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"Change is Hard"
Anthony Brooks
Reporter Anthony Brooks at the Army's training ground in Yakima, Washington. (Photo: Joe Barrentine) First Sergeant James Kemp stands in the middle of the town of Jezebar, a shabby hamlet that has apparently seen better times. Surrounded by a forest of pine trees, the small village is littered with the detritus of warfare, including shreds of barbed wire and a ruined, burnt-out car carcass, which rests at the edge of the muddy town square across from the church. Sergeant Kemp, a veteran of the U.S. invasion of Panama, is waiting for an attack to begin, and he doesn't expect his soldiers to perform that well. "You'll see a lot of the mistakes I was talking about," he says with the tone of a slightly indulgent yet disappointed schoolteacher. Suddenly Jezebar erupts with the sound of gun-fire. From the north, a light armored vehicle sweeps one side of the town with a fifty caliber machine gun; from the south, several squads of soldiers storm the small, wooden buildings, and begin moving through them, one room at a time, shouting and firing their M-4 assault rifles at the hooded gunmen hiding in the dark corridors. When the raid starts, Sergeant Kemp springs into action, running from building to building to watch the action and to judge the performance of his troops. When a canister of smoke detonates outside the town hall to provide cover for the raid, Kemp disappears into the purple cloud then emerges a short time later shaking his head. "One guy went into the room by himself," says Kemp. "That's a non-starter, getting himself killed like that. The team leader isn't articulating himself well."
It takes the soldiers of Charlie Company more than an hour to secure Jezebar, but the cost has been high. Sergeant Kemp says seven of his men were killed and wounded, mostly because of too many "simple mistakes that got people hurt." Of course the soldiers were firing blanks, and none of them was actually hurt in this training exercise at Fort Lewis, Washington. But the exercise made the point of just how unforgiving and unpredictable the business of warfare is. "It's a very tough business," says Sergeant Kemp. "Going through a maze and making decisions on the fly - it's not easy."
Charlie Company is part of the Army's effort at Fort Lewis to transform itself from a heavy, cumbersome force, that took six months to deploy to push the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait during Desert Storm, to a more nimble and quickly deployable fighting force. At Fort Lewis, it is developing Interim Brigade Combat Teams, or ICBTs, which will rely on light armored vehicles instead of tanks. They will also rely on advanced information technology designed to allow them to fight more effectively even with less firepower. At Fort Lewis, and at the Army training ground in Yakima, Washington, the new technology includes unmanned reconnaissance drones, and an elaborate system of portable computers that provide commanders with real-time information about their battle environments. But at the end of the day - and this is a point made by soldiers again and again - there is no technological silver bullet. As the mock raid on the town of Jezebar demonstrated, and as Captain John Kiriazis of Charlie Company says, war is ultimately a messy fight in the mud. "Technology is a great tool before a fight," says Kiriazis, his cheek bulging with chewing tobacco. "But when it comes down to pulling triggers, people going down, it's always gong to come down the individual soldier and his training."
As the daylight fades over the town of Jezebar, Captain Kiriazis assembles his men to dissect what went wrong in the raid. By the time the briefing is finished, the town is cloaked in darkness, and Kiriazis says he will give the men of Charlie Company a few minutes to eat, but then they must reassemble and do the exercise again. This time in the dark.
When the Inside Out Documentary team set out to do a project about the effort to reshape the military the big question was, where do we start? And where to we end up? For us, the challenge was trying to find a few small anecdotes that explain something about the huge challenge of reforming an immense organization that is rooted in the political world, the corporate world, and of course, the military world. In the end, we decided to tell four discreet stories that give the listener a chance to latch on to the story from several perspectives. So this was a little bit like the effort of four blind men trying to describe what an elephant looks like: depending upon where they stand, and what part of the huge body they are touching, they will give very different descriptions.
We did feel strongly, however, that we wanted to begin and end the project with the men and women who are actually engaged in the work of the military. So we started in Fort Lewis, Washington, and we ended at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where tomorrow's officers are minted, and where the idea of change runs counter to a two centuries-long history of discipline and tradition. And in between we explored a conversation about new technology and an old debate about national missile defense.
Through these four scenes we found a few consistent themes. First and foremost was the idea of change and how hard it is. Perhaps William Crowe, the gruff and plainspoken retired naval admiral who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it best when he said, "It's difficult to change the military because of its nature. You can change foreign policy in two or three minutes, but [with] military policy you have a base structure and investment in equipment that's going to be with you for forty years." But that is not to say that the military is immutable to change, according to Crowe, who spent 47 years in the military, and says, the military from which he retired was completely different from the one he joined. "[The military] probably doesn't change with the pace that people would prefer, but the fact is the military is evolving constantly," says Crowe.
One of the reasons the military services are so slow to embrace change is a function of human nature. "Every time you change something some guy looses," says Crowe. He recalls, for example, the immense resistance to doing away with the battleship, which put at stake the pride, tradition and livelihoods of two generations of military professionals. But eventually battleships were mothballed (many of them were also destroyed by Japanese aviators at Pearl Harbor), as naval power was redefined by aircraft carriers and submarines. Today, the debate continues. Some military experts believe aircraft carriers, slow and vulnerable, should give way to a new generation of speedy arsenal ships, which could work close to the shorelines and deliver an array of precision-guided weapons instead of aircraft. But don't expect aircraft carriers to sail away toward the setting sun any time soon. There are too many careers at stake
Beyond human nature, it is also the nature of corporate and political interests that make the process of change so slow. In "Fighting the Next War," we make the point that even weapons that military planners in the Pentagon say they no longer need continue to absorb billions of dollars of national treasure. A case in point is the Army's Crusader Howitzer system, a massive self-propelled gun that can fire 100-pound rounds some twenty miles. The Crusader was originally designed during the Cold War to stop columns of Soviet tanks, which threatened to swarm across the Fulda Gap in the great European land battle that never came. The Crusader, which is expensive, large, heavy and difficult to transport, would appear to be completely out of step with the Army's stated objective of building a more agile and quickly deployable fighting force; and it has been on just about everybody's list of unnecessary weapons programs. Ashton Carter, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, calls the Crusader "the poster child for military waste." Nevertheless, the Pentagon has spent almost three billion dollars developing the program, which will ultimately cost at least 11-billion dollars. The reason, of course, is not news. What Carter calls "an iron triangle of support" between contractors, politicians and the military make it virtually impossible to unplug support from even the most unnecessary programs. "A lot of careers are tied to these programs," says Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon analyst, and outspoken whistle blower, who has been raising the alarm about Pentagon waste for years. "The reason the Crusader continues on," says Spinney, "is because of politics."
Our visit to Huntsville, Alabama, also known proudly as "Rocket City," amplified Spinney's point about the role of politics in matters of national defense. Huntsville is mad for rockets. As we explain in "Fighting the Next War," Huntsville's evolution from sleepy cotton town to a booming hi-technology center was fueled by the missile and aerospace industry. Today, given that companies in Huntstville hold some 900 federal contracts for missile defense, it is hardly surprising to find such devotion to the proposition of national missile defense. Alabama's senior senator, Richard Shelby, is one of the program's biggest boosters, and he is supported with generous campaign contributions from companies that stand to gain the most from continued federal investment in missile defense. The network of mutual support is also reinforced by a revolving door, which allows senior military officers to move right from the Army's Redstone Arsenal, which oversees a large portion of the missile defense program, into senior positions at corporations in Huntsville that profit from that same program. The Pentagon's Spinney calls this a "self-licking ice cream cone." Of course there's nothing necessarily untoward about this, and in fact there's an argument to be made that these corporations, which provide essential technology in support of the nation's defense, benefit from the skills, knowledge and experience of these retired officers. But Spinney is worried about what this system does to the principal of the arm's length relationship between the government and its defense contractors. With the promise of lucrative job offers awaiting these senior military officers after retirement, Spinney says, "think about how that might color [their] decisions" about the merits of the programs they oversee.
The events of September 11th have left their mark on the discussion and the debate about how to reshape the military. The Bush Administration proposes the largest defense budget increase in two decades, which includes new investments in, among other things, hi-tech weapons and missile defense. Ashton Carton, the former Assistant Defense Secretary, hopes that the attacks on New York and Washington have rekindled awareness that "Security doesn't come free." But Carter also hopes it has sparked an effort to clean up what he calls the "embarrassingly critical" mismanagement of defense resources. "One hopes," he says, "that the events of September 11th mean that we are finally going to pull up our socks and get to genuine transformation in the Department of Defense."
Such concerns are generally not the province of soldiers, who have more immediate challenges at stake. But still, the events of September 11th are very much present on the training fields of military bases across the country. One consistent theme we heard again and again was how September 11th has added urgency and relevance to their training. "Any real world situation is going to spark an infantry soldier out here," according to Army Captain John Kiriazis at Fort Lewis. "Ever since September 11th there's a new fire in these guys." We heard the same from Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, who are part of a new anti-terrorism battalion. "Prior to September 11th we were thinking, will we ever use this [training]?" according to Lt. Michael Hoffman. "Now there is a pretty big perception that we are going to go out and execute these operations in the near future." And at West Point, young cadets are thinking about their futures in a world where the nature of warfare itself is changing. In the past, notes Paul Waldof, a third year cadet from Hattiesberg, Mississippi, the difference between combatants and non-combatants has been uniforms. "But the people the Army are fighting now could be civilians with AK-47s," says Waldof. "It's very difficult to fight an enemy like that," he says. "And it makes me wonder, should I be doing this?" It's a startling confession from the disciplined ranks of West Point, but hardly surprising given the nature of warfare today. It was also a confession that Waldof quickly amended. "I have to do it," he said. "I feel that without the people in the Army right now, we would not survive as a nation," Waldof declared. "That's what drives me."
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