[The Reaper]

What we can do

Yet increasing America's war-fighting ability is hardly a gargantuan, much less hopeless, task. Throughout most of the history of Special Operations Forces, since before Vietnam, SOF units were downplayed by the military brass in favor of huge conventional forces but championed by civilian leaders such as Kennedy. Probably no secretary of defense believed in their usefulness or employed them more effectively and broadly than did Donald Rumsfeld. But the pendulum has swung too far, culminating in the dramatic post-Cold War drawdown of conventional forces. Now Rumsfeld's ideas of a smaller, more agile military of the future, ideas that seemed to ratify that drawdown, have met their nemesis in the sands of Iraq.

At the time of Operation Desert Storm in early 1991, our active armed forces--all volunteers--comprised about 2 million men and women. That now stands at about 1.4 million. Yet during those same years the national population grew by a full 50 million, or 20 percent, and the percentage of women in the military is at its highest ever.

Jim Hetrick, who spent 15 years with Special Forces and three tours in Vietnam and has been president of the Special Operations Association for 15 years, makes the same observation about doubling SOF as everyone else I talked to. "Talking about doubling the numbers is just talking. It's cosmetic." But, he adds, "with the reduction in strength of our Armed Forces, the dilemma becomes the inability to field enough soldiers in any area to do the job."

Getting the active military back to nearly two million personnel shouldn't be a hopeless exercise. Further, the more men we have already under arms the more men who have already taken that first step towards becoming SOF. Grow the military, and part of the fallout will be more elite conventional forces and inevitably more Special Operations Forces.

As to those elite conventional forces, they certainly can also be expanded--though again, nowhere near doubled. The 82nd currently has 17,000 soldiers (although not quite all are actually jump-qualified). "We're not having trouble filling slots," says the unit's public affairs officer Maj. Tom Earnhardt. "Given the resources [namely funding], if we wanted to, we could stand up another brigade." There are 3,300 soldiers in an 82nd brigade.

To do this, of course, defense spending would need to be finally increased to a level appropriate for a nation at war. On September 11, 2001, the defense budget was 3.1 percent of the GDP. Now, with two shooting wars and a vast number of other commitments, that figure has gone up merely to 3.8 percent. Half a century ago, in 1956, with no shooting wars, it was 9.9 percent of GDP. (At the height of World War II, it was 38 percent.) Yet, astonishingly, defense spending as a percentage of GDP is slated to drop again until it's fallen back to 3.1 percent by 2010.

The fallout goes way beyond manpower recruitment and retention. A December Washington Post article observed that "depletion of major equipment such as tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and especially helicopters and armored Humvees has left many military units in the United States without adequate training gear." Over 500 M1 Abrams tanks and 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair. Yet repair depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding.

One result is that there aren't nearly enough heavy trucks and maybe not enough armored Humvees to support the current "surge" in manpower into Iraq. "We don't have the [armor] kits, and we don't have the trucks," Lt. Gen. Stephen Speakes, the Army's deputy chief of staff for force, recently told a reporter. He said it would probably be summer before heavy truck requirements are completed. There may or may not be enough armored Humvees for now, but this clearly threatens the sale to Iraq of 400 of them. Most Iraqi forces still drive pickup trucks with a medium machine gun in the bed and at best a sheet of armor riveted to the sides of the bed and the doors.

President Bush has acknowledged some of these problems with a proposed fiscal year 2008 defense budget increase of 11.3 percent or $481.4 billion. Yet an October Congressional Budget Office report indicates that may be far too small, that DoD will require an annual average of about $560 billion through 2024 to pay for ordered weapons and rising operational and personnel costs. So far the Democrats, while promising to do so, have not yet directly challenged defense spending. Let's hope they don't try to use their special ops doubling fantasy as leverage. If they really want to demonstrate how they've become advocates of national defense, they should earmark that extra $80 billion that the CBO report says is required.

Sheer numbers of troops and sophisticated and well-maintained equipment are no substitute for the skills and courage of Special Operations Forces. But neither can SOF substitute for a large army of well-trained and disciplined troops or for top-quality, operative hardware. We obtained our "peace dividend" by gutting the military. We're already paying for serious manpower shortages in both Iraq and Afghanistan with the blood of our servicemen and women. It's time to ante up some money instead.

Michael Fumento, an airborne veteran, has been embedded three times in Iraq.