Military readiness

What is Mr. Clinton’s NATO attack against Yugoslavia doing to the
people of that country and what is it doing to the people of Kosovo?
More importantly, what is his latest wag-the-dog exercise doing to our
own military? Even before the U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia, our
military was experiencing a readiness crisis.

Our national security strategy is to maintain our armed forces in
such a way that we can fight and win two major theatre wars
simultaneously. However, it depends of what the definition of
simultaneously is. In the Clinton Pentagon, simultaneously no longer
means at the same time.

Senator Jim Inhofe, who chairs the Readiness and Management Support
subcommittee in the Upper Chamber, has informed us that Clinton’s
defensive strategists are assuming that there will be a 45 day break
between wars, and that the risk factor to American military personnel
under those circumstances will be high — not low, not medium, but high.
That means lots of body bags. It means lives cut short. It means missing
fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, aunts,
uncles, cousins and friends.

Furthermore, if we send ground troops into Kosovo, Inhofe reports
that we are going to be 100 percent dependent upon Guard and Reserve to
support those troops. Our military is only half the size it was for
Desert Storm in 1991. Right now we are in about the same position we
were in the late 1970s with a hollow force.

The reports from the House Subcommittee on Readiness are much the
same. During a field hearing in February, conducted at Nellis Air Force
base in Nevada, the committee members learned that aircraft maintainers
often stand around because there are too few supervisors to train them,
with most of the mid to senior level supervisors deployed. Broken test
aircraft and insufficient manning have caused weapons testing programs
to be restructured and fighter wings have been forced to serve as enemy
air forces for the first time in school history.

Representatives from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, the Naval
air station in Fallon, Nevada, and the Army’s National Training Center
at Ft. Irwin, California, related similar problems.

Can we sustain a ground war in Yugoslavia and Kosovo? Probably, but
the cost will be extremely high and the United States will be left
extremely vulnerable.