administration is 
     not repeating the mistakes of the Carter Administration.
       Today, the United States spends more than six times as much 
     on defense as its closest rival, and almost as much on 
     national security as the rest of the world combined. In 1995, 
     Bill Clinton will actually spend $30 billion more on defense, 
     in constant dollars, than Richard Nixon did 20 years ago and 
     substantially more than his own Secretary of Defense argued 
     was necessary in 1992.
       Since the collapse of the Berlin wall, the Pentagon's 
     forces have declined by 25 percent and financing for new 
     weapons has fallen by 50 percent while readiness spending has 
     dropped by only 10 percent. In the last year, readiness 
     accounts increased by $5 billion while the overall military 
     budget dropped by 3 percent. The Pentagon now spends more on 
     readiness (about $60,000 per person) than it did in the 
     Reagan and Bush Administrations (when readiness hit all-time 
     highs) and 50 percent more than during the Carter years.
       And the quality of entering recruits is still very high (96 
     percent) and retention rates are so good that the Pentagon is 
     still dismissing people.
       If readiness spending is higher than in the Reagan and Bush 
     years, and if the manpower situation is still so solid, why 
     do so many politicians and generals warn darkly about a 
     readiness gap? That--not the theological question of whether 
     our forces are combat ready--is the crucial question. The 
     answer is more nuanced than most people would imagine, and 
     sheds a great deal of light on Pentagon politicking in the 
     post-cold-war era.
       I first encountered the politics of military readiness 30 
     years ago when I was a Naval flight officer in the Far East. 
     One Sunday afternoon, in response to a call from the Seventh 
     Fleet, I reported that only 3 of our 12 planes were ready for 
     combat. For my honesty, I received a severe tongue-lashing 
     from 
     [[Page E680]] my commanding officer, who informed me that 
     whenever headquarters called we were always ready. The 
     military, he explained correctly, prized a ``can do outfit,'' 
     and the services promoted those who performed regardless of 
     circumstances.
       My next encounter was in 1980, when I was preparing a 
     monograph on the subject for the American Enterprise 
     Institute. When word of my project reached the Pentagon I was 
     drowned in data (some of which was highly classified) and 
     anecdotes from normally tight-lipped bureaucrats. When I went 
     to the Pentagon to conduct some interviews, I was treated 
     like a foreign dignitary.
       One of my conclusions was that readiness is a slippery and 
     poorly understood concept. To most people it is a synonym for 
     military capability or preparedness. To the military, 
     however, readiness is only one of four components of 
     preparedness, and not necessarily the most important one. To 
     obtain a true picture, one had to look at the other three 
     pillars--force structure (the number of ships, planes, 
     tanks), modernization (the age of the forces) and 
     sustainability (staying power). Thus, a very ready force 
     could be considered militarily impotent if it was too small, 
     too old and lacked staying power. By the same token, a force 
     that was bigger, more sophisticated and better armed than its 
     adversaries could be deemed unready if it was considered 
     improperly trained and outfitted.
       I also concluded that readiness is a hot-button political 
     issue, subject to unlimited manipulation. Even the informed 
     public can't judge such matters as the appropriate force 
     structure, the proper time to replace a plane or tank and the 
     level of effort necessary to win a war. But everybody wants 
     and expects a ready force.
       Military leaders were quick to grasp the political 
     potential of readiness scares. In the late 70's, word went 
     out that reports of readiness problems would be welcomed by 
     headquarters. The only exception was the Marine Corps. I was 
     told by a general that the Marines had been C-2 (ready) for 
     200 years!
       I also came to understand that measuring readiness is 
     hardly an exact science. Each service defined readiness 
     differently, and I found similar units with similar problems 
     reporting different levels of readiness. The Air Force 
     claimed that a fighter pilot needed to fly 20 hours a month 
     to stay battle fit. The Navy and Marine Corps said their 
     pilots needed a minimum of 24 hours a month; Air National 
     Guard units needed only 10 hours per month. No one could ever 
     explain why readiness demanded that Army tanker trucks drive 
     800 miles a year, why ships needed to steam 55 days per 
     quarter or why helicopter pilots needed only 14 hours a month 
     flying time.
       Finally, I discovered that a unit's readiness was 
     determined by the lowest grade it received in any of the four
      categories (personnel, equipment and supplies on hand, 
     equipment readiness and training). Thus, a fully manned 
     unit with modern equipment in perfect working order would 
     be classified as not ready if it trained for only a brief 
     period of time.
       Nonetheless, my report for the American Enterprise 
     Institute concluded that the armed forces were indeed 
     experiencing severe readiness problems, for three reasons. 
     Given the threat posed by our principal adversary, the Soviet 
     Union, military expenditures in the 1970's were too low. 
     Moreover, the civilian and military leaders of the Department 
     of Defense decided to spend the few extra dollars they 
     received on stealth war planes, cruise missiles and other new 
     technologies at the expense of flying hours and spare parts. 
     Finally, the Carter Administration allowed military pay and 
     benefits to fall 25 percent behind comparable rates in the 
     private sector. Consequently, the quality of recruits fell 
     below acceptable standards and retention rates dropped 
     precipitously.
       My conclusions were attacked by the Secretary of Defense 
     but embraced by the military and candidate Reagan. My reward, 
     following the Reagan triumph, was to be appointed ``readiness 
     czar'' in the Pentagon.
       Once in office, I was introduced to another side of the 
     politics of readiness. The military chiefs, having skillfully 
     used the issue to help secure a large spending increase, were 
     much less interested infixing readiness than in modernizing 
     and enlarging their forces. The same Army chief who had 
     coined the term ``hollow military'' told the Secretary of 
     Defense that the best way to improve a soldier's readiness 
     was to buy him a new rifle.
       Spending for readiness did increase by about 20 percent, or 
     nearly $10,000 per person (in total, less than one-fifth the 
     increase in procurement). Nonetheless, according to the Joint 
     Chiefs, by 1984 the readiness of all major units, except Navy 
     ships, had gone down and I was being pilloried by the 
     Democrats.
       How did this happen? Without telling their civilian 
     ``superiors,'' the service chiefs had raised the standards 
     for readiness right along with the Reagan buildup. After 
     these standards were made more realistic, readiness began to 
     grow significantly during the last half of the 1980's, 
     reaching all-time highs. The performance of the American 
     forces in the gulf in 1990 and 1991 showed just how capable 
     and ready they were.
       With the ascension of Bill Clinton to the Presidency, 
     readiness once again emerged as the hot-button issue. Senator 
     John McCain, the Arizona Republican, issued a report called 
     ``Going Hollow,'' in which he drew heavily on the views of 
     the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last December, a weakened 
     President Clinton pledged an additional $25 billion for 
     readiness. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the current 
     readiness gap, like others since the 1970's, was designed and 
     manufactured by the Pentagon to serve its political agenda--
     to maintain the cold war status quo.
       Despite several reviews of force structure in recent years, 
     the services remain configured to contain a non-existent 
     Soviet empire. The Navy still keeps three active carrier 
     battle groups, with thousands of battle-ready marines, while 
     the Army and Air Force have nearly 200,000 troops stationed 
     in Europe and Asia. Thus, when a crisis erupts in a Haiti or 
     a Rwanda, these forces must take on these assignments as 
     ``extra tasks,'' for which they often lack training and 
     equipment. The question here is not readiness but why we 
     continue to train and deploy forces for cold war tasks.
       Additionally, the services have inflated the threat against 
     which readiness is measured. According to President Clinton, 
     the armed forces should be prepared to fight two major 
     regional wars simultaneously: one against Iraq and one 
     against North Korea. According to the Pentagon and many 
     Republicans, the services have neither the money nor the 
     forces to accomplish this. Since defense spending is at about 
     85 percent of its average cold war level, this leads to the 
     absurd conclusion that Iraq and North Korea (which together 
     spend less than $20 billion a year on the military) equal 85 
     percent of the might of the Soviet empire.
       Finally, the joint chiefs are simply manipulating the 
     system. Two of the three Army divisions that they identified 
     as unready were in the process of being demobilized. Other 
     units were not able to do routine training because they were 
     involved in a real war, that is, the October deployment to 
     the Persian Gulf to deal with Saddam's thrust toward Kuwait. 
     The Marines, who have finally caught on, now say that their 
     readiness is lower than in 1980!
       The U.S. has the finest and best financed military in the 
     world. It is also the most ready, prepared to go thousands of 
     miles on short notice. But it is inadequately controlled by 
     its civilian superiors. Because of Bill Clinton's perceived 
     political vulnerability on defense issues, the civilian 
     leaders do not wish to risk a confrontation with the 
     Republicans or the military chiefs. As a result, the 
     ``nonpolitical'' admirals and generals running the military 
     are taking all of us to the cleaners, using the readiness gap 
     to snatch up precious dollars to defend against a threat that 
     no longer exists.
     

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