Defense review: Major implications for Isles
President Bush has endorsed the preliminary outlines of a dramatic reorganization of the nation's defense forces, with sweeping implications for Hawai'i.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indicated his intention to parlay his wealth of respect in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill into major reforms of the way the Defense Department buys weapons and the way the military thinks about the strategic challenges facing the nation.
In their present form, at least, many of these reforms seem way overdue.
Ever since President Eisenhower warned of the predations of the "military-industrial complex," the nation has paid too much for its defense. Because of the prolonged crisis that was the Cold War, however, there was little Americans could do about it. The profligacy ranged from $600 toilet seats to unneeded ships and weapons systems, whether built to enhance a general's territoriality or a congressman's reputation for bringing home bacon.
More recently, as we have noted in conversations with the last several admirals commanding Pacific forces from Camp Smith, the Pacific Ocean is the most likely theater of future major U.S. military operations. This requires a reorientation, a decade overdue, of a defense policy that has been geared since the end of World War II to protecting Europe from Soviet invasion.
Absent some new arrangement for basing U.S. forces in Asia, operating in the Pacific will require an additional emphasis on "long-range power projection," which means greater attention to airlift capacity and other ways of sending troops and firepower across thousands of miles.
Rumsfeld also appears to be prepared to depart from the long-standing doctrine that the military must be prepared to fight two major wars simultaneously. Perhaps this seeming retreat would be accomplished under cover of a national missile defense, although to our thinking, money would be better spent on improvement of proven systems like the Navy's Aegis theater defense system.
The choice of weapons systems, the directions of research and development and the basing of sufficient military resources in the Pacific are all natural consequences of Rumsfeld's thinking.
In this context, it behooves those of us in Hawai'i to reach a consensus on what kind of face we wish to present to a military that may soon grow and spend more here. In particular, we must resolve our attitudes toward the military's need for live-fire training in Hawai'i.
The Bush administration has indicated it is friendly to the very welcome idea of improvement in the quality of life for military members. The money for these sorely needed upgrades, however, is likely to come from a new round of base closings and suspension of older weapons systems.
All of these changes will meet major resistance in certain sectors of Congress, the Pentagon and the defense industries. But pursued aggressively and carried out properly, they will give us a leaner, but meaner, fighting machine — prepared to point in the right direction.
