Army, Marines need priority
Robert Scales admits he’s biased. He’s a ground soldier. He won a Silver Star as a 24-year-old artillery captain at “Hamburger Hill” in Vietnam. He commanded ground troops, and the Army War College, before retiring as a major general.
He’s a ground-combat theoretician with a PhD in history and five books to his credit, including a well-reviewed recent one, “The Iraq War: A Military History.”
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the 19th century British Army because he believed, in 1976, that America’s future wars would be close-combat encounters like Vietnam, not all-forces strategic conflicts like World War II or a World War III with the Soviet Union or China.
He still thinks that. Recent history bears him out, and he makes a compelling case that the U.S. government is misdirecting funds to “the wars we want to fight” — air, sea and space battles — rather than “the wars we have to fight,” on the ground in the Middle East.
Scales thinks that the United States faces “generations” of smaller wars in the Mideast. And to fight them, it needs 100,000 more Army combat troops, 30,000 more Marines and 20,000 more Special Forces, plus a modernization of their equipment, a reorganization of their units and a much better training regime for small-scale urban combat and intimate contact with foreign cultures.
Right now, he says, “we essentially have two services at war, the Army and the Marines, and two services at peace, the Air Force and the Navy. You can’t dispute that.
“We have the Army stretched to the absolute limit. Both the Army and the Marine Corps are tired beyond belief. We’re beginning to see cracks in recruiting for the National Guard and the Army Reserve. And we’re beginning to see bits and pieces of that in the active Army.”
Scales believes the overall military does not need to be enlarged beyond its present 1.2 million personnel. He opposes a draft because “we don’t want an army of amateurs and units of strangers.”
He also doesn’t favor putting more troops into Iraq. “You know why? Because we don’t have them. If you include the Marines, we only have 36 combat brigades in the whole armed forces. Right now, 20 are in Iraq. If you believe in having one brigade in recovery and one preparing for deployment for every one in the field, we need 60 total. We simply don’t have them.”
Rumsfeld has proposed a semi-permanent increase of 20,000 troops, increasing the number of combat brigades to 43. “But that’s only 20 percent of the way we need to go,” he said.
Scales, who like me is a regular commentator on Fox News, is critical of the way the Rumsfeld Pentagon conducted the aftermath of the Iraq war, though he’s optimistic that “Iraqification” of the conflict will achieve favorable results.
“The ‘post-combat’ phase was just unplanned,” he told me. “The administration thought this would be like the occupation of Germany and Japan, a constabulary-civil affairs operation.”
Combat troops also need better communications and body armor, a new infantry weapon and munitions that will detonate above hidden enemy fighters and knock down the walls they hide behind.
Scales is encouraged that Rumsfeld favors more “special operations” capability. But he’s worried that, overall, “transformation” will emphasize expensive high technology when America’s real enemies are fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.