China is making preparations to conduct the second flight test of its
newest intercontinental ballistic missile, the DF-31. Pentagon
intelligence agencies notified senior policy-makers last week that DF-31
test preparations were detected. The notice was contained in a
classified report based on spy satellites that spotted the test
preparations at the Wuzhai Missile and Space Center in central China.
The center is located about 250 miles southwest of Beijing. The test
firing is expected later this month, according to officials familiar
with the report.
China conducted the first flight test of the new DF-31 on Aug. 2,
also from Wuzhai. The missile included a dummy warhead and several
decoys designed to defeat long-range missile defenses.
The 5,000 mile-range missile is China’s newest strategic weapon that
will be deployed soon. The CIA said in a September report it will be
able to hit targets in parts of the Western United States. It is also
gauged to be the first weapons system to incorporate stolen U.S. missile
and warhead technology.
Marching orders
Gen. Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff, has sent a message to his
top officers pledging that he will eventually man every unit at 100
percent.
The Army, stretched by foreign soil commitments in South Korea, the
Persian Gulf, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, is missing key
personnel. Some divisions are short on basic infantrymen. AH-64 Apache
helicopter units lack sufficient pilots.
“Nearly every unit in the Army has a shortage of something,” says a
service official.
We obtained a copy of Gen. Shinseki’s Army-wide message. While it is
upbeat, it also predicts “turbulence” as the 475,000-member
organization changes the way it assigns troops.
“It will take time and significant effort to align our structure and
inventory,” he wrote. “We must achieve our recruiting goals and adjust
structure. We will initially revise our manning priorities. Our plan
will create some short-term turbulence. Some units will initially
experience lower manning levels. But we will carefully manage this
process so that all units remain capable of performing their assigned
missions.
“If we stay the course, the payoff is an Army where all units are
fully manned with personnel in the grades and skills required to
continue our dominance across the full spectrum of operations.”
Buy the boat
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has taken a number of “hits” from
Washington’s media for speeding up the Navy’s purchase of an amphibious
assault ship built by a home-state contractor.
What the New York Times, Washington Post and the TV networks failed
to mention is this: The people who would actually use the LHD-8 want the
ship as soon as possible, even though the Pentagon made no such request
in the just-completed fiscal 2000 budget.
Retired Gen. Charles Krulak made this point in a letter to the
Mississippi Republican when the general served as Marine Corps
commandant.
“As for my view on the wisdom of procuring a new LHD versus
refurbishing our oldest LHA, I believe procurement of a new LHD is a
wiser investment for our nation,” Gen. Krulak said in a letter. “The
LHD is larger, has more carrying capability, and can better accommodate
our new technology systems that have been fielded in recent years or
will soon be added to our force.”
Now, a top Navy admiral also has come to Mr. Lott’s defense.
“The Navy needs that ship. It is not an extraneous ship,” said Vice
Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, deputy chief of naval operations for
operations, resources, warfare requirements and assessments. “It is
needed to replace our LHA force, which are all coming to the end of
their lives. They are all to be due at once in a big lump sum. There’s
going to be a huge bill due at that point to recapitalize that. … If
you were to delay the ship, you would lose the industrial base, lose the
workers, lose the training. To delay the ship would cost the Navy a lot
of money in the long term. Senator Lott was trying to move the ship up
for us and that is definitely welcome.
“Obviously Congress has the oversight responsibilities according to
the Constitution, and we support the Constitution. They have the ability
to review our budget and change the priorities as they see fit. …
Senator Lott is a patriot. He has supported the Navy and other services
for many years.”
Vieques, Kahoolawe
If President Clinton caves to Puerto Rican demands and keeps the
carrier USS
Dwight D. Eisenhower and its battle group from training on the island of
Vieques, his press office will surely cite precedence.
Nine years ago, a Republican president faced a similar dilemma an
ocean away. For years, Hawaiian residents complained of live-fire
exercises on the island of Kahoolawe. There were protest demonstrations,
civil disobedience, and dire predictions about environmental damage —
the same rhetoric heard in Puerto Rico today.
What did President Bush do? He bowed to the locals’ complaints,
closed the range and forced the Navy to go elsewhere for training. There
were suspicions in the Navy at the time that Mr. Bush was trying to help
the campaign of a Republican Senate candidate, who ultimately lost the
election in heavily Democratic Hawaii.
“If Clinton caves on it, he will have done no more than Bush did in
1990,” said a government official.
Red ammo
Politically correct environmentalism is a hallmark of the Clinton
administration, which created an entire Pentagon bureaucracy devoted to
questionable “environmental security.”
Now the Army has jumped on the bandwagon. The service has ordered all
new bullets, notably the 5.56 mm round used in standard-issue M-16
rifles, to be produced with tungsten filler instead of environmentally
polluting lead.
The decision was made before the designation of an Army firing range
on Cape Cod, Mass., to be an environmental disaster area requiring
federal cleanup funds — even though lead rounds there will not pose any
threat for 300 years.
The problem for U.S. national security, we are told, is that the
United States has no domestic tungsten resources. It must be purchased
abroad and is only available from the Czech Republic, Canada, Mexico,
Cuba and China.
Guess where the Pentagon currently gets its tungsten? “We’re getting
all of ours from China,” an upset official told us. “The Army could
have opposed this and didn’t.”
If the decision on green ammunition stands, the Army will be reliant
on a foreign power for the basic combat unit — bullets. The tungsten
would be used to replace the lead currently used as filler behind a
steel tip and inside the metal jacket surrounding M-16 rounds.
Army spokeswoman Karen Baker said the service fires between 300
million and 400 million M-16 rounds a year and will produce about 1 million
“lead-free” bullets this year. She did not know where the Army gets the
tungsten for the new rounds.
