While it may be premature to describe the US Military as being in a state of collapse, there are indications it is nearing a breaking point. Consequently, as evidenced by the following remarks by Senator Carl Levin at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee (November 15, 2007) discussions that have roiled this election season about the success of the surge and timetables for withdrawal may be rendered moot by the military's own internal tensions and fissures. While Senator McCain may want to stay in Iraq for 100 years, he may not have a military left to do it with.
Senator Carl Levin: Good morning, everybody.
Today, Secretary Geren and General Casey testify before our committee on the state of the Army.
Secretary Geren testified eight months ago on March 15th, along with then-Chief of Staff General Schoomaker, at the annual Army posture hearing. General Casey, no stranger to the Senate, is testifying for the first time before the full committee as Army chief of staff.
We welcome you both and thank you both for your service.
Over the past eight months, since Secretary Geren testified, the Army has committed even more forces to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands more soldiers have deployed to those wars. Hundreds more have died, and thousands more have been injured, many of them critically.
These soldiers, their Marine counterparts, their families, have borne the greatest burdens of these wars, and we owe them our heartfelt thanks.
Less than one-half of one percent of Americans, volunteers all, are fighting these wars, while the vast majority of Americans go about their daily lives largely unaffected and uninvolved.
Yes, while Americans differ in their opinions about the war in Iraq, all Americans recognize and honor the bravery, self sacrifice, and devotion to duty of our soldiers and their families -- indeed, that of all of our military personnel and their families.
Recognizing and honoring the soldiers and their families is not enough. All of us, no matter how we voted on authorizing the war, and whether we've been critics or supporters of the president's handling of the war, are determined to see that our troops and their families are supported in every possible way.
The pending defense authorization bill is an effort to do that, providing as it does a 3-1/2 percent across-the-board pay raise, enhanced education assistance benefits for reservists; increased hardship duty pay; authorizing end strength increases for the ground forces; fully funding operations and maintenance accounts; adding substantial additional funding for critical force protection equipment; and supporting Army transformation.
Guiding our continuing efforts to support our troops must be an honest assessment of where we are in terms of military readiness and investment in capability, present and future. We need our military leaders in uniform and out of uniform to help us help them, by giving us the unvarnished truth as they see it about the state of the military and what needs to be done, no matter how costly or how politically popular or unpopular.
The Army has been engaged in Afghanistan for over six years, and it is now in its fifth year of war in Iraq. None of the rosy predictions have come true. In fact with the recent surge the number of soldiers engaged in Iraq has approached previous high level marks.
Some Army units are on or entering their third year of Afghanistan or Iraq service. Some individual soldiers are on their fourth. According to our -- to recent press reports, Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meeting with Army captains at Forest Hill last month, found the most prevalent concern was the impact on those soldiers and their families of their repeated deployments for 15 months with 12 or fewer months home between rotations.
One captain said, we have soldiers that have spent more time in combat than World War II. Is there a point when you can say, you said that you've served enough.
The heaviest burden in this war has fallen on the ground forces and on their families. We simply must find a way, as General Casey has said, to bring the Army back in balance, so that the demand for soldiers does not exceed, and continue to exceed, the supply.
To do that it is essential to turn over responsibility for internal security more quickly to Iraqi forces, and to reduce U.S. force levels in Iraq or we will not achieve that balance.
The impact of the wars has affected the Army in many ways. In order to sustain the necessary high readiness levels in our deployed forces, the readiness of our non-deployed forces has steadily declined. Equipment and people are worn out. Most of those non- deployed units are not ready to be deployed.
Consequently, getting those units reset and fully equipped and trained for their rotations to Iraq or Afghanistan is that much more difficult and risky. Getting those units equipped and trained for all potential conflicts including high intensity combat, is virtually impossible, and is not being done.
This nation faces substantially increased risk should those forces be required to respond to other full spectrum requirements of the national military strategy. The surge of additional forces to Iraq earlier this year put even more pressure on an already strained readiness situation.
Long before the president announced his new strategy in Iraq, military leaders raised questions about the nation's readiness to deal with other contingencies. In his testimony to this committee last February, General Schoomaker was direct in his concern for the strategic -- strategic depth of our Army and its readiness. He was clear in his apprehension about the short and long term risks resulting from the lower readiness levels of our non-deployed forces.
General Casey sounded a similar alarm in his recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.
I believe the current situation is intolerable. There can be no excuse for subjecting this nation to that degree of risk.
n a marked change of position for the Defense Department, the Army earlier this year proposed increasing its active duty end strength by 65,000 soldiers to 547,000 over the next five years.
eneral Casey has said that he wants to shorten that time by two years. In the year five of the Iraq war the proposed increases come late. Despite the proposals for increases from senators on this committee over the past several years, proposals that the department previously opposed. Even with General Casey's efforts to speed up the process, few of these proposed additional soldiers would be trained and ready to help relieve the stress on the Army in the next year or two, plus there are many who say even those increases are sufficient (sic) for the strategy the Army must be prepared to execute over the long term.
When increasing end strength, recruiting and retention become ever more critical. While quantity is of course important, quality must remain the highest priority. The Army must continue to uphold high standards, moral, intellectual and physical, for new recruits to ensure that these young men and women are capable of handling the great demands that they will face.
The committee is concerned that the Army is relaxing recruiting standards and approving more waivers in order to meet requirements. The press reports cited earlier said that another one of those captains in the meeting with Admiral Mullen said the following. He voiced, quote, concern over the Army's growing practice of granting waivers to recruits for legal and health problems, saying that he spent 80 percent of his time dealing with the 13 problem children as he put it in his 100-person unit, some of whom went AWOL or had been methamphetamine dealers.
It has been reported that 18 percent of new recruits this year required a waiver, up by half from two years ago, and that recruitment from category four, the least skilled category, has increased eightfold over the past two years.
We cannot allow the Army to reach the state of the hollow army of the '70s. We must find a way to both increase the size of the Army and to maintain its standards.
Had we started in earnest to grow the Army even four years ago, our forces today would be less stressed and more ready. We must guard against merely creating a larger version of a less ready force. Army plans for expansion must be comprehensive, detailed, and fully resourced. The secretary of the Army must marshal the necessary resources to meet this challenge. Congress must understand what is needed to bring our ground forces to the level of strength and readiness necessary to avoid the unacceptable risks and readiness shortfalls that exist today.
As daunting as it is to meet the current readiness challenge, we must also modernize our Army to meet our readiness requirements and our national security requirements into the future, and we must do so intelligently. In doing so we must not fail to capture the lessons learned since the end of the Cold War, and apply those lessons to building the force of the future.
Although it appeared somewhat fashionable to question the relevance of ground forces prior to 9/11, that can hardly be the case now. The reality of warfare in the 21st century demands both, the high intensity force-on-force combat that characterized the early weeks of the Iraq war; and the grinding, all encompassing stability and support and counterinsurgency operations of the last few years.
The answer is not one mission or the other; the Army must be prepared to do both. Almost all types of warfare require in Army parlance boots on the ground. They require an Army that is optimally organized, trained and equipped for anything that we might ask it to do.
The challenge for the Army, for this nation, and for Congress is sustaining and Army fully engaged in current operations of all varieties while also modernizing and transforming that Army to meet future threats.
This hearing will hopefully help us understand the state of the Army today, and what needs to be done to ensure an Army that is ready for all of its potential missions, both today and in the future.
The Army and the Congress owe nothing less to the soldiers, their families, and to the American people.