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And what is the truth? The truth is that our military isn't ready for this war. The truth is that we have too few troops. The truth is that we need either a draft, or the sort of massive expansion of our forces that will be difficult to achieve in the absence of a draft. The truth is that the public is as yet unaware of and unprepared for the military responsibilities of the new age of terror. The truth is that no one wants to talk about this. The truth is that we are fooling ourselves. The truth is that we have not yet overcome the Vietnam syndrome. The truth is that we have not yet been tested. The truth is that no one knows whether or not we shall pass the real test when it comes, as it surely will. Now maybe I am wrong about all this. But if I am wrong, then so is the most important article you've never read, an article by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt that was buried on page eight of the May 24, 2002 New York Times. What caught the attention of the press and the pundits last May 24 was a front-page story in the Washington Post claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had succeeded in persuading President Bush not to invade Iraq. The more obscure piece from the New York Times of the same day may explain a great deal about why the Joint Chiefs were trying to dissuade President Bush from an invasion in the first place. The Shanker-Schmitt piece reported the results of a highly classified war game, code-named "Prominent Hammer." Prominent Hammer was the most thorough assessment of American military readiness since 9/11, and Shanker and Schmitt were able to reconstruct its results by piecing together interviews with more than a dozen senior Defense Department and military officials. According to Shanker and Schmitt, Prominent Hammer concluded that an invasion of Iraq, or a substantial military campaign anywhere else in the world right now, would stretch American forces to the limit. Why? Because new and unanticipated demands on the military for domestic defense and "force protection" have upended pre-9/11 calculations about our troop requirements. What does this mean? It means that the terrorist threat has created a fundamentally new situation for our military. Deploying military men at airports, at our borders, at foreign embassies, near nuclear-power plants and such was never planned for. On top of that, American troop deployments themselves now need "force protection." That is, our bases themselves now have to be guarded from attacks, such as al Qaeda's bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon. According to Shanker and Schmitt, the unanticipated demands of domestic defense and force protection have "placed combat readiness at risk." Here's how Shanker and Schmitt quote Air Force chief of staff Gen. John Jumper: "We never sized ourselves to have to do high force-protection levels at home and overseas at the same time....We're stretched very thin in security forces." Another senior Pentagon official said that Prominent Hammer revealed that our new level of force protection "strips combat power" and that the drain on personnel had created "a dangerous situation." The ongoing commitment of forces in Afghanistan was also reported to have taken a toll on readiness. Shanker and Schmitt quote the recently retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair, of the Pacific Command, who told a House committee in March, "We do not have adequate forces to carry out our missions" if operations in Afghanistan "continue at their recent past and current pace." These points are bad enough, but reading between the lines of the Shanker and Schmitt article raises still more disturbing possibilities. The military men and Defense Department officials interviewed by Shanker and Schmitt were careful to emphasize that, despite the stress on our forces of even one more major military commitment, we could still somehow manage to make ends meet. But the real question — the one obliquely raised in the article — is what will happen if, having stretched ourselves just short of the breaking point with an invasion of Iraq, North Korea, or any other potential foe, decides to make a move. In fact, even that sort of deliberate adventurism by a rogue nation may not be the deepest threat. What Shanker and Schmitt don't mention, but what the president and his advisers have surely considered, is the full-fledged "clash of civilizations" scenario. What if reaction in the Islamic world to an American invasion of Iraq starts to destabilize governments like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan? What if an Islamist attack on the Musharraf government, or even a successful assassination of Musharraf himself, means that we have to go in an stabilize Pakistan and protect or seize its nuclear weapons to keep them out of the hands of al Qaeda? How can we handle destabilization in the Islamic world in the wake of an attack on Iraq if the invasion itself stretches our forces to the limit? And why hasn't the press been asking these questions? Is it because a liberal press, with its own memories of evasion of, and opposition to, the Vietnam draft, is too embarrassed and too politically indisposed to ask vital questions about what is obviously the most important issue facing this country? Now maybe Shanker and Schmitt's reconstruction of Prominent Hammer is mistaken. Or maybe Prominent Hammer itself reached faulty conclusions. Or maybe the military is somehow relying on false claims of thinning forces to disguise a deeper aversion to risk. But maybe — just maybe — Shanker and Schmitt are right. Maybe we don't have enough troops. Maybe an invasion of Iraq leaves us vulnerable to any sort of destabilization in the Muslim world, or to deliberate adventurism from foes who understand that we are militarily tied town and stretched to the limit. Maybe our unwillingness to face the need for a draft is what's really holding President Bush back from an invasion. Maybe we want to have our cake and eat it too. Maybe we haven't acknowledged the reality of new world we are living in. We face the possibility of a dirty nuclear bomb, a real nuclear bomb, an anthrax attack, or a smallpox epidemic striking at the heart of an American city. We face the very real possibility of civilian casualties the like of which this country has never seen. We may never be able to entirely protect against such attacks, but if we cannot show that states who would provide terrorists with weapons of mass destruction will be overthrown, then we have lost the capacity to defend ourselves. Have we lost that capacity? Again, I am perfectly willing to believe that our forces are adequate, and that we do not in fact need a draft. But the Shanker and Schmitt report raises sufficient question that the press ought to be all over this issue. Yet it is not. Now consider the important survey of American college and university students just released by Americans For Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), an organization chaired by William J. Bennett. According to that poll, a full 37 percent of students would be likely to evade a draft were it reinstituted; 21 percent of students would be willing to serve, but only if stationed in the U.S.; and only 35 percent of students would be willing to serve and fight anywhere in the world. Actually, that 35 percent would be more than enough to give our military the ability to function effectively in this new and more dangerous environment. But the president understands the political risks of a draft. The real question might not be how many would evade or serve, but how those subjected to a draft — and their friends and relatives — would vote for a congressman, senator, or president who supported a draft. The other day I attended a briefing given by one of the county's most prominent analysts of public opinion. I asked him how the public would react to a draft. He said he hadn't seen any polling on the question (another reason why the AVOT poll is so important), and it was obvious that he'd barely given the issue any thought. Why should he? No one else is talking about it. Five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Congress to extend the service time for draftees to two-and-a-half years — a 150 percent increase in time served. The measure passed by one vote. Our response to Pearl Harbor was long, slow, and troubled as it was. Can you imagine what our situation would have been had Roosevelt not managed to extend the draft? What did we know five months before Pearl Harbor? Only that the world was growing more dangerous. Only what we know right now. The measure passed by only a single vote — a vote that mattered a great deal. We cannot afford not to invade Iraq. And yet we are unprepared. — Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. |
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most important decision facing the United States of America is being debated
in ignorance. The press has fallen down on the job. So have the pundits.
The administration is afraid to speak the truth. The public doesn't want
to hear the truth.
