Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
Anyone old enough to qualify for a senior discount has seen it happen at least twice -- once in the draw down after World War II that led to disaster on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, and again in the final years of the Vietnam War.
Sadly, it is beginning to happen again under the stewardship of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The furor that erupted after a National Guard enlisted soldier challenged Rumsfeld to explain why his outfit had to scavenge garbage dumps in Kuwait for pieces of castoff metal and bullet-proof glass to jury-rig armor for their Humvees en route to duty in Iraq was only the first visible sign of what is wrong.
The Bush administration and its Pentagon boss seem determined to fight the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the greater global war on terrorism, on the cheap.
They cut the planned invasion force for the Iraq campaign almost in half, skimping on the kind of follow-on forces that were needed to secure the country after it was conquered. Even the anemic occupation force of about 140,000 soldiers employed since the outbreak of a serious insurgency in Iraq has strained the regular Army to near the breaking point. And the Army is forced to rely on Army Reservists and National Guard troops for nearly half of that manpower.
The defense secretary ignores the calls of key congressional representatives such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who believe that, given the activist and pre-emptive strategy the Bush administration has embraced and the wars we are now fighting, we need a substantial increase in the size of our Army.
Rumsfeld has given the Army a temporary three-year increase of 30,000 troops above its mandated maximum strength of 485,000 and continues the reliance on Reserve and National Guard units called up for 18 to 24 months on active duty.
This week think-tank scholars came together to address the issue of saving the all-volunteer Army at a panel in Washington sponsored by the Center for American Progress.
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence J. Korb, who served in the Reagan administration, presented a paper proposing that the Army be increased by at least 86,000 soldiers to provide for two division-size units dedicated to peacekeeping operations, a doubling of the size of Special Forces to 100,000, and the addition of 10,000 military police, civil affairs specialists, engineers and medical personnel to the active-duty forces.
Korb also called for an end to what he calls the "back-door draft," meaning methods to retain troops such as stop-loss orders, which prevent a soldier from leaving his unit even when his enlistment is up, and callups of the Individual Ready Reserve. Korb would reduce the current eight-year total military service obligation to four years of active or six years reserve duty; change the stop-loss policy so no soldier is hit with an involuntary extension of service more than once; limit the calling of a reserve unit to no more than one year out of every five years; and prohibit police and firemen from joining or remaining in the reserves so that they remain in their critical jobs at home.
He added that Congress should repeal the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy on homosexuals serving in the military, which requires that anyone who declares himself a homosexual be immediately discharged. Korb said that was counterproductive to military readiness and virtually unworkable anyway.
Korb called for the extension of Tricare military health care to reservists and their families; for a presidential order preserving military combat pay and family separation allowances as well as commissaries and schools on military bases -- all items on the Pentagon budget chopping block under Rumsfeld.
Korb suggested that the changes might be partly paid for by a careful review of the Defense Department budget and elimination of what he called some very expensive and unneeded projects such as anti-missile defense, the building of new Navy submarines, and the Air Force's F-22 fighter plane.
Panelist Thomas Donnelly, a defense and security policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said Korb's proposal didn't go far enough toward saving the all-volunteer Army.
"Larry's 86,000 isn't enough, even with near-term success in Iraq and Afghanistan. The new baseline for the Army should be 650,000 soldiers," Donnelly said. That would be 80,000 more than Korb's proposed increase.
Another panelist, Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said while he disagreed with parts of Korb's paper, "it conveys the seriousness of the problems and pressures on our force." Preble said that the answer "is not a draft" and "the point is to maintain the strength of our military." Whether any of the ideas is taken up by the Pentagon remains to be seen.
