February 19, 2008
Military Poll: Armed Forces -- And U.S. -- Highly Vulnerable
Is the military broken?
That is a question the Pentagon and Washington have been asking since late 2003, when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld inadvertently signaled that the country was in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers themselves have been generally more positive about their mission than American civilians are. A new survey of military officers shows that while most maintain that the military is not broken, it cannot persevere under present conditions for long.
More than 3,400 active and retired officers -- 10 percent of whom served in Iraq, Afghanistan or both -- were surveyed by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for a New American Security [PDF], a centrist think tank.
Just 42 percent of respondents described the military as broken, compared with 56 percent who disagreed. But 60 percent said the military was weaker. Just 25 percent said the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had helped the military grow stronger.
The results are largely in line with other surveys of military officers, such as those conducted by the Military Times publishing group. But as warnings from the military about its own health have intensified over the years, the strain placed on active-duty troops has only grown. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the new 15/12 deployment schedule last April, and there are no indications that those rotations will be eased this year, even as troop levels are brought back down to pre-surge levels. If anything, the Pentagon appears to be hinting that they will not.
When asked whether the war in Iraq had stretched the military "dangerously thin," a whopping 88 percent of respondents said yes. More gravely, the officers said, the military is currently ill-prepared to respond to other major conflicts. More than 80 percent said it was unreasonable to expect the military to engage in another war today. And on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 meaning completely ready, the officers gave America's readiness to go to war with Iran a 4.5.
That may be because many see the current mission in Iraq as untenable: Nearly three-quarters said the goals set for the military by civilian leadership after the fall of Saddam Hussein were unreasonable.
Still, nearly 90 percent of officers surveyed said the new counterinsurgency strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus had raised the chance of success in Iraq. If U.S. fortunes are tilting up there, though, it isn't just due to Petraeus, experts said.
"We are extremely fortunate to have the officer corps that we have," said Lt. John Nagl, who helped write the Army's counterinsurgency field manual and also wrote the book, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife."
Nagl, speaking at a press briefing announcing the survey results, was seconded by Lt. Gen Greg Newbold, who quit the Pentagon out of dissent over the war.
"The Marine Corps I left five years ago is not nearly as good as the Marine Corps today," Newbold said. But "we ought to pay more attention to quality," he added, stating a widely shared concerned about the current military.
"The Army is not broken," said Maj. Robert Scales, but it risks being "hollowed out" as it was following the Vietnam conflict. If the military does break, it will happen in such a way that no one will realize it until it's too late, he added.
"This is not going to be a volcanic event. This is going to be tectonic," said Scales, a military analyst for FOX News. "It won't be anything that makes the headlines. It will be gradual and insidious." If the military does break, Scales said, it will be from "atrophy and neglect."
As much as lawmakers and administration officials talk up the bravery of service members, few have a substantive understanding of how the armed forces function, officers believe. About two-thirds of the officers polled said elected officials are somewhat or very uninformed about the nation's military.
There's a sense in the military that officers are doing better than can be expected under extremely harsh conditions, but that the civilian sectors aren't doing their part. Fewer than one in 10 Americans has ever served in the military, and military advocates have long complained that the American public at large has little invested in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
About eight in 10 of the officers surveyed described their main mission in Iraq as counterinsurgency, while just two in 10 described it as reconstruction. Their reasoning: Reconstruction is the job of other governmental agencies.
In a November speech, Gates called for dramatically increased funding at the State Department as part of the war on terror. "There are more people in military bands than in the U.S. Foreign Service," Nagl said. He advocated the creation of a "U.S. Advisory Corps" to "prevent wars and minimize their effects by putting more money into Foggy Bottom instead of the Pentagon."
All the panelists agreed that the increased retirement rate of officers, particularly those graduating from elite military academies like West Point, are the product of military strain and threaten to handicap the military in the longer term. According to Foreign Policy, nearly 60 percent of the West Point class of 2002 left active duty at their first chance to opt out, in 2007.
"Bonuses are merely bribes. The only way to solve this problem is to pay people what they're worth -- not only for their skills, but the risk involved," Scales said. "I don't understand why a military analyst in the Pentagon makes more than a lieutenant walking the ground in Fallujah."
The sense that officers are doing their part while the rest of America is not seems pervasive, according to the survey results. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a great level of confidence, officers had an average confidence level in the president of 5.5. The State Department scored 4.1, Veterans Affairs scored 4.5, the CIA rated a 4.7, and Congress received a pitiful 2.7.
Officers had the most confidence in their own institution, rating the Pentagon 5.6.
Respondents seemed split on the question of torture. A slight majority said torture was "never acceptable," while 44 percent disagreed. Newbold pointed to the Abu Ghraib scandal as a sign that the integrity of the military may be disintegrating.
"If you have a hollow force, unfortunately, some of the symptoms won't be manifest in a way that they are neatly identified," he said. "They will show up in times of crisis when American prestige is on the line, and the consequences will be felt for decades."
Posted at 3:35 PM
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Afghanistan, Asia, Bush Administration, CIA, Congress, David Petraeus, Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq, Middle East, Military, Robert Gates
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