Puerto Rico sinks U.S. Navy?

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On Feb. 18, the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower and its battle group
will steam out of Norfolk, Va., headed for the Mediterranean Sea and the
Persian Gulf with a crew unready for combat because the Clinton
administration is once again sacrificing national security for domestic
political gain.

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President Clinton will not enforce the law by clearing protesting
Puerto Rican squatters from a vital naval bombing range on Vieques
Island even though the Pentagon brass has unambiguously stated that the
sailors and Marines he deploys on the Eisenhower cannot be ready for
combat unless they first undergo routine live-fire training exercises
there.

Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a former Republican senator from
Maine, initially had been expected to go to the mat for the sailors and
Marines in his charge by insisting that Clinton open the range. After
all, when Chief of Naval Operations Jay Johnson and Marine Corps
Commandant James Jones were asked in October if any available training
facility other than Vieques would adequately prepare units to deploy in
a potential combat zone, they said, "Not without greatly increasing
risk."

Would Cohen really put his men at "greatly increased risk" just so
Democrats aligned with Clinton -- including First Lady Hillary, who is
running for U.S. Senate from New York, and Vice President Gore, who is
in an unexpectedly tough race for the Democratic presidential nomination
-- could score some political points with the traditionally Democratic
Puerto Rican vote?

It now appears that the answer is yes.

Cohen has endorsed Clinton's capitulation to the Puerto Ricans, which
means not only that the Eisenhower battle group will not be able to
train at Vieques in February but also that a multimillion-dollar payoff
to the Puerto Ricans will have to be made for the Navy to resume
training there next year with dummy bombs and shells -- instead of the
live rounds needed to simulate the conditions of real combat.

Cohen will thus be morally responsible for ordering the Eisenhower's
sailors and Marines overseas, potentially into harm's way, without
having properly trained them to fight and win if sent in combat.

In keeping with Clinton's Puerto Rican capitulation policy, Cohen now
says the Pentagon is trying "to secure necessary commitments from our
allies to accommodate further live-fire training and readiness
certification for the Eisenhower Battle Group and the Wasp Amphibious
Ready Group before undertaking combat operations."

In other words, the United States is begging the Europeans to allow
Americans to train on their territory because Americans in Puerto Rico
will not allow our own Navy to train on our territory.

Since World War II the Navy has spent billions of dollars developing
Vieques into the best firing range in the world. The Navy owns
two-thirds of the land on the small, approximately 20-mile-long island,
one-third on each end, with 9,300 civilians living in the central area.

After a Marine pilot mistakenly dropped a bomb on a building within
the range killing a local security guard in April, protesters seized
control of the area and the Navy has not used the range since. Last
week, protesters locked the gates to Camp Garcia, one of the island's
two Naval facilities, and turned away U.S. Marines who tried to remove
the padlock.

Denied the use of this range by U.S. citizens violating U.S. laws
that the U.S. president has decided not to enforce, Navy and Marine
commanders have had to scramble for training alternatives that would
raise the Eisenhower and its attending ships to a "sufficient level of
readiness" before they are committed to a potential combat area. They
concede, however, that Eisenhower's sailors and Marines will not reach
the readiness level the Navy usually demands.

The services have an established rating system to quantify military
preparedness. Ships deploying into hostile theaters must hold the
highest readiness rating of C1. Without training at Vieques, the
Eisenhower and the Wasp cannot earn that rating before they steam to the
Mediterranean and Persian Gulf.

"As a fleet commander, I would never have considered deployment
without adequate training," former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Adm. Thomas Moorer told Human Events. "It's criminal not to give our
men and women the best equipment and training we possibly can. Safety
comes through training. No stone should be left unturned with regard to
safety and that's what Vieques is all about."

A current fleet commander considers the range critical. "I can't
tell you how many casualties we might suffer if we don't start training
again at Vieques very soon," Vice Adm. William Fallon told Congress in
October. "But I can tell you that we instituted a very rigorous program
of heavy ordnance surge capability on the aircraft carriers as the
result of a couple of disasters back during the Vietnam War. The
Forrestal and Enterprise disasters which killed hundreds of sailors and
Marines were the direct result of an unfamiliarity and mistakes in
handling live ordnance on the aircraft carrier."

"That's what makes Vieques unique," added Fallon, who commands the
Second Fleet. "We have to have a place to mitigate this risk, to be
able to run the ordnance from the magazines, assemble it, put it on the
airplanes, and drop it someplace to get this entire training cycle in
the intense environment of working from the aircraft carriers. And
that's what's going to be lost if the range is continually closed."

Nevertheless, the Eisenhower Carrier Battle Group and the USS Wasp
Amphibious Ready Group are steaming on the same mission that put two of
the three previous carriers into combat against Serbia and Iraq.

On Dec. 3, when reporters asked Adm. James Johnson, the chief of
Naval Operations, whether the units would be combat-ready when they
sailed, he answered, "No."

The Navy is sending ships to Wrath Island, Scotland, for live-fire
training, but that is a problematic locality in March. Weather in the
North Atlantic is so unpredictable that the range is unusable half the
time. "And every one of those days that we stay for weather reasons is
another day that we're not on station and not available to perform the
mission," said Navy Secretary Richard Danzig.

Clinton's selling out the safety of the sailors and Marines he is
otherwise so ready to order into combat comes as no surprise to those
close to the military. What is surprising are the Republican leaders
who are letting him get away with it.

Both of the leading GOP presidential contenders, Texas Gov. George W.
Bush and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have effectively gone AWOL on this
issue. Both men were military pilots -- in McCain's case, a Navy pilot
-- and should know what is at stake. The Texas governor, who believes
he can garner a respectable percentage of the Hispanic vote in the
general election next year, said he wanted the Navy to work out a
compromise with the Puerto Rican government, which is exactly what
President Clinton says he is doing, although capitulation would be a
better description.

"Gov. Bush hopes the Navy will respect the wishes of the Puerto Rican
people and work with the local government to find a solution for a
prompt and orderly transition to an alternate site," Bush campaign
spokesman Mindy Tucker told Human Events.

On Dec. 3, Cohen sent Clinton a letter laying out the proposed
"deal." The Navy would immediately and permanently suspend all
live-fire exercises at Vieques. It would hold inert weapon exercises
there a maximum of 90 days a year. In five years, it would evacuate the
island entirely. In the meanwhile, $40 million from an already
over-burdened defense budget would go to provide perks to Puerto Rico,
including turning an ammunition depot into parkland, constructing a
commercial ferry terminal, extending the runway at the local airport,
establishing an artificial reef to attract sporting fish, and opening an
economic development office on Vieques.

Despite the one-sided nature of this "deal," it was immediately and
insultingly rejected as "unacceptable" by Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro
Rosselos, a Democrat who serves as the local finance chairman for Gore's
campaign.

Just last week, on board the USS Intrepid in New York harbor, McCain
outlined his national security plan, which focuses on readiness. But he
said not a peep about the USS Eisenhower and the impasse at Vieques.

Readiness Subcommittee Chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., did not
hesitate to state his views. "The president callously disregarded the
best military judgment of our senior officers. The 'fix' was in months
ago when we discovered the president's instructions to National Security
Adviser Sandy Berger to withdraw our forces from Vieques. By rewarding
lawbreakers who are threatening violence, the president has chosen
special interests over the national interest."

©1999 Human Events