After five weeks of air attacks, NATO seems farther from achieving its political aims in Yugoslavia than it was before the bombing started. Ignoring the high level of professionalism the troops have demonstrated daily since the bombing began, some politicians want to blame a readiness crisis for the failure of the air war to achieve a quick solution to the Balkan tragedy. A move is afoot in Congress to cloak a longstanding military and industrial wish list in the mantle of a readiness emergency to scare the American public into opening its purse.
Congress typically uses emergency supplemental appropriations to pay for unforeseen circ*mstances like war or disaster relief. Such appropriations are exempt from the spending limits that Congress and the White House agreed to under the 1997 balanced budget deal. Last week the White House rightly asked Congress for about $6 billion in emergency funds to pay this year's bills for air operations and humanitarian assistance in the Balkans.
Congressional Republicans want to expand the emergency measure to cover much more. They argue that the Defense Department needs extra money right now to shore up readiness -- the military's ability to deploy quickly and perform as intended in wartime. The proposals floated so far range from $5 billion to $23 billion in add-ons that include everything from enlarged stocks of munitions and spares to new aircraft and ship purchases to a big boost in military pay and benefits.
But most of these expenditures are only distantly connected to the military's immediate ability to go to war. Military readiness is not what is lacking in our war with Yugoslavia. By all accounts, U.S. forces have performed the military tasks assigned to them with great skill. There have been no public reports of personnel or training shortfalls, supply problems or faulty maintenance. The Air Force expressed concern that its inventory of conventional air-launched cruise missiles was running low, but the Navy has more than enough sea-launched cruise missiles, and other munitions appear plentiful.
The Army has been slow to deploy Apache helicopters to the region, but that seems to reflect the size of the accompanying forces and the sorry state of Albania's only usable airport. The deployment of additional fixed-wing aircraft requested by the NATO commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, has been delayed by NATO's need to arrange bases for them, not by shortages of spare parts, pilots or weapons. Even the call-up of 33,000 reservists reflects today's high level of integration between reserve and active forces, not a lack of troops or training.
The American public is sympathetic to readiness concerns. Nobody wants to send U.S. military units in harm's way with insufficient troops, poor training or unserviceable equipment. Recognizing public attitudes, proponents of military programs sometimes stretch the notion of readiness to include activities that are more related to the purchase of new and more advanced equipment, the construction and upkeep of buildings and bases and improvements in the quality of life in the military. But relating most of the extra items on the Republicans' wish lists to the military's immediate ability to go to war stretches the imagination.
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The Republican plan to boost pay and benefits might seem more likely to influence readiness, since compensation levels can affect the military's ability to recruit and retain high-quality troops. But years of data on recruiting and retention indicate that advertising, additional recruiters, sign-up bonuses and educational packages improve recruiting at far lower cost than the across-the-board pay raise the Republicans want to add to the emergency measure. Bonuses targeted at specific categories of troops with retention problems are cheaper and more efficient than across-the-board raises. And the increase in retirement benefits proposed for some members of the military solves a problem that the data show never existed.
Though the military appears to be in good shape today, it does face a problem in its future -- a large and growing mismatch between America's expectations for its forces and the amount of money it is willing to spend on them. The Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office have warned for several years that current levels of defense spending could not support the military in the future at its current size, with its current level of infrastructure and its planned modernization programs. The nation could avert the crisis either by reducing its expectations for the military's role and size or by increasing defense budgets.
The Clinton administration and the military squandered a golden opportunity to address the problem in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review mandated by Congress. Rather than choosing among competing possibilities for national security strategy in the post-Cold War world and setting priorities for the future military, the review embraced multiple strategies and numerous roles for the military; it "balanced" priorities by setting none. The review actually widened requirements imposed on the military while holding future defense budgets about constant in real terms.
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It's easy now to place all the blame for the mismatch on the Clinton administration. But the budget cuts began during the Reagan administration, and Congress contributed its share to the problem. The Republican 104th and 105th Congresses both pressed for sizable forces equipped with a new generation of expensive weaponry, yet banked on cuts in defense spending to balance the federal budget -- in spite of repeated warnings of mismatch from their own nonpartisan budget analysts.
Not until last year did the military concede that it had a problem. Like the Republican members of Congress, it couched the issue as one of readiness but proposed solutions indicative of the more fundamental mismatch and for the most part unrelated to readiness. Now that the military owns up to the problem, it's time for a national discourse about fixing it.
The rush to complete an emergency supplemental guarantees that this discourse will not occur. Moreover, if we have a problem with the spending limits that we imposed on ourselves in the 1997 budget deal, we need to adjust them with our eyes open to the consequences, rather than picking our own pockets and pretending that the surpluses anticipated from that deal will continue after fiscal discipline evaporates.
The writer, a senior research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as assistant director for national security in the Congressional Budget Office from 1994 to 1997.
