The Army has been short-changed for years in favor of its glamorous and pricey sisters the Air Force and Navy. Now it’s the land service’s turn for the big bucks, Army chief of staff General Pete Schoomaker tells GovExec.com:
Historically, the Army’s been a Cinderella service. We paid the lion’s share of the so-called peace dividend in the 1990s. We had a $100 billion shortfall in investment in the 1990s. We cut the Army by 500,000 soldiers — active, Guard and Reserve. Defense Department investment was $1.89 trillion between 1990 and 2005. And the Army’s share of the pie was 16 percent.
The result, Schoomaker says, was an under-manned and under-equipped force, which is only now turning around:
You cut 500,000 soldiers out of the Army and then try to grow 30,000 back — it’s a little like trying to grow oak trees. They’re easy to cut down, but it takes years to grow them back. …
Everybody knows the Guard and Reserve had serious equipment shortages; not only that, they had serious modernization problems — Korean War era trucks, shortages of aircraft, wheeled vehicles, older versions of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The active force also had serious shortfalls. We had six active heavy divisions. None of them were the same because of the various degrees of modernization, the various degrees of organization. When you go to war with a $56 billion deficit in equipment, you have to aggregate that equipment and push it forward to the war, which means that on the backside, you now have issues in training, you have issues in reconstitution and reset. That is the challenge that we’ve been dealing with. If you take a look at our depot backlog, we have over 600 tanks unfunded. Almost 1,000 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 2,500 wheeled vehicles are sitting in depots right now that if we had the money, we’d be repairing them faster.
Schoomaker says there’s increasing appreciation of the Army’s unique capabilities. That means more money for the service, especially at the expense of the Air Force, which is shedding 40,000 people and 1,000 aircraft, almost 20 percent of its fleet. The general continues:
I believe in airpower, and there’s nothing like having somebody on the other end of the radio when you need something done in a hurry. But to overstate what’s possible with airpower is easy to do, and people have a certain tendency to love things that go fast, make noise and look shiny. Like I told you, never confuse enthusiasm with capability. It takes a team. I wouldn’t denigrate airpower at all, but anybody who thinks that you can win these kinds of things in one dimension is not being honest.
Fiscal Years 2004-06 were the first in a long time in which the Army got at least as much money as the Air Force and Navy — and that’s not counting supplementals, which last year totalled more than $100 billion, most of it for the Army. The Army got less in ’07 than its sister services, but not by much, and supplementals will surely change that.
Schoomaker closes the interview with a plug for his service’s prize program, Future Combat Systems, a $250-billion gobbler that rivals the multi-service Joint Strike Fighter for the record of biggest weapons program ever:
FCS right now is on schedule and under cost. We have 3 percent actual cost growth in the program. This is really not just a program of record, it’s a strategy. We have already either terminated or adjusted 126 of our programs in the Army to do the things we have to do. I’m fairly sure that we ought to play hardball on FCS, and that’s what we’re doing.
How can you receive 600 billion dollars every year + 100’s of billions in war funding and complain that you do not have enough funding to go around? I would complain about the high cost of equipment and the defense industry’s high profits, not complain about how much money you are receiving. If you do not have enough money you are not spending it correctly.
Bob Work from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments commented to me offhand a few weeks ago that Schoomaker’s hissy fit over $25 billion to the OMB would open the door to a very public “phalus measuring contest” between the services. I agreed with him, but didn’t think things would degenerate so quickly.
Does this renewed infighting mark the end of the 1/3–1/3–1/3 budget era? To be honest, I would confine Army, Navy and Air Force to a room and force them to collectively hash out future FYDPs, POMs and procurement plans with fixed toplines. The Goldwater-Nichols Act may have instilled a joint operational attitude, but the services are still too parochial when it comes to everything else.
I agree the Army definitely has been getting shorted on the funds over the past decade. However, I do think Schoomaker is putting too many eggs in one basket by pitching the $250B FCS program.
A better solution would be along the lines of what I believe Germany has done by taking the overall program and splitting into smaller more manageable pieces. This might actually be more productive as well for the Army, since they could focus on specific needs(replacement for M-16/M-4, better body armour) instead of a massive program. It’s easier to sell Congress on the idea of a better assualt rifle–harder to sell that overall package, especially with record deficits and overall debt.
Aside from the cover-up of waste, there’S one serious quote in the text:
“When you go to war with a $56 billion deficit in equipment, you have to aggregate that equipment and push it forward to the war, which means that on the backside, you now have issues in training, you have issues in reconstitution and reset.“
This qualifiesn Schoomaker as incompetent for being a field officer.
Equipment cannot make up for lack of training or suboptimal training quality. So training is first, equipment second.
By the way, I’ve heard that a possible approach on army savings might be to reduce the personnel employed specifically for making fancy powerpoints…
As someone who writes actual reports for the Army, I too think we could afford to trim the Powerpoint MOS from the personnel system. We could also afford to scale back some FCS as well.
The Army has a tendency to plan for too many platforms and FCS is no exception. Their idea of transformation frequently involves giving older weapons platforms a new spin instead of abandoning them wholesale (think of the canceled Crusader self-propelled howitzer).
Ah yes… the poor poor Army.. no fancy equipment… always lacking funds… As a Marine I find that laughable. Remember the Navy’s budget goes for both the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps has been doing more with less for almost our entire history. We always marvel at the quality of the Army equipment and how the Army gets all the fancy toys when we are flying around in Vietnam-era helicopters and armored (if you can call it that) vehicles almost as old. We still do well though! What the Army misses is that it is about the people, and there should be a lot less Power Pointers and a lot more warriors. All the equipment in the world doesnt make a difference if the people running it can’t fight effectively with it. The Air Force’s budget does need to be trimmed, expecially some of their more extravagant quality of life measures. But we also need to remember that we have total dominance in the sea and air– but that is not a permanent fact. If we forget those branches, someone will give us a run for our money in them, and unecessarily so. So as for the Army being the Cinderella service though? I think not. The Army needs to spend some more money on things like marksmanship– you know the basic skills of infantry combat– before they try to become “Star Wars” come down to earth with a lot of suppliers and a couple Jedi Knights.