Forward Observer: Many Dollars, No Sense

The bad old days when tanks couldn't roll, warships couldn't sail and planes couldn't fly for want of spare parts and skilled people will return unless somebody, somewhere, does something fast.

But how can this be when Congress just appropriated a whopping $538 billion for national defense this year -- more than a million dollars a minute? The short answer is that neither the Bush administration nor Congress has bothered to look around the bend, see the financial train wreck in the making and take action to avoid it.

One way to avoid the wreck would be to cancel weapons designed for the last war, such as the Air Force F-22 fighter designed to fight Warsaw Pact air forces that no longer exist. Canceling the F-22 and other weapons that have nothing to do with winning the war on terror would go a long way to bailing out the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps from their readiness woes.

The Pentagon plans to spend $62 billion for just 185 F-22s -- $338 million each, counting research and development costs. If neither Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon nor the Republican-controlled Congress can bring itself to cancel the F-22, how about taking some of the billions from that other new aircraft, the Joint Strike Fighter, and spending them to make the armed forces ready to fight? The Pentagon's new price tag on the supposedly bargain-basement JSF has jumped to more than $100 million per plane.

The Pentagon plans to buy 2,458 JSFs for $276.5 billion. But Osama bin Laden won't have to worry. The F-22 and JSF fly too fast to see him on the ground.

It doesn't take long for the American people and their hired hands in Congress to get sick of a war and refuse to keep financing it and other military endeavors. In 1980, just five years after that other unpopular war in Vietnam finally ended, I was writing about a hollowed-out Army and Marine Corps peopled with disillusioned troopers, many in stockades for crimes they committed while in uniform. They were saddled with broken equipment and weren't ready to fight anybody.

That same year, I stood on the bridge of the Navy supply ship Canisteo as the skipper explained convincingly why he was refusing to take his ship to sea. It would be too dangerous, he said, because he did not have enough Navy chiefs, boiler technicians or machinist's mates on board to run it safely.

And I was in the House Press Gallery in 1980 when Rep. Jack Edwards of Alabama, then the ranking Republican on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, shocked colleagues by disclosing that his investigator had discovered that half the nation's first-line warplanes couldn't fly for lack of spare parts.

"This is unacceptable," Edwards said. "People are lulled into the feeling that we've got an Air Force hot to go. But what we've really got are hangar queens all over the country."

Edwards' disclosures embarrassed Congress into voting fresh billions for spare parts. But lawmakers today are back to raiding Pentagon accounts that contain money for spare parts and training of our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.

These readiness accounts, called O & M for operations and maintenance, and MilPers for military personnel, are orphans within the Pentagon budget. No Boeings or Lockheeds scream in protest when lawmakers take money out of these accounts and order it be earmarked for pet projects back home, like the bridge to nowhere in Alaska.

Stephen Daggett, a national defense specialist in the lawmakers' own Congressional Research Service, recently wrote a report that suggested earmarks have gotten completely out of hand.

"The number of earmarks in Defense appropriations laws has grown from about 587 in Fiscal Year 1994 to about 2,847 in Fiscal Year 2006," Daggett concluded after fastidious research that left out a lot of possible pork. That's almost a five-fold increase in just 12 years.

"The amount of money earmarked also has increased over the same period from about $4.2 billion to $9.4 billion," he wrote.

Winslow Wheeler, who spent decades looking behind the budget numbers for the government and now does the same for the Center for Defense Information, figures lawmakers this year raided the Pentagon's O & M accounts for $5.4 billion and its MilPers accounts for $2.9 billion.

Further assuring the train wreck are out-of-control people costs. Noting the generous healthcare programs for the military people and their families, Government Accountability Office Comptroller General David Walker recently told the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, "If there is one thing that could bankrupt America, it's health care."

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker told the House Armed Services Committee this summer that healthcare and other benefits for his active duty force, including Army reservists and National Guardsmen, will eat up 81 percent of his total Army budget by fiscal 2008.

And just to get well from Iraq, not to modernize, Schoomaker said he will need $17.1 billion next year and $13 billion a year for this "refit" for two or three years after that. The Marine Corps said it will need $11.9 billion for refit in fiscal 2007 alone.

Red warning lights are flashing, but the White House and Congress appear content to ignore them and let the wreck happen.

Then the bad old days for the military will, indeed, be back.