PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Are the Troops Ready?"

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Are the Troops Ready?

THINK TANK

WITH HOST BEN WATTENBERG

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. George W. Bush and Al Gore are arguing about the condition of America's military. Just how prepared are the nation's armed forces? Is it just an issue of money, or do deeper problems threaten to undermine readiness and particularly morale? To find out Think Tank is joined by: Joseph Collins, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and project director for the report American Military Culture in the 21st Century; Stephanie Gutmann, author of The Kinder Gentler Military, Can America's Gender Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars; and in New York City, Lawrence Korb, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former assistant secretary of defense for manpower during the Reagan administration. The topic before the house, are the troops ready, this week on Think Tank.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: The state of the military has become a major issue in this year's presidential campaign. Governor George W. Bush has criticized the Clinton administration for its handling of the military. He claims that the armed forces are dis-spirited, over deployed, and underpaid.

GOVERNOR BUSH (From video): We want to keep the peace in the world, but in order to keep the peace we must restore the morale in our military. We must rebuild the military power of the United States of America.

MR. WATTENBERG: Al Gore defends the Clinton administration's record on the military.

VICE PRESIDENT GORE (From video): It's that year after year commitment to a strong American defense that makes me so concerned when others try to run down America's military for political advantage in an election year, that's not only wrong in fact, it's the wrong message to send our allies and adversaries across the world.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, what is going on with the American military? Despite earlier concerns about problems in recruiting, all four branches now appear to have met their recruitment targets. And clearly, the U.S. military does, indeed, remain the strongest in the world, but American commitments are by far the most extensive in the world. Do we have ten pounds of mission in a seven pound bag? Doubts linger, too, about morale and readiness, long deployments on peacekeeping missions keep units from training for their primary purpose, war fighting. Women now make up 14 percent of the armed forces, but there are signs that gender integration policies are not working smoothly. And some observers point to a so-called Clinton effect, a military largely alienated from a president for whom they allegedly have little respect.

MR. WATTENBERG: Lady, gentleman in Washington, gentleman Larry Korb in New York, thank you for joining us.

Joe, let's begin the action here with you. Is there a morale problem in the U.S. military today?

MR. COLLINS: Absolutely, Ben. I think it's beyond the shadow of a doubt. We surveyed 12,000 men and women in uniform in deployable units --

MR. WATTENBERG: We meaning the Center --

MR. COLLINS: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, correct. We found that morale was, at best, mediocre. We asked all of the people that we surveyed to comment on the statement, we have high morale in this unit, and only 26 percent of the people who were surveyed definitely agreed with that statement. Even if you added in the slightly agrees, you still only come to about half.

MR. WATTENBERG: Larry, how does that sound to you?

MR. KORB: I think there are morale problems in the military for two reasons. One, it's terribly poorly managed. Joe's very fine study looked at deployable units, and we do deploy some units too much, others not enough, because the military hierarchy has not adjusted to the end of the Cold War. The second problem you have, this is a period of transition, the country is not quite sure what role it wants to play in the world and how it wants to use the military, so you get mixed signals from the people, from the Congress, and from the leadership. But, I think those are both curable problems with good leadership and good management.

MR. WATTENBERG: So, Larry, when candidate George W. Bush criticizes the military for low morale he's right?

MR. KORB: Well, he's right in the sense that it could be better. But, I mean, if you listen to him it looks like we're at some sort of crisis situation. I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as it was, for example, in the '70s or the early '80s, or during the '60s during Vietnam.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me now turn to Stephanie Gutmann, who has looked at this situation from a very particular point of view, that of women in the military. What did you find in your very interesting book, I must say.

MS. GUTMANN: Well, my book is really about sort of political correctness in general in the military and how that's affected morale. I agree with Joe, I think morale is terrible. I also agree with Mr. Korb, I mean, I don't think it's a crisis, but it's very bad, and could very well become a crisis if we have a major threat of any kind, it will immediately tip into a crisis, I think.

MR. WATTENBERG: What sorts of PC, political correctness, do you see in the military, because of the increase in female recruits, and officers, whatever.

MS. GUTMANN: First, I want to say that women are not the problem, or integrating women is not the problem, women can contribute in many ways. But, what happened in the 1990s is that the brass and Congress made, it almost sometimes seemed like their central goal to recruit more women and sort of create a picture of a gender balanced military. And very little thinking was given to what happens after we do this, and should we really be putting this person here. There was a sort of a frantic focus on numbers, just get the numbers.

MR. WATTENBERG: Did standards for training deteriorate, in terms of what you found?

MS. GUTMANN: They had to reduce standards. I mean, they tried experiments in the early '80s where they ran mixed camps, and they just found that women got injured trying to keep up with men.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me see what Larry has to say about that. Larry, what do you think about the female situation in the military, has that eroded morale?

MR. KORB: No, I don't think so. I think if you go back and you take a look at the greatest expansion of both opportunities, and the number of women, it occurred during the '80s. It basically went from about 6 to 12 percent, and now it's at about 15 percent. So that was the period of greatest expansion, and that's when we had probably the finest military we ever had. The military we sent into the Persian Gulf War. We've had integrated training in the Air Force, in basic training, since 1975. So that's not new. The Army doesn't have gender integrated training for their first line combat units, nor do the Marines.

MR. WATTENBERG: Has there been, you hear, Stephanie has written about it, sort of a feminization of the warrior culture, because after all ultimately these people are going to have to train to kill people.

MR. KORB: Again, I don't see that. I mean, I think she makes a lot of good points in her book, but I don't buy the basic argument that somehow men can only be warriors, and women cannot. I think if you look at some of the good sociology on this, people like Margaret Mead, they show that both genders can be very fierce in defending themselves. And I don't see any decline in military effectiveness.

MR. WATTENBERG: That's in the military culture. What did your study -- feel free to interrupt.

MR. COLLINS: We didn't make a big effort on the gender integration, but we did have a few questions, and it did come up in focus groups. And what we found was that there are, in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, we found gender integration problems in units that were gender integrated. Obviously, if you go to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, there's not much of a gender integration problem, because most of those units are single gender. But, where there were mixed gender units we did find problems. The biggest issue that I have with all of this is the inability of people in the armed forces of higher ranks to delve into these issues, and to discuss them in public.

MR. WATTENBERG: Stephanie you were grimacing when Larry was talking. Go ahead.

MS. GUTMANN: I wanted to respond to Mr. Korb, the point of my book was never that only men can be warriors, and women cannot. What happened in the '90s was there was just a flood of new policies making military life more friendly to women. And these policies were instigated purely because they were trying to keep those numbers up.

MR. WATTENBERG: Larry, Stephanie seems to be saying, as I hear it, that the Clinton administration politicized the military, and did certain things for political reasons, be it gays in the military, be it the role of women in the military, that this came from the White House and was laid upon the military as PR military, not for real. Do you buy that?

MR. KORB: No, I don't. I think, as I pointed out, the big expansion came in the '80s, and to the best of my knowledge there's no quotas that you have to have.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, Stephanie is not talking about the numbers, she's talking about the change in the culture as they apply to those numbers.

MS. GUTMANN: A tumult of policies, new policy, policy changes is what happened in the '90s.

MR. KORB: Well, again, if you go back to the '90s, don't forget for the first couple of years it was the Republicans in the Bush administration. In fact, in your book you're very critical about the way Tailhook was handled, remember that was the Bush administration, Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense. So I don't really see these big changes that you're talking about. Leaving aside the gay issue, which is a completely separate issue, I don't see any big changes in the policies in the '90s, nor a big increase in the number of women. The only big change that came about is one you support, which is allowing women to fly combat aircraft, that was the big change. Women had been on ships, they did allow the men to go on different kinds of ships, but we had integrated when I was --

MS. GUTMANN: I'll tell you, Mr. Korb, the importance of talking about culture, and doing the kind of reporting I did, on the ground, talking to people, living in the places they lived for as long a period as I could finagle out of the military, which was very difficult, but the longest period was, say, five days. The importance of that is you learn all the tiny policy toggles, some of them are unofficial, that change the feeling of life, the flavor of life. And if you count all the tiny little things, it is massive, there is a massive change in environment. And every time I asked somebody on the aircraft carrier, The Stennis, I say, so what were the -- have things changed in the '90s, people would just close their eyes and shake their head and say, oh God, yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Just hold it for a minute. I want to talk to our viewers for just a second.

We at Think Tank, as you know, depend on your feedback to make our program better. Please email us at thinktank@pbs.org. Now, let's get back. We've all heard there have been a series of horror stories about the view of the military about President Clinton, that he didn't serve, that he evaded the draft, that they don't really care about the military, that there was this alleged White House staffer who allegedly told an important officer who walked into the White House early on, he said, you've got no business here, we don't deal with people in uniform. And there's a series of these kind of things. Is that valid about the military's attitude towards their commander in chief?

MR. COLLINS: There's definitely a problem there. However, to put it in perspective, no one that we spoke to identified this as a major issue for the armed forces today, or as a major problem. People in units are very focused, they're much more interested in their supply of training ammunition, and how many vehicles are up at any one time than they are in what the president is doing. But still, the situation with the president is a background factor. And I say it's a background factor because it's hard for military people to talk about it, because if you give disrespect to the commander in chief it's an offense against the code of military justice. So people rightfully, they have their personal opinions, but mostly are kept to themselves.

MR. WATTENBERG: Larry, let me ask you just one further question on this, and then let's get on to what Gore and Bush are saying. At the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal some major officers in several branches of the service were dismissed, or busted, or refused promotion on the grounds of some sexual behavior, which on any rank order of magnitude would be substantially less than that of their commander in chief. And one heard all over that they were screaming mad, not talking about it publicly, as Joe says, because they couldn't. Is that valid?

MR. KORB: Well, I think there were some people in the military who felt that as commander in chief the president has to provide moral leadership, and because of the commander in chief hat that he has, given what he did, he should have taken a more honorable way out and resigned. But again, we have constitutional processes to deal with that, just as the military has the uniform code of military justice. Both of them worked, and military people who were found to have violated the code were appropriately punished. And the president was impeached, but not convicted by the Senate. I think most military people when they think about it say, well, the process has worked out, and that's the way it's supposed to.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you, I want to move now onto the Gore-Bush different views of what has to be done. Let me ask you to very, very briefly try to lay out each side of this argument. What are the two candidates saying, and then we'll open it up.

MR. KORB: Well, I think what President Bush is saying is that while our military is still the best in the world it's in decline --

MR. WATTENBERG: Governor Bush.

MR. KORB: And unless we act to give them, as he said, better pay, better equipment, and better training, that we could have a crisis on our hands in a period of time. I think what president -- I mean, what Vice President Gore is saying is, yes, it was in a period of decline until about '98, but we have given large pay raises, there have been large increases in defense spending, and we're on the right track now and we need to continue, basically doing what we've done in the past two years.

MR. WATTENBERG: Joe, what do you think of that?

MR. COLLINS: I think that --

MR. WATTENBERG: That sounds like an accurate description.

MR. COLLINS: Yes, I think that's a fair description of the debate. I think, to say something positive about the Clinton administration, I think in the last few years they have acted decisively on retirement, and on pay, to really help the military, and those are very, very important things. But, we look around, we look at morale, we look at modernization, which is really long-term, future readiness, we see lots and lots of problems. Marine Corps helicopters, over 30 years old, average age of Air Force planes today, 20 years old. The cost of a flying hour in Marine Corps aviation went up 44 percent in the last 3 years, because of aging equipment. The Clinton administration did something that was kind of miraculous. After cutting the force and cutting the budget, they raised the activity level by about 300 percent, in terms of deployments. And this was purchased by shorting modernization. But, the big problem is going to be what the program is going to be for the future. And neither one of the presidential candidates has laid out a convincing vision for how they're going to fix this set of problems in the future.

MS. GUTMANN: A number of people have asked George W. what his policy would be regarding opening up combat positions for women, and he is the one candidate who has been absolutely tight lipped. I really agreed with John McCain who said that he would not put women in combat, and he would begin to reassess some of the positions that were opened up by Les Aspen.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Let me ask you another question, and I know you raised it in your study, Joe. This idea of the so-called CNN war, where everything is so publicized, and you get the military dancing on pins and needles, and you get into this idea of excessive aversion to risk, where we plan missions so that no one in this volunteer force, this wonderful volunteer force of ours will be exposed to, or will come back in a body bag, to put it as grimly as possible, which is about as dumb a way, in my judgment, as you can design a military operation, firstly because it's inefficient, and secondly because it sets up a situation where every gunner all over the world says, these people care so much about a single individual, let's go target single individuals, and you get more terrorism and everything else. So has that -- is that something that's been playing itself out?

MR. COLLINS: That's a problem, and it really began in earnest after the Cobar Towers thing and there was a lot of emphasis --

MR. WATTENBERG: That was the Saudi Arabian --

MR. COLLINS: Exactly, and we lost over a dozen airmen in that particular building, and there was a lot of emphasis placed on force protection. We then went into a few military operations, the last one in Kosovo, where people began the operation saying, we are going to behave and plan on conducting this operation without having casualties. This has a very negative effect on military culture. Military culture is built on self-sacrifice.

MR. WATTENBERG: Your polls show that, is that right?

MR. COLLINS: Absolutely. And we find that people believe that, young soldiers, old soldiers, high ranking, low ranking, they have bought into the classical military virtues. And when you tell somebody that your mission is force protection, you're confusing the heck out of them. And if you bring people up --

MR. WATTENBERG: Force protection, in other words you're saying, your mission is not to get killed?

MR. COLLINS: Exactly. You begin to confuse folks, and they begin to question, hey, why am I -- if we're not out here about conducting a mission that has some risk, why isn't somebody else doing this job. So that's a problem.

MR. WATTENBERG: Larry?

MR. KORB: I think Joe is 100 percent right. The military is willing to put their life on the line, the problem is that the political leadership, and I think that President Clinton has been terrible at this, has not made the case to the American people about why these operations are necessary. And I think if he did they then would be willing to accept casualties. But, what you have is a situation where the president refuses to spend any political capital justifying some of his military operations. And so quite obviously the American people don't want to see casualties, and then of course the order goes out to the military to make force protection, or casualty avoidance the primary goal. And it doesn't help anybody in the long run. I hope the next president, whether it be Governor Bush or Vice President Gore, when they do use military force, make sure that they explain to the American people what's involved, and then I think the people would be willing to take the casualties if that were necessary, if they believed in the objective.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. One other thing, in my preparation for this show, that comes up again and again is that the current weakness in our military force, partly driven by the hot economy, is that your mid-level officers, who are really the people who fly the planes and run the joint, are just getting out?

MS. GUTMANN: The thing is, each of the people I've asked of that age who are leaving, I've said -- when you talk to them after a while they say, it's not the money, we've put up with hardship before in this job. They're old enough to have put up with hardship before, they'd put up with it again if we were the Army we used to be.

MR. COLLINS: You have to be very careful of some surveys. People very rarely will ever tell you, I'm leaving because of the money, because that makes them seem small. But, there's no doubt about the fact that the military compensation system is terrible. It was designed for the Depression era military, and it's not going to help us in the 21st Century. We need to revamp the whole thing. We need to vest people earlier with retirement, because right now it's sort of double or nothing. You serve 20 years in order to get something. We need to have -- allow people to flow between the active and reserves more. We need to manage their deployment policies better than we have, because you have dual career couples now in the military, something you didn't have during the draft era.

MR. WATTENBERG: Larry, given that litany of woe, whose program, Gore or Bush's, appeals to you more?

MR. KORB: Well, I mean, neither of them, as Joe said, are tackling the real problems. I mean, Governor Bush says he's going to have a bigger stronger military, but he's going to use it less, so I don't know why we'd need it. And Vice President Gore has recognized the pay situation, but his solution is sort of to increase pay rather than, as I can see, redesigning the pay system.

MR. WATTENBERG: Stephanie, whose program do you think more of?

MS. GUTMANN: I think Gore's program is nuts. What we need is, if we're going to increase the number of deployments, we need more, more, more people. And we're having so much trouble getting people as it is. We're throwing money, you know, Army is advertising bonuses of $50,000. Of course, that's just for a few specialists, but that's what kids are seeing on TV.

MR. COLLINS: Whoever becomes president needs to put a fresh pair of eyes on the situation. Continuing the Clinton policy is not going to work. But, you've got to identify all the problems, you've got to come up with comprehensive solutions. It's not enough just to raise pay if the pay scales don't make any sense. You really need to re-look some of the really basic things that are going on in the armed forces today, and that includes all of our aviation modernization plans, which have been chugging along for the last eight years. We've got a half-a-trillion dollars worth of aviation modernization plans which have just been chugging along for the last eight years, with nobody figuring out either how we're going to afford them, or having the energy to take our the scissors and pair them back, or the intestinal fortitude to cancel them outright.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay.

The military deserves our support. And they do good work, and as someone, I guess Larry, pointed out, and in my view, the problems are not with the young men and women who are serving us, but they are right here in Washington, D.C. Thank you, Joe Collins, Larry Korb in New York, and Stephanie Gutmann.

And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank.

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Funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation.

(End of program.)

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