[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 106 (Thursday, July 24, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1511-E1512]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   THE CASE FOR MILITARY PREPAREDNESS

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. IKE SKELTON

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, July 24, 1997

  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, a few years ago, I discovered a speech made 
in 1923 by then Army Maj. George C. Marshall, that warned against a 
troubling pattern of failure in American history--a pattern which I 
fear we may be repeating today. Marshall, of course, later became one 
of the most distinguished American leaders of the century, serving as 
Chief of Staff of the Army in World War II, Secretary of State in the 
early years of the cold war, and Secretary of Defense during the war in 
Korea. ``[F]rom the earliest days of this country,'' said Marshall in 
1923, ``[the Regular Army] was materially increased in strength and 
drastically reduced with somewhat monotonous regularity.'' Immediately 
following a war, he said, ``every American's thoughts were centered on 
the tragedies involved in the lessons just learned,'' and the size of 
the standing Army was increased in an effort to prepare for future 
conflicts. But within a few months, Marshall lamented, ``the public 
mind ran away from the tragedies of the War . . . and became obsessed 
with the magnitude of the public debt. . . . Forgetting almost 
immediately the bitter lesson of unpreparedness, [the public] demanded 
and secured the reduction of the Army.''
  The bitter lesson of unpreparedness, unfortunately, had to be 
relearned repeatedly through much of the rest of the 20th century. Each 
time the price was paid in the lives of young Americans ill-prepared 
for the missions thrust upon them--at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, 
where United States forces were decimated in their first large tank 
battle of World War II; at the start of the Korean war, where a poorly 
equipped United States holding force, called Task Force Smith, was 
almost destroyed; and at Desert One in Iran, where equipment failures 
and poor coordination doomed the hostage rescue mission.
  Today, in contrast, America has built a military force that sets the 
standard for the rest of the world. It is equipped with modern weapons. 
It is well led and well trained. The military services are more able 
than ever to work cooperatively. It is, above all, a high quality 
force, made up of well-educated, carefully selected, disciplined 
volunteers. They have carried out an extraordinarily broad range of 
responsibilities in recent years in a fashion that has demonstrated 
their professionalism and their dedication to duty. The former Chairman 
of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, often characterized the troops he 
led as an exquisite force--he was not exaggerating.
  I am afraid, however, that we may once again be forgetting the costs 
of unpreparedness. A return to the unfortunate pattern of the past is 
reflected in several ways. First, now that the cold war is over, the 
rationale for maintaining U.S. military strength is being questioned 
even by many who ought to know better. Second, because of budget 
pressures, defense spending appears unlikely to rise in the foreseeable 
future, but budgets must grow modestly over time to maintain a capable 
force. Third, the quality of our Armed Forces depends on keeping 
quality people in the services, but the extraordinarily high pace of 
operations is putting too much pressure on military families and may 
lead many good people to leave. Consider each of these issues in turn.
  Why we should remain strong: Today, a number of my congressional 
colleagues challenge me with a question that surely echoed through the 
halls of Congress in 1923 or in 1946--``What is the enemy?'' I am 
asked. And with that question, there are many others. Why continue to 
support more spending for defense when the cold war is over? Why 
continue to pursue expensive, new, advanced weapons when U.S. 
technology was so dominant in Operation Desert Storm, and when no other 
nation is spending nearly what we do on military hardware?

  If we look to the past, however, we have never been able to predict 
what military threats would arise in the future. In 1903, no one 
envisioned World War I. In 1923 we did not foresee World War II. In 
1946, we did not anticipate the Korean war. In 1989, we did not expect 
the Persian gulf war. So a major reason for maintaining military 
strength is to hedge against the appearance of unexpected regional or 
global threats in the future.
  But that is not the only reason. Today, our military strength is the 
foundation of a relatively secure international order in which small 
conflicts, though endemic and inevitable, will not decisively erode 
global stability. And as such our military strength is also a means of 
discouraging the growth of a new power that could, in time, constitute 
a threat to peace and evolve into the enemy we do not now foresee. 
Because of this, the very limited investment required to maintain our 
military strength--though somewhat larger than we are making right 
now--is disproportionately small compared to the benefits we, and the 
rest of the world, derive from it. My fellow Missourian, Harry S. 
Truman, stated the issue clearly: ``We must be prepared to pay the 
price for peace, or assuredly we will pay the price of war.''
  Defense spending: As so often in the past, the United States again 
appears unwilling to pay the price of peace. Since the mid-1980's, the 
Department of Defense budget has declined by 40 percent in real, 
inflation-adjusted dollars, and the size of the force has been reduced 
by a third. Funding for weapons procurement has fallen even further--
today we are spending just one-third as much on new weapons as we did 
in the mid-1980's. I do not believe that these levels of spending can 
be tolerated without critically weakening our military capabilities. 
And yet, there is all too little support for restoring even modest 
rates of growth in military spending. On the contrary, for long-term 
planning purposes, the Pentagon assumes that Defense budgets will be 
frozen at about $250 billion per year, in constant prices, as far as 
the eye can see.
  We cannot, however, maintain a force of a stable size without at 
least modest growth in spending. For one thing, in order to keep 
quality people in the force, the quality of life in the military has to 
keep pace with the quality of life in the civilian sector. So pay, 
housing expenditures, facility maintenance accounts, and other related 
activities have to increase with the overall growth of the economy. 
Second, modern, advanced weapons grow in cost from one generation to 
the next, so budgets must grow to take advantage of evolving 
technology. Finally, sophisticated new weapons are more expensive to 
maintain, and they allow a higher, more costly pace of operations. Flat 
defense budgets, therefore, will entail further, strategically 
unwarranted cuts in the size of the force, declining military 
readiness, and a failure to exploit the rapid evolution of military 
technology. This is a prescription for the slow, steady, debilitating 
erosion of our military capabilities.
  Pressures on people: Perhaps most importantly, even as the size of 
the force has declined in recent years, the pace of military 
operations--from Somalia, to Haiti, to Bosnia, to the Persian Gulf--has 
accelerated dramatically. Senior officers in all of the services worry 
that the pace of operations will sooner or later drive good people out 
of the military. To operate the modern U.S. military requires 
professional personnel with advanced skills that take years to learn. 
As a result, the services have to retain quality people after their 
initial enlistment run out. Older, skilled service members will get 
married, have children, struggle to make ends meet, worry about 
education, just like other citizens. Military personnel managers, 
therefore, often say that they enlist soldiers,but they retain 
families.
  By its very nature, military life puts pressure on families. Service 
members are away from home for extended periods. Moves are frequent. 
Jobs are often very demanding, and job pressures grow as careers 
advance. Military personnel, of course, understand and accept these 
pressures, including regular deployments abroad, as part of the job. 
The pressures on military families have been greatly aggravated in 
recent years, however, by force reductions and by unplanned, irregular, 
temporary assignments to support military operations. If we are to keep 
skilled people in the service, we cannot afford to keep asking them to 
do more and more with less and less.
  Were he here today, Major Marshall, I am afraid, would recognize all 
of this--a failure to appreciate the need for military strength, 
reluctance to pay the price of peace, asking too much of those who 
serve in the military--as familiar symptoms of our Nation's traditional 
attitude toward national defense. If we are to

[[Page E1512]]

avoid the mistakes of the past, we need to reconsider sooner, rather 
than later, how to protect the exquisite military force that we have 
inherited.

                          ____________________