[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15107-15109]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




  WE ARE WEARING THEM OUT: WHY WE NEED TO INCREASE ARMY TROOP STRENGTH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, this year, at the urging of the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff and other senior military leaders, Congress has taken 
some critically important steps to improve military pay and benefits. 
Both the House and the Senate have now approved versions of the Fiscal 
Year 2000 Defense Authorization Bill that provide higher than requested 
pay raises for service personnel and reforms the pay table to better 
reward personnel who have performed particularly well and that repeal 
reductions in military retirement benefits enacted in 1986.
  Although there remain minor differences between the two chambers on 
some details, service members can be assured that these much needed and 
much deserved improvements in pay and benefits are on the way.
  I hope that the fine young men and women who serve in our Nation's 
military will see this as evidence that we appreciate what they are 
doing, that we are aware of how hard they are working, and that we 
understand, to some degree at least, the tremendous personal sacrifices 
we ask them to make for our country.

                              {time}  2340

  Having addressed pay and benefits, it is now time for the leaders in 
the military services and for the Congress to consider other critical 
steps to ease the burdens of military service. First and foremost in my 
mind is the need to stop imposing dreadfully excessive day-to-day 
demands on large parts of the force. The Congress is approving better 
pay and benefits in the hope that these measures will help stem the 
hemorrhage of high quality people from the force and ease recruitment 
of some new high quality people. Pay table reform in particular is 
designed to encourage the best of the best, the people whose work has 
led to rapid promotion, to stay in the service for a full career. But 
service members are not leaving the force simply or mainly because they 
are not being paid enough. Nobody makes the armed forces a career 
because of the financial rewards. Rather, too many good people are 
leaving because we are wearing them out.
  Let me emphasize that point again, Mr. Speaker, we are wearing them 
out. While it is not true of all parts of the force, for too many 
service members and too many key military specialties, their lives have 
become a never-ending and often unpredictable cycle of stand-ups and 
stand-downs; of preparation for exercises, exercises and recovery from 
exercises; of preparation for deployment abroad, deployment in often 
tense missions overseas, and of recovery from deployment; of temporary 
duty assignments to fill out units engaged in exercises or in missions 
abroad, or of working doubly hard at home to take up the slack caused 
by the loss of people on temporary duty assignments, and on and on. 
Unless we take steps to reduce the number of days many service members 
spend away from home, unless we ease the intensity and constancy of 
periods of overwork, unless we improve the predictability of periods 
away from home, unless we do all of these things, the extra pay and 
benefits we are providing will have but little effect in preserving a 
high quality, well-trained, ready military force.
  All of the military services suffer from the problem of overwork to 
one degree or another. And all of the services are taking steps to try 
to ease the workload. Today, however, I want to talk in particular 
about the state of the Army, where I believe the underlying problems 
are most deep-rooted and where measures to ameliorate the problem will 
have to be most far reaching.
  To put it bluntly, the Army today is too small. It is not big enough 
to carry out all of the responsibilities assigned to it without wearing 
out too many of its best people. We need a bigger Army. How much 
bigger? I will not at this time venture to say. I do not know whether 
we need 5,000 more people in the Army or 20,000 or 40,000. But I know 
we need more. For the record, in testimony before the House Committee 
on Armed Services in January 1996, Lieutenant General Ted Stroup, who 
was then the Army personnel chief, said the Army should be at 520,000 
active duty troops, which is 40,000 more than is currently authorized.
  I believe as well that we cannot afford to follow through on measures 
to reduce further the size of the Army National Guard and Reserve 
components. They, like the active Army, have been reduced enough. 
Instead of shrinking them further, we need to work on measures to 
improve the way in which reserve components can help, even more than 
they have, to ease the strains on the active part of the force.
  To his credit, the new Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric 
Shinseki, has begun already to raise the issue of personnel levels. In 
his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee 3 
weeks ago, General Shinseki opened the door to a discussion of troop 
levels, saying, ``It would

[[Page 15108]]

be a bit premature for me to tell you that raising the end strength 
right now is the right call. But I think it is a legitimate concern.'' 
He clarified that comment a bit more last week in his first press 
conference as Chief of Staff when he said that he suspects the Army 
will decide it needs more troops after it completes its current review 
of Army requirements, called ``Total Army Analysis--2007,'' over the 
next few months.
  While I look forward to the results of ``TAA-07,'' for me the 
question is not whether the Army should pursue an increase of some 
significant magnitude in its personnel strength--the question is how 
much and how fast. And I think the sooner the Army leadership begins to 
make the case for a necessary increase, the better Congress will be 
prepared to address it, and, more importantly, the sooner the troops 
will feel that some relief is coming. To explain my reasoning, I want 
to walk through, step by step, how shortfalls in Army personnel levels 
have developed in the post-Cold War period and how they have affected 
the people in the service.
  To begin with, like the other services, the Army has drawn down force 
levels substantially since the end of the Cold War. At the end of 
fiscal year 1987, the Army had 780,000 active duty troops. At the end 
of fiscal year 1999, the Army's authorized end-strength will be down to 
480,000 troops, which is 38% less. In fact, the Army is actually 
falling considerably short of its authorized troop level--as of April 
30 of this year, there were 469,314 active duty troops in the service.
  The Army's cut in end-strength is roughly commensurate with cuts in 
the size of the force structure, that is, in the number of units in the 
force. Over the last 12 years, the Army has come down from 18 active 
divisions to 10, which is a reduction of 44%. The number of brigades 
has come down somewhat less, because almost all Army divisions are now 
wholly filled with active duty units rather than some being filled with 
round-out units from the National Guard, as in the past.
  As it has turned out, however, simply shrinking Cold War troop levels 
in proportion to cuts in the Cold War force structure has not been 
appropriate in coping with post-Cold War demands on the force. The root 
cause of the problem is that the Army has deliberately maintained--in 
the post Cold-War environment as it did during the Cold War--a somewhat 
larger force structure than it has people to fill. If you take a table 
or organization for the entire active duty Army today, and count up all 
the jobs in the organization--including combat jobs, headquarters 
staff, training, medical, and other support positions--you will come up 
with a requirement for about 540,000 full time uniformed personnel. As 
I said, the Army actually has an authorized end-strength of 480,000, 
which is 60,000 troops, or about 11 percent, below the level need to 
fully man the organizational structure.
  During the Cold War, and to some degree even today, it made sense to 
fall somewhat short of filling all the Army's positions. As the Defense 
Department has said in its annual ``Manpower Requirements Report,''

       During peacetime, it is neither necessary nor desirable to 
     fill all positions in all units. Some units may not be 
     staffed at all, due to a lack of funding or because we can 
     fill them in an expeditious manner following mobilization. 
     Some units may be staffed with a combination of active and 
     reserve people. As a unit is tasked to perform more in 
     peacetime, the proportion of full-time people, whether 
     active, reserve, or civilian, may be expected to increase.

  This explains the underlying premise of the manning policies of the 
Army, and, to differing degrees, of the other services. In peacetime, 
units deployed on missions and units designated to deploy early in a 
conflict, are maintained at full or close-to-full manning levels, while 
units designated to deploy later and many support activities are 
maintained at lower levels. In the event of a conflict, critical needs 
can be filled by reassigning people within the force or by tapping 
other sources of personnel--including recent retirees who still have an 
obligation or members of the individual ready reserve, IRR, which is 
mainly composed of people who have not reenlisted after completing 
their contractual tours of duty, but who also have a period of 
obligation remaining.
  This system makes sense if you are preparing for an all-out war with 
the Soviet Union and its allies, as in the Cold War, or for two major 
theater wars, as planners initially assumed in the post-Cold War era. 
If the prospect of a major conflict arises, then you do whatever it 
takes to get the force fully prepared--you take people out of the 
training system and put them into combat units; you mobilize reserve 
units and assign some personnel to active units to fill them out; you 
call back recent retirees and members of the individual ready reserve 
as needed to fill critical positions. The fully manned Army 
organization is really a wartime organization, which is not necessary 
to maintain in peacetime.
  In the post-Cold War period, however, we have found that peacetime is 
not what it used to be. It is not a period in which the Army--or the 
other services--can focus simply on preparing for the most demanding 
conflicts in the future. The world is a dangerous place--now. Iraq and 
North Korea have simmered, threatening to flare into regional crises. 
India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons and are currently 
engaged in a territorial dispute. Peace in Bosnia and Kosovo confound a 
neat, easy solution. Terrorism still rears its ugly head. Since the end 
of the Cold War, our military has responded to an average of one crises 
or contingency a month, a pace of operations 300% greater than during 
the Cold War.
  Some may argue that we should simply decrease our pace of operations. 
They would be wrong. The United States must remain engaged in the 
world. Our global engagement prevents the growth of malevolent powers 
that could threaten our security. Our engagement provides stability in 
a world more globally dependent than at any time in history. The 
world's stability affects our stability. It is simply in America's 
interests to shape the peace.
  The post-Cold War era is a period in which forces have been required 
to prepare for major theater wars and also to participate in recurring 
peacekeeping operations, to maintain a constant, active forward 
presence, and to engage in an extraordinarily broad range of exercises 
and other activities, with long-time allies and former foes, as part of 
a policy of international engagement. Senior Army officers have said 
that this so-called ``peacetime'' has actually been as demanding for 
the force as a major theater war would be. There is, of course, one big 
difference--unlike a war, the current demands never go away. There is 
the strong possibility that if we continue with the high operational 
tempo, and I foresee no let-up, we will truly end up with a hollow 
Army.
  A policy of not fully manning later deploying units and of not fully 
manning many critical support functions would make sense if peacetime 
were actually peaceful, such as during the 1920s and 1930s. But such a 
policy does not make sense when a wartime level of demand is constantly 
being imposed on precisely the forces that are deliberately being 
undermanned on the assumption that they can be built up in the event of 
a crisis. The effects of this policy have been very deterimental for 
large parts of the Army. Last year and this, subcommittees of the House 
Armed Services Committee held a number of hearings to explore the 
impact of the demanding post-Cold War pace of operations on personnel 
readiness in different services--including hearings in Norfolk, in 
Naples Italy, and in San Diego. Last year, at the request of the 
Committee, the General Accounting Office also surveyed personnel 
readiness in later-deploying active Army divisions.
  While I won't go into great detail on what we learned from these 
investigations, I will highlight a few points that illustrate what I 
see to be the general situation. First of all, the Army, as I said 
earlier, has followed a policy of most fully manning early deploying 
divisions, while later-deploying units and many support units are less 
fully manned. The problem is that later-deploying units, by definition, 
are the units expected to be available for contingency operations, such 
as those in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, and now Kosovo. 
In particular, later-deploying Army units include brigades deployed in 
Europe, where forces are expected not only to deploy to Bosnia and 
elsewhere, but also to be actively involved in engagement exercises 
with allies and others in the region.
  When a Europe-based brigade sends part of its force into Bosnia, the 
units being deployed there have to be fully manned to carry out the 
mission. But this will further deplete a brigade that to begin with is 
manned at only 90% of total authorized strength. The problems become 
particularly acute because troop shortages are never evenly 
distributed. So if there is an Army-wide shortage at certain grades or 
in certain specialties, later-deploying units will be even shorter in 
those positions. Spending part of the force on a mission can virtually 
strip the remainder of the unit of key personnel. And because there is 
an Army-wide policy of not fully manning certain support positions, 
including positions as important to mission support as intelligence and 
communications, shortages in some areas leave some units with virtually 
no capability on hand.
  The General Accounting Office survey I referred to gave some dramatic 
examples of the effect:
  At the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, only 16 of 116 M1A1 
tanks had full crews and were qualified, and in one of the

[[Page 15109]]

Brigade's two armor battalions, 14 of 58 tanks had no crewmembers 
assigned because the personnel were deployed to Bosnia. In addition, at 
the Division's engineer brigade in Germany, 11 of 24 bridge teams had 
no personnel assigned.
  [C]aptains and majors are in short supply Army-wide due to drawdown 
initiatives undertaken in recent years. The five later-deploying 
divisions had only 91 percent and 78 percent of the captains and majors 
authorized, respectively, but 138 percent of the lieutenants 
authorized. The result is that unit commanders must fill leadership 
positions in many units with less experienced officers than Army 
doctrine requires. For example, in the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry 
division, 65 percent of the key staff positions designated to be filled 
by captains were actually filled by lieutenants or captains that were 
not graduates of the Advanced Course.
  There is also a significant shortage of the NCOs in the later-
deploying divisions. Again, within the 1st Brigade, 226, or 17 percent 
of the 1,450, total NCO authorizations, were not filled at the time of 
our visit.
  [T]o deploy an 800-soldier task force [to Bosnia] last year, the 
Commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team had to reassign 63 soldiers 
within the brigade to serve in infantry squads of the deploying unit, 
strip nondeploying infantry and armor units of maintenance personnel, 
and reassign NCOs and support personnel to the task force from 
throughout the brigade. These actions were detrimental to the readiness 
of the nondeploying units. For example, gunnery exercises for two armor 
battalions had to be canceled and 43 of 116 tank crews became 
unqualified on the weapon system.
  Mr. Speaker, I know that other Members of the House have gone on 
their own fact-finding trips to Europe, and almost everyone comes back 
with the same story--that Army personnel would talk their ears off 
about shortfalls in personnel and the killing effect this has on the 
day-to-day operational tempo. These concerns come not mainly from 
forces actually deployed on missions, but from forces left behind to 
take up the slack. I am here to tell you that these are not just a few 
isolated cases--they reflect a very wide-spread situation in later-
deploying Army units, because there just are not enough people to go 
around given the operational requirements.
  To test that proposition, I asked the Army Legislative Liaison office 
to provide me with a rundown of the current personnel situation in each 
of the 10 active divisions. They did a good job of it--in particular I 
want to thank Lt. Col. Joe Guzowski and Lt. Col. Craig Deare for 
putting together very useful, well organized data very quickly. I am 
afraid I may have contributed a bit to the overwork problem I'm 
discussing here today, but, as usual, they came through.
  The information they collected shows especially severe personnel 
shortfalls in units deployed in Europe, more isolated and less serious 
problems in some other later-deploying divisions, and generally good 
personnel levels in early-deploying divisions. Here are a few excerpts:
  1st Infantry Division (Germany)
  The Division is 94% assigned strength and 88% available strength and 
86% deployable strength. Available senior grade is 88%. They have a 
shortage of 436 NCOs, 73% of their required Majors and 84% of required 
Captains, which continue to cause junior leaders to fill vacant 
positions.
  The Division remains critical in maintenance supervisors, to include 
Aviation maintenance warrant examiners . . . which remain at 0% fill.
  The Division's MI Military Intelligence battalion is below for the 
eleventh consecutive month and without extensive augmentation is not 
capable of performing sustained combat operations.
  1st Armored Division (Germany) [Which will take on the KFOR mission 
in Kosovo]
  [Due to] shortages of soldiers in critical division competencies 
resulting from deployment on contingency operations, the division 
cannot deploy to meet assigned . . . missions without augmentation and 
training time.
  Personnel trained in critical division competencies are deployed on 
contingency operations. These training issues make the division unable 
to function effectively for division level operations without extensive 
assistance.
  The continued downward trend in NCO strength (85%, short 724 NCOs) 
hinders the division's ability to provide adequate supervision and 
training.
  4th Infantry Division (Fort Hood, Texas and Fort Carson, Colorado)
  The division remains at borderline . . . Senior grade shortages 
continue to be primary concern. The [overall] personnel strength 
percentages continue to mask critical shortages.
  Captains and Majors are short . . .
  NCOs are short . . . [by] 450.
  10th Infantry Division [Which is preparing to deploy to Bosnia]
  The division's aggregate strength and infantry squad manning are at 
the highest levels in over 18 months and continue to improve. . . . NCO 
shortages were the primary reason for . . . failure.
  The shortage of field artillery NCOs . . . is placing junior soldiers 
into critical positions that require a greater experience base to 
effectively lead gun crews. Of the 44 howitzers authorized, all are 
combat capable, but only 22 are fully manned and qualified.
  [We] project [that] some subordinate units preparing to deploy will 
improve and units remaining on Fort Drum will decrease their overall C 
[readiness] ratings.
  Mr. Speaker, the shortages in personnel in later deploying units and 
in many support positions is, in my view, seriously damaging the 
overall readiness of the Army. General Shinseki essentially 
acknowledged that in his confirmation hearing. The Army, he said, is 
currently able to meet its primary strategic mandate, which is to be 
prepared to prevail in two nearly simultaneous major theater wars. But 
the requirement to prevail in the second theater, he warned, could be 
accomplished only with ``high risk.''
  In the vernacular of the military in the 1990s, Mr. Speaker, this is 
a carefully crafted way of saying that the situation is not acceptable. 
To say that the mission is ``high risk'' is to say at the very least 
that the Army would suffer unacceptably high casualties in the event of 
a conflict. Just as importantly, in my view, it is to say that the 
units involved are not able to attain the standards which the service 
has established. For the professional men and women who serve in the 
force, this is a terribly frustrating situation. It is reflected in 
complaints that units sent for exercises to the Army's combat training 
centers in California, Louisiana, and Germany are not as capable as 
they used to be because shortages have limited the extent and quality 
of preparatory training at their home bases. It is reflected in the 
difficulty the service has had in retaining its most highly skilled and 
accomplished personnel. It is reflected, as well, in evidence of 
increasing strains on military families caused by frequent and 
unplanned deployments and excessive workloads when people are at home.
  Mr. Speaker, the Army has tried valiantly to adjust to the demands of 
the post-Cold War environment by managing shortfalls in personnel as 
best it could. The leadership of the Army has tried to ensure that 
first-to-fight units have what they need, and, for the rest, they have 
demonstrated remarkable creativity and flexibility in allocating 
personnel to fill urgent requirements created by contingency operations 
and other demands. They have done a good job. The U.S. Army remains the 
best in the world, and perhaps, the best Army ever in this country or 
elsewhere. When called upon to perform difficult and demanding 
missions, the Army has responded magnificently.
  But this has come at a price. The continued high pace of operations, 
the continued turbulence in the force, the continued need to assign 
hundreds and even thousands of people to temporary duty, the need for 
others to work harder to make up for shortfalls--all of this is eroding 
the readiness of the force. The Army needs to work with Congress 
beginning today to fix the problem. We need to add enough personnel to 
the force to meet the demands of the post-Cold War world without 
wearing out so many of the wonderful men and women on whom our security 
depends. We are wearing them out, Mr. Speaker. It is up to Congress to 
correct the problem.

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