Forward Observer: People, Not Paper

Nobody is looking into the faces of those serving in the military as they parse in bloodless reports and pork-driven congressional hearings the base closing recommendations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon team. Yet we are talking here about generating the kind of personnel turbulence that could ruin the all-volunteer force that ended draft calls in 1973.

From living with troops and sailors and getting to know their families for several decades now, I can imagine the looks on their faces as rough accounts of Rumsfeld's master plan seep into their homes. Visualize Army Sgt. Everyman, who has a wife and four kids -- two in pre-school and two in junior high -- coming home to his tidy house on a leafy street at Fort Bragg, N. C., and telling his wife, "Looks like we're going have to move again, honey."

This military wife looks at him with dread. She asks where and why. Her kids have all kinds of ties to the Fort Bragg community: soccer, basketball, swim teams, summer camp, buddies. She has worked out, with great difficulty, day care for the pre-schoolers so she could take a job she enjoys. And the pay is pretty good, thanks to the healthy economy the big Army and Air Force presence in Fayetteville has created.

"Don't know yet," Sgt. Everyman replies to most of her questions. "The colonel just told us that Rumsfeld wants us SF [Special Forces] guys to move to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to be with the Air Force's Special Ops guys there. Army troops from Europe are moving to Bragg. One of them will probably buy our house."

The sergeant's wife is tired of moving; tired of measuring and sewing curtains for a new place, tired of being uprooted every three years or so; tired of her husband flying off to dangerous places and not being able tell her or the kids just what the hell he will be doing there. She has been nurse, bill payer, mechanic, taxi driver, yard worker, painter during all those times he has been away.

She is sick of uncertainty. Yet her husband loves being a Green Beret. He would lose his pension and other benefits, including a super healthcare plan in retirement, if he quit the Army now.

Thousands of other Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine wives will endure similar situations in the coming months as they learn how Washington's decisions about base closures and realignments will affect them. Their plight is so well known within the American military family that it has been printed in big type on shopping bags in Norfolk: "Navy wife. Toughest job in the world."

The wives have gutted it out for 32 years now. But there are big cracks, especially in the National Guard and reserve forces, that warn that President Bush and Rumsfeld might shatter the volunteer force if they ask much more of military families.

What Rumsfeld is trying to do -- with Bush's blessing -- sounds good. He is trying to create a new version of Fortress America by pulling troops back to the homeland, which might sound isolationist if not for his emphasis on giving them quick reach to distant hotspots. Their reach would be provided by springboards in the United States -- airfields and seaports -- as well as other launching pads abroad near likely fires.

The launching pads overseas would include those the administration is building or borrowing right now in Iraq, Kuwait and Uzbekistan. Making the United States the main on-call fire house rather than scattering the firemen around Europe and the Pacific, as was the case during the more predictable Cold War, answers to the dictum that the commander who tries to be strong everywhere is weak everywhere.

Congress, in reviewing Rumsfeld's grand design, has paid dangerously little attention to what impact all the moving of military people from Europe, the Pacific and within the United States -- along with support civilians -- will have on the inclination of young people to join and stay in America's military. The record shows that turbulence can be ruinous.

Recall the scandals of the past, when desperate military recruiters resorted to forged diplomas and faked test scores to make their quotas of volunteers.

There are signs those days are coming back. If recruiters have an increasingly difficult time filling the ranks of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps in the future, partly because of worsening personnel turbulence, the president or Congress could always bring back the draft. There is little chance of that happening, at least in the short run, since no politician will make the case for a draft during the run-up to the 2006 congressional and 2008 presidential elections.

Still, nothing less than the survival of the all-volunteer force is at stake. Congressional committees should look beyond the jobs that constituents back home are likely to lose under Rumsfeld's basing and contracting-out plans.

They should focus on the impact on the men and women who place themselves in harm's way for the rest of us.

It would be refreshing to hear from military chaplains who deal with the human problems of change rather than just the reassuring generals. Sergeants major and Navy chiefs could also give enlightening testimony.

Their words would put the focus where it belongs -- on the men and women in uniform.