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washington pulse
March 2007
Enjoy Your Money While You Can …
By Sandra I. Erwin
 More than any other service, the Army has relied on Iraq-war funding to refurbish vehicles and acquire new hardware. In 2008, the Army is seeking $55 billion for weapon acquisitions, more than half of which will come from war-emergency requests.
The affluence may be short lived, however, says the Army’s chief acquisition executive, Claude M. Bolton Jr. If history is any guide, money only lasts as long as there are troops under fire. Once the shooting stops, “they take the money away. And they do it very quickly,” Bolton tells an industry conference. He recalls that soon after the U.S. air campaign in Kosovo ended in 1999, “it took about an hour” for funds to begin drying up. “The day after the fighting ended, by noon you could not find anyone in the building who could accept your request … It’ll happen again.”
The demand for specialized military units in Iraq — such as police, medics and helicopter pilots — continues unabated. Most of these forces so far have come from the Army, which has prompted senior green-suiters to question why the Joint Chiefs of Staff are not assigning some of those duties to other services. Requests for fighting units, such as heavy armor or Stryker, only can be met by the Army or the Marine Corps, but other duties could be filled by Navy or Air Force personnel, Army officials have argued. “They have to stop coming to the Army for everything,” says an Army source. “The joint staff has to vet the requirements to make sure somebody else can do it.”
It wasn’t until Robert Gates took over as defense secretary three months ago that the Pentagon announced plans to permanently expand the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. An earlier move by former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld to add 30,000 troops to the force had been deemed only temporary. Rumsfeld, after all, was the guy who wanted to cut two divisions from the Army in 2001.
Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel David Chu, however, rejects the notion that only after Rumseld’s departure was the Pentagon able to move forward with a permanent troop increase. Engaging in a bit of revisionism, Chu tells reporters, “Force expansion, capability expansion, has been a constant of the current administration’s effort … Force expansion, particularly, has been a constant the last five years.”
The Air Force soon will be reorganizing its intelligence operations — which currently are so balkanized that the senior leadership doesn’t have a good grasp of the service’s own assets and skills. That makes it difficult to win key billets in influential organizations such as U.S. Central Command.
“We need help in reconstructing our bench of senior intelligence officers so that we can viably compete for joint interagency positions,” says Lt. Gen. David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “The Air Force has not had a combatant commander J-2 in more than five years,” he says. Although the director of the CIA is an Air Force general, the service is not “adequately represented … Our combatant commanders need to be served by an air perspective.”
Another problem is the disjointed process for funding intelligence programs. “We have the potential for the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Deptula says. That actually happened recently when officials found out that the images gathered by the U-2 and the Global Hawk spy aircraft could not be viewed by computers on the ground because the software was incompatible. That glitch will take 20 months and $17 million to fix.
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