Editor’s note: As America’s most decorated living war veteran, Col. David
Hackworth knows the military. At the age of 14, Hackworth enlisted in
the U.S. Army. He spent 26 years in the service, seven of those in
combat theaters. Hackworth was involved in a dozen wars and conflicts
and received eight Purple Hearts.
Even though he has served faithfully in the military, Hackworth
doesn’t mince words when he speaks out about the problems of today’s
armed forces. In order to effectively fight in the 21st century, he
says, major changes in focus and priorities must be made.
Zoh Hieronimus interviewed Hackworth on her syndicated radio show,
The Zoh Show, which can be heard weekdays from 12-3 p.m. Eastern time.
Hackworth’s exclusive column is featured each Tuesday in WorldNetDaily.
© 2000, Hieronimus & Co.
Question: From your own vantage point, clearly define the purpose of our military traditionally?
Answer: The purpose of the U.S. military, those on active duty and those in the reserves, is very simple: It is to defend America. To defend this great country of ours physically and our interests and concerns around the globe.
Q: How would you describe the change in perspective about the purpose of our military, particularly in the past eight years?
A: In my lifetime, our military has been involved in World War II, Korea, Vietnam — all big fights. And of course running through that at the end of World II was the Cold War. When the Cold War ended, we had Washington, D.C, kind of lost, trying to find out what the purpose of our military was and how to apply it and how to keep the cash register ringing for all those bucks that would be coming in through the industrial-military-congressional complex. If you go back to 1989, remember that George Bush Sr. was in office saying that we had to be concerned about Cuba and Libya and all these powers jumping up on us and knocking us down. So there was a frantic search for a mission. It was found in part by Desert Storm. We next moved into Somalia. Then there was a change of command in the White House, and Clinton took over.
Clinton and the Pentagon had been trying to find out: What is the role for this big thing they called the armed forces? How can they justify the $300 billion a year we taxpayers throw their way, and what can this outfit do? Under Clinton, it has been a kind of Salvation Army, 911, globo-robo-cop, hopping into fights that had nothing to do with what I mentioned earlier — defending this country of ours, defending our interests.
We’ve gone from Somalia to Haiti, Bosnia to Kosovo, and the end result of this incredible commitment has been so destructive to our armed forces. After Desert Storm, we cut our military in half; the Soviets were no longer coming. There was no need to have that huge military, which was a Cold War military. So they tried to rationalize it, bring the military back to a size they could somewhat justify.
Q: But, as you have pointed out on numerous occasions, with much more to do.
A: Exactly. The military has been given more missions, a heavier commitment than all of the exercises combined that went on during the Cold War. So what we have today is a military that’s 50 percent smaller than it was during Desert Storm in 1991, but is doing 300 percent more operational missions. We have a force that’s doing too much, with too little, for too long. As a result, they’re no longer kind of ragged at the edges, kind of dull at the forward edge; they’re broken.
Q: And as you have pointed out repeatedly, this has been easy to see.
A: What really bothers me is that the other day when Schwarzkopf announced off the deck of a Navy carrier that our armed forces’ readiness was in bad shape, he was jumped upon by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, by the Pentagon top propaganda expert, Kenneth Bacon, and Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera, all saying that he’s all wet. My take on it is that it was like when Schwarzkopf wanted to punch right through the center of the Kuwaiti line and then-Defense Secretary Cheney said, “Wait a minute. Why don’t we go around?” Then Schwarzkopf said, “If I go around, I’ll need another corps. And if I get another corps, it’s going to take me another three or four months to deploy the corps from Germany.” It was the 7th Corps, which we all know was deployed and that gave us the force for that hell of a Hail Mary. The Marines kind of pinched the enemy’s nose and held it.
Q: Not only is the military half its former size, but there used to be an ideology of hold two, win one; then it was hold one, win one; then there was win one. Now, it’s questionable if we could win one.
A: My take on it is no. For example, I spoke to a naval officer. I said, “Look, I just got a report that a leading senator said that 20 percent of our fleet couldn’t go to sea. Is that true?” He said, “Hack, it’s far worse than that. Try 30 percent of our fleet that couldn’t go to sea, and those that do, steal parts and people from the ship that just came back in.” So, that’s the Navy.
I get the same kind of reports from the Air Force people who are saying that they are taking parts out of what used to be called hanger queens. I know that the condition of the Army is just the same. So across the board, our military is not in a great readiness posture, and fortunately, we don’t have a serious enemy out there waiting to beat us up. But that doesn’t mean we won’t have one tomorrow.
Q: In the Clinton years, we’ve seen deployments into Haiti, Somalia, Korea and now Colombia. Pick a few examples to show us what’s wrong with these deployments.
A: Let’s take Somalia, which was the first one. George Bush Sr. got us in. The mission for the military was to stop the terrorism, stop the outlaws from taking from the people, feed the people, get the country back on its feet. That’s what our military tried to do. But the mission got changed under Bill Clinton, and it went from feeding to fighting. The problem was Clinton and his military advisers, knowing very little about the military, decided to pull out as much combat force as they could when they changed the mission from feeding to fighting. So he didn’t have enough cops on the block. Then he decides to get the leader of the terrorist organization that’s causing him so much trouble, Aidid, so he sends his special-operations people out to hunt this guy. They ended up doing the same operation again and again, and got caught in a bad situation.
The Secretary of Defense Les Aspin had said that no more heavy combat equipment would go into Somalia. So, as a result, when the commander on the ground asked for tanks, he was denied. The commander didn’t stand up and fight and say, “Look, my people will not be properly protected.” He had a piece of paper to cover him. So as a result, the mission went on. The men got into a terrible fight that finally resulted in 18 American soldiers, mainly Special Forces Rangers, being killed with over a hundred wounded. A few days later, America jumped on their boat and ran, kind of like we did in Vietnam, because we had taken losses and were so humbled. And yet when the ships went into Haiti, a few thugs waved AK47s from the docks, and we hauled butt. The ship with our forces on it turned around because of a few guys brandishing AK47s from the docks. Now this is our policy.
All of these invasions, Haiti, Bosnia and Somalia, I went on as a reporter. I was standing there in Haiti, for example, when the 20,000 American soldiers conducted a peaceful invasion to take that country. I spent a while with them while they were occupying the country. I predict that in Bosnia and Kosovo down the track, we will leave the same way we left Somalia. We jump into actions, and we don’t think out the consequences. We don’t have an appropriate force there to do the job. We put such rules of engagement on the soldiers that it basically ties their hands, and we find ourselves as recently as a few months ago in Kosovo, where American paratroopers were stoned and sticks were thrown at them, and they couldn’t do anything about it. They had to abandon their equipment and run, much like we left Somalia and, more recently, Haiti.
So, it’s the top not thinking out what the mission is — how we are going to provide proper protection for the force, what the rules of engagement are, why we are there in the first place? It’s the guys at the bottom who have to wear the hurt.
Q: Let’s talk about the bare bones. In the Gulf War, you covered what our troops were outfitted with. How is our military prepared for chemical and biological warfare or a plain ol’ “on the field shooting match”?
A: Across the board, when I see special units like Green Berets and Rangers, they come to me and say, “Hack, we now have to go to a civilian range and buy our own ammunition to fire our weapons because the military doesn’t have ammunition.” Or I get letters or communications, most recently from a mother of a soldier, who said, “I have to send my son toilet paper because there is no toilet paper on his post. It costs me more to post toilet paper to him than what the toilet paper costs. And the broom that he has to clean out his barracks, is worn out. There’s no dust pan.” Then you say, “Wait a minute. We have a $300 billion a year military operation and soldiers have to buy their own bullets and have their mothers send them toilet paper? And these are not just isolated cases. I get this across the board.
Q: Contrast that with how the brass and commander in chief live.
A: Right you are. At the same time, we have the president of the United States flying with a huge operation from China to Africa, right around the world. And by my calculations, he’s spent about a half billion in defense dollars that should have gone to ammunition, to toilet paper and all the rest of it. But he’s been on these incredible visits to countries where he takes a huge staff of thousands of people. Air Force people tell me that many of the movements are so large that it virtually paralyzes the United States Air Force to come up with the lift aircraft to move this circus to wherever he’s visiting.
Q: You’ve shared stories about Secretary of Defense William Cohen putting himself and his entourage up at first-class hotels.
A: At the Four Seasons, at the cost to the taxpayer of $2,500 a night. Or the whole Independence Day scene where 25 of our warships were used. A naval officer told me only yesterday that he thought that 30 percent of our naval ships were not operational, but that on the Fourth of July holiday, 25 ships paraded up and down the Hudson while the sailors’ spouses were at home saying, “My husband, or wife, is always away, and here he is putting on a dog and pony show for the president.” And then later, a big scrumptious dinner party with all kinds of Washington groupies of the secretary of defense was held.
This is the kind of stuff that really needs to anger the people. It needs to stop. We must stop preventing our soldiers from having the right stuff to do the job, to train up hard to go into battle. Part of going into battle is having the right stuff in training. I learned as a little kid, the more sweat on the training field, the less blood on the battlefield. And believe me, today, no one is sweating enough.
Q: One of the things we have watched over the years — and I think many Americans are concerned, particularly those that feel the brunt of the boot of the drug war — is the militarization of our police. But we’ve also seen a narcotizing of our military, from Afghanistan to Iran to Nicaragua to the KLA in Yugoslavia, and now Colombia, where our military and intelligence communities train and deploy mercenaries, engaging and collaborating with narco-terrorists groups. How has this sort of narcotizing of our military impacted our military?
A: Well, it’s not good on the morale of the troops. It certainly exposes those people of weaker character to the temptations of making a lot of money real quickly. We saw a United States Army colonel recently spending several years in the slammer for what his wife was doing in Colombia. While he ran the military mission in Colombia, his wife was involved in smuggling narcotics back to the states. So it’s this kind of stuff. It’s our support of the KLA during the Kosovo war, the war with Serbia, folks who were known gangsters. As a matter of fact, the guy that is running the KLA and the Kosovo government, his brother was just arrested with $250,000 of American cash under his bed. Where do you think that money came from — selling lifesavers?
Q: In going back to the Reagan and Bush administrations — the Iran Contra pipelines using drug money, weapons trading, laundering that money through apparatuses — what we find out is that at one time the drug lords are our enemy, and the next week they are our allies.
A: That’s right. That’s the game that was carried over from the Cold War. As long as anybody pointed their weapons at the evil empire of the Soviet Union, regardless how many crimes they had committed, we were eager to jump in bed with them. So, it’s that same philosophy. It rubs people like you and me, and a lot of other people, the wrong way. It needs to stop. It’s going to be part of the destruction of our military.
Q: You have often commented that we are always preparing for last year’s or last decade’s wars today. Perhaps you can address the concern many people have about the impact technology is having on our fighting abilities and the risks it puts us at?
A: We’re in a new position, a revolution in war. We have to determine how we are going to configure ourselves to fight future battles. As I see it, there are going to be two types of war. One is going to be the same kind of fights we’ve always experienced, down on the ground. It could be brought on by nationalism, ethnic strife, tribal strife, but it will be what is being experienced around the world now. Like in Russia yesterday, where a bomb exploded in a busy community center. So, you are going to have terrorism or low intensity conflict.
Then, on the other hand, you are going to have the new face of war, and that’s a very high-tech war. It will probably be opponents never seeing each other, but fighting a war over the horizon, a war controlled by satellites, eyes in the sky, with missiles probably under the sea. Everything will be controlled, almost by remote control, and the weapons will be highly destructive. There will be laser weapons. Perhaps we’ll have battleships — much like the ones I grew up with in the comic books like Flash Gordon — battleships not in the sea, but battleships in the sky. It could bring all kinds of devastation in a short order, anywhere in the world.
Q: Those are pretty different kinds of wars. Explain how this impacts our nation.
A: The problem is that for these two kinds of wars, the people that are orchestrating and developing our future strategy are not looking at it this way. As a result, they are kind of going back and saying, “Here’s what we did yesterday.” They are inching forward instead of taking a huge leap forwards and saying, “What we need to do is to have two forces, one to fight these low intensity terrorist-type fights and the other to fight the high-tech kind of warfare.” But right now, we are simply readying to fight a Desert Storm II. There’s just no forward thinking.
Q: Adm. Bill Owens wrote a book, “Lifting the Fog of War.”
A: Yes, a wonderful book. I read it twice. I’ve spoken to him eyeball to eyeball, and what he says is dead on target for the high-tech aspect of the war. I maintain that manned aircraft, fighters, bombers, are obsolete. They are made obsolete because of the laser technology that is just about to happen. Let’s move right away to unmanned aircraft, which is basically how we have been fighting the last little wars. Remember, push the button and off goes a missile and knocks out the CIA-built terrorist camp in Afghanistan or the vitamin factory in Sudan.
Q: The problem is that it sanitizes war. The Gulf War was more like TV theater. In Yugoslavia, we had the illegal ransacking of a sovereign nation, bombing civilian market areas, hospitals and schools. Then we were told through our media outlets what a fine job our military and the Western powers were doing bringing under control that awful Serbian military.
A: The point you make is excellent. When the war ended and when Milosovic waved his white flag, all of the Gen. Clarks and the President Clintons got out on their soap boxes and were crowing about how great the air power was, that there was nobody on the ground and there were no casualties. But the end result was that the Serbian military pulled out of there in very good condition. It was proven later that all the propaganda put out by the Pentagon, put out by the White House, in terms of the damage done to the Serbian army was just that. There was marginal damage done to the Serbian army. There were, as you say, hospitals, civilian entities, a television station where about 19 Serbian civilians were killed, that got hit.
Q: Significant damage was done to their shared natural resources. The Danube River and their rivers that run into the well systems are contaminated. The casualties were in the civilian population, but not necessarily the enemy target.
A: In all of the countries like Bulgaria, Rumania, etc., that have been so hurt because they can’t navigate the Danube, we are quietly paying those people compensation. It’s the same way we used missiles to destroy the vitamin factory in Sudan, where we are going to pay off $50 million. The taxpayers just don’t hear about this for some reason. This is petty cash. This is a small amount of money. But then go back and tie this into readiness, where soldiers have to buy bullets and rent a civilian range to fire their weapons, where mothers mail their kids toilet paper.
Q: One of the other interesting areas about moving into this technological age is that the magnetic pulse weapons can make any satellite communication ineffective. Therefore, messenging to your troops in the field becomes obsolete. But the other serious impact of all of this is the issue of computer hacking. Could you spend a few moments discussing the challenges we face on this issue?
A: It is a proven invasion already. The Department of Defense and sensitive agencies have been hacked by little kids playing, but how many full-on spies have succeeded in doing that? So, I think that certainly EMP, electronic magnetic pulse, has been known about for years. We know that if a nuke explosion occurred, we would probably have a meltdown in communications, and now they can produce this without a nuclear explosion. So, with our whole communication system that we are so hot-wired on now, we might be back to saying, “Hey, you over there.”
Q: What would a Hackworth military look like?
A: First of all, any corporal will tell you, if he is going to patrol and defend a piece of dirt, he will analyze what the threat is. So we need to say, what’s the threat? — right now, tomorrow, 10 years from now and 50 years from now — and prepare ourselves accordingly. If I were responsible for giving us a force of the future, I would have a force that can deal with the two threats that I see. The low intensity threats — the terrorist threat, the insurgency threat — and then the second threat, the high-tech threat. Then I would look at our complete military force, and I would ask, “Why do we have four of everything?” Four air forces — Army air force, Navy air force, Air Force air force and Marine air force. We have two navies, the Coast Guard and the United States Navy. We have two armies, The U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps. Within them, we have four finance corps, four medical corps, logistical corps and so on.
In the Army, there are more full colonels than there are Army machine gunners. Now, something is wrong when you have such a huge tail and you have no biting teeth. An organization that was basically structured somewhere around 1950, and it’s supposed to fight the wars of the 21st century? What we need to do is consolidate and bring the ground forces together — one ground force. Sure, you are going to hurt a lot of egos and a lot of traditions. But that’s what you have to do when you are shaping yourself for the future. The same with the Navy; the same with the Air Force. We have to get rid of the waste, the redundancy and the duplication of these things that are just gutting our military and creating such rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force.
I remember when I worked in the Pentagon, a bigger enemy to the Air Force was the Army or the Navy, bigger than the Soviets were. They were involved in stealing each other’s budget. This is the kind of mentality, and it begins at West Point, at Annapolis, at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where these cadets have drummed into them for four years — beat Army, beat Navy and so on. Then the big admirals and generals have that same mentality 30 years later. I would say, merge all of the defense schools. Again, long-term traditions are going to be flushed down the toilet, but for the betterment of our future military. We’ve got to have people who don’t think of their service, but of their country.
Q: One of the things you constantly bring to the public’s attention and insist that young members of the military reflect on is that the strongest defense is having the best offensive capabilities.
A: Absolutely. What we tend to do in modern warfare and certainly in Vietnam — and I am working on a new book on Vietnam — all we did was react. A principle of war is initiative. You have to be the first guy going and make the enemy react to you. If you are going to be in a defensive role, you are not going to get very many footballs into the end zone.
Q: Please remind us who Smedley Butler is and what he said. The bottom line is that the industrial-military-congressional complex wants to go into space. The dual-use technology exports and the notion that trade comes before national security is, in my mind, one of the greatest mindset enemies we face. How would you address that?
A: Firstly, Smedley Butler was a U.S. Marine Corps major general, a recipient of two medals of honor, a very distinguished guy. He started in the Marine Corps at the age of 16. He was always one to stand up and tell the truth, about anything. He coined the expression that “war is a racket,” and I have the privilege of adding to that by saying “Yes, war is a racket, and most of the racketeers live around the Beltway.”
When I look at the money given to presidential candidates and senatorial candidates from the defense community, it is mind-boggling. So, you look at a how a senator like Trent Lott can build, in his home state of Mississippi, ships and aircraft that the United States doesn’t want. And this is going on across the board. We have Lieberman running for vice president who’s a big proponent of the Sea Wolf submarine that’s built in his home state of Connecticut. But the Navy doesn’t want it. It’s a submarine that they don’t want and McCain has been trying to kill it, and he’s an ex-Navy man. This is the kind of racketeering going on. We have to be concerned, not for our districts, not for our states, but for America as a whole.
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