Defense preparedness.

IS THE United States really prepared militarily to meet its many commitments abroad? Half on each of the past two numbers of The Public Interest has been devoted to exploring "America's Defense Dilemmas." The situation is not encouraging.

In a splendid article in the Spring issue, Georgetown professor Philip Gold--himself a Marine Corps Reserve officer--discusses the expectations being placed on reserve forces in current U.S. military planning. Gold begins with the observation that there are essentially two types of military forces. Territorial-defense forces deter or defeat aggression at or around a nation's borders. But, writes Gold, "By the grace of God and geopolitics, the United States does not fight on its own soil." American military forces are expeditionary forces. Historically, expeditionary forces rely on long-term, well-trained manpower--something the U.S. does not have enough of.

Gold notes that U.S. forces are "currently committed, or slated for commitment, across the planet: Central Europe, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Korea, the Western Hemisphere--almost anywhere. No nation in history has ever attempted to fulfill such an array of commitments. Nor has any done so less wisely--at least in terms of its manpower policies."

Gold takes aim at the Defense Department's so-called "Total Force" policy. Faced with global commitments but inadequate manpower, the Defense Department more than a decade ago concocted the doctrine that reserve forces, for planning and deployment purposes, should be treated as the functional equivalents of their active-duty counterparts. "Because of the U.S. Total Force policy," writes Gold, "Selected Reserve units comprise half the non-strategic combat capability and two-thirds of the combat support and combat service support capability of the United States." For example, 43 per cent of Army tank battalions are in the Army National Guard; 39 per cent of Army medical units are in the Army Reserve; the Naval Reserve is home to 88 per cent of the Navy's ocean-going minesweepers.

History, as well as common sense, argues against the proposition that part-time reserve soldiers and units are the equal of their full-time, active-duty counterparts. Of the three mobilizations since the Second World War--the 1950 Korea mobilization, the 1961 call-up during the Berlin crisis, and the activation of 37,000 reservists following the Tet offensive in 1968--two took more than a year to bring reservists to combat-ready strength, and the third required seven months. Says Gold: "In all these cases, individuals--those who showed up--proved grievously deficient in skills; units lacked manpower, equipment, and cohesion; and the political costs of the disruption of private lives and local communities were often exorbitant."

Gold points out that his criticism is not of the reserves themselves, which he thinks in most regards have never been better. The problem, rather, is that "there are limits to what even the most effective reserve structure can accomplish . . . limits which may some day exact a fearful human price from a society willing neither to reconsider its global commitments nor pay the price of meeting them."

THE SUMMER issue of The Public Interest offers another essay on the military's personnel needs, called "On the Making of Lieutenants and Colonels." The preparation of those who will lead others into combat, and of those who will reach the highest commands, are the two crucial processes of military education, says Theodore J. Crackel, a Senior Fellow in Military Studies at the Heritage Foundation. All in all, between various Reserve Officer Training Corps programs and the service academies, Crackel sees "significant reason for satisfaction in the way the military trains those about to be commissioned." When Crackel turns his attention to the making of colonels, however, and especially to the five military war colleges through which virtually all high-ranking officers pass, he is considerably les buoyant. In what Crackel claims amounts to "a systematic discouragement of thinkers in uniform," the services have provided little opportunity to those inclined to spend time thinking about, writing about, or teaching military subjects. "The Air Force and Army have never brought themselves to admit that really good officers should be invested--for the long term--in military education. And the Navy . . . has turned over its institutions--the Naval Academy and the Naval War College--to civilians." Crackel sums up the situation this way:

The sad truth is that none of the war-college faculties is in the forefront of developments in any of the military disciplines they teach. (This is also true of the service academies, not one of which can boast of a renowned uniformed military historian, or military geographer, or leader in the military application of meteorology or oceanography, or any other discipline.) In the senior service schools there are too few scholars of distinction, and virtually none of these is in uniform.

Crackel's conclusion is that the American military should develop a service track for education, geared to the development of a first-class military education system. The alternative, says the author, is continued reliance on civilian scholars in think-tanks and universities "whose influence is out of all proportion to their experience and their ultimate responsibility for the actual conduct of vital military affairs."