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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Retiring Marine Corps general says today's military is too small
August 10, 2000
Web posted at: 11:10 p.m. EDT (0310 GMT)
From Jamie McIntyre
CNN Military Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The retiring commander of U.S. forces
in the Persian Gulf said the military has been cut too much and would
have trouble mounting another major operation on the scale of the 1991 Persian
Gulf War.
"I think it definitely w ould be harder," said Marine Corps Gen.
Anthony Zinni, in a Thursday interview with CNN on the eve of his retirement
from the military.
Zinni is the latest critical voice in the ongoing debate on
military readiness, which became one focus of the Republican National
Convention.
The four-star general said he believes the United States could
still win a major war like the one fought to oust Iraq from Kuwait, but that
it would be more difficult with today's smaller military.
And Zinni told CNN that while the United States could carry out
its stated goal of being able to win two major wars at once, it could do so
only with great risk and high casualties in the second conflict.
More troops, money and aircraft carriers Zinni, as head of the
U.S. Central Command, was in charge of Operation Desert Fox in December 1998,
the four-day air campaign waged by the United States and Britain in an effort
to force Iraqi compliance with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Zinni said the American military today is under-funded for the
number of
missions it's being asked to perform, everything from peacekeeping in the
Balkans to containing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"I believe the military is too small for the current kinds of
commitments we have," he said. "You either need to change the structure of
the military and the size and the manning, or you need to change the
strategy. I don't see the strategy
changing significantly."
Zinni added, "We are the world's leader. We fill a void. There
is no one out there that even comes close to filling the leadership role that
we have, and
some of the moral responsibilities that we have."
Specifically, Zinni argued the Army needs two more divisions,
and all military branches need more money and personnel.
Zinni also says Persian Gulf commanders should have an
aircraft carrier available 365 days a year. The Navy says it would have to go
from 12 carriers to 15 to
meet Zinni's standard.
Overall, Zinni's conclusions are backed up by the Pentagon's
most recent report to Congress, which calls overall readiness "satisfactory,"
but cites deficiencies
even among some of the military's "forward deployed, and first to fight
forces."
But the Pentagon insists budget increases this year have
stopped the readiness nose-dive.
"We have taken a lot of steps not only to arrest the decline in
military spending, but in fact to reverse it," said Pentagon spokesman Ken
Bacon.
Politics and war Zinni's parting shots aren't anything the
Pentagon hasn't
heard from other commanders, but coming as they do in the midst of a
presidential campaign, they could play into the Republicans' strategy of
portraying
the Democrats as presiding over the decline of the U.S. military.
At the Republican National Convention last week, retired Gen.
Norman
Schwarzkopf noted that he had far more Army divisions to call on when he was
planning for the Persian Gulf War.
At that time, there were 18 Army divisions, and a total of 2.2
million people in the U.S. armed forces.
But Schwarzkopf did not mention that the Republican
administration of President Bush -- with current GOP vice-presidential
candidate Dick Cheney serving as Defense secretary -- was responsible for
cutting the Army from 18 to 12
divisions as part of the post-Cold War reduction in the size of the U.S.
military.
That left 1.6 million men and women serving in the armed forces.
The Clinton administration made further cuts, reducing the Army
to just 10
divisions. Now, there are 1.4 million people serving in the U.S. military.
Zinni said that number is too low.
"In the case of the Army, I would feel more comfortable with at
least 12
divisions, maybe more," he said.
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