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Personnel Costs

George C. Wilson, the National Journal’s CongressDaily

Congress was right and Army leaders were wrong in the argument that raged from President Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 onward about how many troops were needed to fight two wars at once and safeguard the nation’s other interests.

Lawmakers found themselves shouting down a well when they urged the civilian and military picks of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to support a bigger Army and Marine Corps by raising their end strengths permanently.

Now young officers, sergeants and motivated privates will pay the price day after day and night after night of this shortsightedness at the top of the defense establishment.

One part of that price is too few skilled soldiers, Marines and National Guardsmen to spread the load of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same troops have been sent to those wars again and again for lack of numbers. Many of their families have been ripped apart by this overload, with divorces all too common.

Another part of the price patriotic Americans in uniform will be paying is watching out for criminals in their midst.

“Gangs are back in the Army,” said Bobby Muller, a Vietnam amputee who keeps in close touch with military people as president of the Veterans for America.

This is because the Army and Marine Corps have been accepting more criminals and other undesirables in desperate attempts to fill the ranks.

The seemingly endless Iraq war has turned off an ever increasing number of quality young men and women and their parents about serving in the military.

Bad apples signed up by recruiters in the early 1970s almost ruined the military. Despairing Army leaders themselves told Haynes Johnson and me this when we did a series for The Washington Post in 1971 called “Army in Anguish.” So here we go again. When will they learn?

Besides the anguish the troublemakers going into the Army and Marine Corps these days will cause this new generation of officers and fellow troopers, Bush and his successor will find themselves with too few troops to put out fires beyond those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is because it takes time to recruit, train, equip and field a larger force at the same time regular troopers and Guardsmen are leaving.

During the early years of the Iraq occupation, when young people were more inclined to join the military than they are today, Gen. Peter Schoomaker was Army chief of staff.

Rumsfeld called him out of retirement in August 2003, meaning the general was politically bulletproof on Army policy issues because he had no career at stake. No matter.

Schoomaker steadfastly rebuffed lawmakers as they pleaded with him to make the Army bigger by agreeing to go along with a higher, permanent end strength. I could never figure out, even though I asked him, why Schoomaker put up such a fight against such an obvious need.

Did Rumsfeld make his support of a small Army a condition for his appointment as the Army’s top soldier, or did he believe the explanations he gave Congress during his tour from 2003 to 2007?

Schoomaker’s official explanations included balancing the force between manpower and new weapons, letting civilians do more military jobs, thus freeing uniformed people already on the Army’s payroll for more critical work and saving whopping personnel costs by keeping the force small. Such reasoning never computed for me when two wars were raging and danger lurked elsewhere.

Schoomaker’s deputies gave me a more plausible explanation. They said if he went along with Congress and accepted a higher permanent end strength figure for the Army, the day would come when the White House and/or Congress would order the Army to shift funds from other accounts, like procurement, to pay for the manpower increase.

This might well put the Army’s Future Combat Systems and other beloved hardware on the chopping block. Buying more boys would mean buying fewer toys.

If Schoomaker had told Congress early on in his tour he personally believed the permanent end strength of the Army should be higher, the lawmakers probably would have been emboldened to make it happen.

Bush probably would have gone along rather than fight the Army’s top soldier hand-picked by Rumsfeld. Instead, for want of enough qualified volunteers, the Army and Marines are going back to the bad old days of the Vietnam era and signing up what back then was called “ash and trash.”

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman last week pried figures out of the Pentagon that show the Army granted 10,258 “conduct waivers” in FY07, including to convicted criminals and drug offenders, compared to 8,129 in FY06. The Marines issued 17,413 waivers in FY07, up from 16,969 the previous year.

The Army’s acceptance of convicted felons doubled, from 249 to 511, while the Marines’ take of convicted criminals went from 208 to 350 between FY06 and FY07. The number of convicted burglars the Army took in nearly tripled, from 36 to 106 between FY06 and FY07.

This is bad news for enlisted men who live in close quarters where money, clothing, watches and wallets are easy to steal. It didn’t have to turn out this way, but it has.

The Bush administration has forced these choices on the next president: Find better ways to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer force; bring back the draft; keep what firemen you do have in the firehouse when alarm bells go off in distant trouble spots.

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