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| March 21, 2002 |
Bush Administration Using Military Training as Key to War on Terror
Victoria Garcia, Research Assistant, vgarcia@cdi.org
As the global war on terror expands beyond Afghanistan’s borders, U.S. Special Forces, which have been essential in the war in Afghanistan, are now using their military know-how to train other nations struggling with terrorism. Indeed, the Bush Administration has assigned U.S. Special Operations Forces to provide counter-terrorism military training, as well as weapons, to several countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Kenya and Colombia to stamp out global terrorist networks. While training the militaries of allied countries has many long and short term benefits, critics have raised serious concerns as to the utility of this strategy. Many of these countries are flooded with corrupt military and police forces, which have substantiated records of gross human rights violations. Getting involved with some of these bad actors may prove detrimental to the purpose that U.S. foreign military training has been known to serve: transferring U.S. political ideals to foreign governments and military institutions.
Military training is justified on the grounds of strengthening democratic ideals -- especially civilian control of the military -- through the interaction of the U.S. military with their foreign counterparts. U.S. troops are prohibited by law from training forces that are known violators of human rights. In several instances, laws have strictly prohibited the United States from training troops in some of these countries for counter-terrorism purposes because of the risk that military training and weapons could be misused.
The Bush Administration has shifted some of its existing training programs that initially prohibited training for counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency purposes into full-fledged terrorist fighting programs. For example, in Colombia the Bush administration has suggested that a counter-insurgency military training program be created to supplement the current counter-narcotics Andean Regional Initiative (ARI), which strictly limits military aid. Indonesia, which has been banned since 1999 from receiving military training, may also reap benefits from the global war on terror. In December 2001, Congress approved a Regional Counter-Terrorism Defense Fellowship Program, circumventing the training ban on Indonesia that had been imposed after U.S.-trained Indonesian armed forces and militias massacred civilians in East Timor. In addition, the Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), which for four years has focused on preparing African peacekeeping troops, will now reportedly be more aggressive and involve more weapons training in an attempt to strengthen military relations with countries such as Kenya. The strategy for strengthening ACRI is to assist in a possible U. S. led anti-terrorism campaign in Somalia in the future.
As the Bush Administration maximizes the reach of military training programs to fight terrorism, Congress is debating whether or not to loosen or possibly eliminate foreign military training public reporting requirements. The current foreign military training report, while not very clear or easy to read, is publicly accessible on the Internet. The report includes information on the type of training provided abroad as well as the location and number of personnel trained in foreign military forces. The report also contains details of U.S.-trained foreign military or civilian personnel who were involved in human rights abuses in an effort to improve transparency and facilitate oversight of human rights violations. The report has been useful in tracking the success of the "Leahy Law," which prohibits foreign aid, including military training, from going to military units that have committed gross human rights violations. Minimizing or eliminating the report would deepen the challenge to maintaining human rights standards in military training.
As the Pentagon requests curtailed public reporting requirements of military training abroad, the State Department is proposing an increase of 13% for International Military Education and Training (IMET) over this year’s budget as well as a 27% increase for Foreign Military Financing (FMF), which can be used by countries to purchase military training. The increases reflect the Bush Administration’s plan to use military training to accomplish the still unclear objectives in the war on terrorism. However, military training alone will not change a country’s social, cultural or economic situation. Without implementing human rights training and requiring more comprehensive oversight mechanisms that can determine which candidates qualify for U.S. military training, the current rampant training campaign may backfire.
Boosting Army Troop Numbers One Of Best Ways To Spend Defense Dollars
Colin Robinson, Research Assistant, crobinso@cdi.org
Amid the flurry of military news from Afghanistan, one small item from Capitol Hill passed almost unnoticed late last week. General William Kernan, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which controls major Army and Air Force formations in the continental United States, reemphasized the current over-stretch of America’s fighting forces.
General Kernan was testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on the 2002 Fiscal Year Appropriation Bill last Thursday, Mar. 14. He told the committee, "They’re tired, sir," adding that the armed services are busier than they have ever been. Part of the reason for the strain is Operation Enduring Freedom and America’s other deployments around the world. However, there are other factors. First, the Army’s force is not well balanced; it’s ten divisions and eight regiment and groups include too many heavy troops and too few lighter troops, which tend to be used more often. Second, the forces are undermanned more generally. General Kernan endorsed proposals to raise troops numbers.
The Army’s force structure includes six heavy armored and mechanized divisions, plus two heavy armored cavalry regiments, and four light infantry divisions, plus the Special Forces and Rangers. The burden of Enduring Freedom operations has however been squarely placed on the light forces, while the most employment the heavy divisions have had is a continuing deployment in brigade strength to Kuwait to safeguard it against renewed Iraqi aggression. It could even be argued that in the face of the continuing strains upon the light force, with peacekeeping and other engagement operations all around the world, that these formations should be expanded. Special Forces are particularly stretched at the moment, with extra deployments to the Philippines and Afghanistan, and prospective deployment to Yemen and Georgia on top of the normal deployments that see them go everywhere from Argentina to Kuwait.
The second area of strain is that of simply too few personnel. During the 1990s the active Army was reduced from 770,000 to 495,000, and then to the current 480,000. This has left the service short of personnel to fill out its units, and as a result, through much of the 1990s, some units were either undermanned or had the wrong mix of officers and soldiers to accomplish their missions. In mid 1998 the Army’s "later deploying divisions," the second wave behind the high-readiness contingency force, had only 93% of their authorized personnel. But their real readiness condition was worse than the bare number indicated. There were excess personnel in some grades and ranks, but insufficient personnel in others. Some infantry brigades had less than half their assigned numbers of infantry squads. These problems were addressed by the Army’s Manning Initiative, which aimed to staff the fighting forces by 2001 at 100% of their authorized enlisted personnel by the skills and grades needed. This goal has nearly been achieved. However, this initiative did not address the officer staffing, which continues to present difficulties.
The simple under-manning difficulty has not been removed, however. While officials, such as Under-Secretary of Defense David S. Chu, say spot shortages in specific skills and specialties are the problem, a wealth of evidence says otherwise, both publicly and privately. Congressional aides say "privately, the services have all run numbers to show why they need more people" but in public "no one wants to talk about increasing personnel strength because Secretary of Defence [Donald] Rumsfeld has ruled [it] out." General Gordon Sullivan, former Chief of Staff of the Army, said on Mar. 11 that the Army’s strength should be raised to at least 500,000. Representative Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) noted at last Thursday’s House hearing that military leaders have indicated the Army needs 40,000 more people; the Air Force, with a current authorized strength of nearly 359,000, needs another 6,000 more personnel.
It seems clear that despite the official denials of need coming from the upper echelons of the Defense Department, the Army, most stretched by the global war on terror, needs more active-duty personnel. The Air Force, and to a lesser extent the Navy and Marines, need more personnel as well to sustain the long drawn out and repeated rotations of forces to the combat zones, on top of other continuing missions such as peacekeeping in the Balkans. Another option for the Army would be refashion and re-station so of the under-used heavy forces. Heavy divisions now stationed in Germany might contribute more if they were converted to light or the new medium forces and moved to countries like Hungary, closer to the Balkans. These changes might be funded through the several programs in the Defense budget that are unneeded, and only kept alive through defense contactors and congressional pressure. Examples include the $11.1 billion for 480 Crusader heavy self-propelled artillery pieces. Such funds shouldn’t be too difficult to find. The problem would be the political storm caused by canceling such pork-filled programs. However if the armed forces are to be best placed for the demanding series of missions the global war on terror is bringing, such tough changes should be made.
White House Wants WMD Information Off Federal Web Sites –- The Bush Administration has ordered all federal agencies to remove from their websites sensitive information related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or other data that might be helpful to terrorists, according to a story in the Washington Times (March 21). A memo sent out by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card orders an "immediate re-examination" of all public documents. A second memo calls for a more far-reaching examination of web data and the withdrawal of documents that include "sensitive but unclassified information" regardless of whether its related to WMD.
Cracks Found in B-2 Bombers -– The Air Force has found cracks in the airframes of 16 of its fleet of 21 B-2 bombers. The cracks, which measure between one and nine inches long, are all located in titanium plates behind the jets’ engine exhausts. The Air Force reports that it has not determined the cause of the cracks, but that they do not currently pose a threat to the aircraft, which are still flying routine training missions. No solution to the problem has yet been developed, but maintenance crews have been instructed to measure the cracks after each flight to determine if they are growing.
UK Deploys Another 1,700 Troops to Afghanistan -- The British Ministry of Defence announced on March 18 that another 1,700 troops will join the 4,400-strong British contingent in Afghanistan in the biggest U.K. offensive troop deployment since the Gulf War. Britain already leads and commands the peacekeeping forces in Kabul and takes part, alongside U.S. and other coalition troops, in combat operations against the remnants of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The contingent of 1,700 soldiers to be deployed in coming weeks is built around the Royal Marine Commandos, who are experienced in mountain warfare. They will join coalition forces in pursuit of Taliban and al Qaeda units concentrated in the mountains along Afghanistan's southern border with Pakistan.
DU May Cause Kidney Damage -– A report by the Royal Society of Britain indicates that soldiers exposed to high levels of depleted uranium (DU) may suffer kidney damage, and that exposure could cause harm to civilians through contaminated water or soil. The report said, however, that only a very small number of soldiers would have inhaled a sufficient amount of DU particles to seriously damage their health, and that civilians could be protected by monitoring water supplies and removing contaminated soil in areas where DU weapons were used. DU ammunition is used by the U.S. military because its density makes it extremely effective against armored vehicles.
Quotation of the Week –- "[The President’s announcement] will be relevant, though, only if it really signals an understand by the Bush team that there are no walls for us to hide behind anymore, that everything is connected to everything else and that we cannot win a global war against terrorism without global allies, but we will have those allies only if we practice what the architects of the Marshall Plan practiced: enlightened self-interest, not just self–interest,” columnist Thomas L. Friedman, on President Bush’s announcement that the United States would increase foreign aid by $5 billion, The New York Times, March 17, 2002.
This Week on America’s Defense Monitor: "An Environmental-Industrial Complex"
Until recently the United States' sense of national security was dominated by the danger of nuclear war with Russia. With the decline of the "Russian threat," the United States is now focusing on other dangers. Americans now feel threatened by the poisons in their water, land, and air, and by a multitude of other environmental hazards. New partnerships between the government and private companies are emerging to deal with this threat. This collaboration creates an environmental-industrial complex that stimulates the economy and creates jobs. The question is: Will society benefit from this expanding complex?
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