Ready or Not?

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It's like a routine inspection, but on a much grander, million-man, scale. Every month, in an arcane and complicated ritual tracking thousands of troops, tanks and tarpaulins, Army bean counters rate the readiness of each of the service's 10 divisions. Troops, weapons, logistics and training are all measured, then reviewed by commanders and tweaked if the results might give a misleading impression of a division's fitness to fight. The grades range from C-1--fully ready to wage war--to C-4, unprepared for battle. The marks warn the Army of impending problems and help the generals know when to turn up the spigots for troops or materiel if a unit is lagging. The results are secret, complicated and, even inside the Army that lives by them, highly controversial.

So last week, when lawmakers got word that two of the Army's key divisions rated C-4s in October, Capitol Hill quickly took on the aura of an unhappy dinner table on report-card night. Who was to blame? Republicans pointed fingers at the Clinton Administration, complaining that Democrats had once again underfunded defense. "Over the past several years, the readiness of the Army has been deteriorating as a result of insufficient funding and a foreign policy that has committed military personnel to areas where we have no vital security interests," said Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee readiness panel. And there were dire warnings that America was not ready to fight. But, like so many things that emanate from the Pentagon, there's far more to this story than the bald fact that a pair of divisions flunked their readiness drill.

Actually, Pentagon spending on readiness, per soldier, is near an all-time high, eclipsing even 1991's tally, which included the Persian Gulf War. And while the Army is not at the peak of readiness, the relevant question is not why not, but rather, why should it be? After all, the Soviet army, with its swarms of T72 tanks, is no longer poised at the German frontier's Fulda Gap, ready to pour into Western Europe in the next 30 minutes. Instead, today's U.S. military is deployed, in relatively small numbers, to regional hot spots that Washington wants to keep from becoming global conflagrations. So the Army's admission that the 10th Mountain Division and the First Infantry Division are not ready for war is surprising only until one learns why: their commanders secretly rated the units unfit for combat because up to half of their troops--less than 1% of the active-duty military--were busy tending to peacekeeping duties in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Since the end of the cold war, the Pentagon has said it would need all its troops to meet its pledge to wage and win two "major theater wars" at once. But because it would take up to 90 days to move troops in Bosnia and Kosovo to a new conflict--longer than permitted under Pentagon guidelines--their commanders had no choice but to rank their units as unable to fight.