THE COMING OF BUSH’S ONE-PLATOON ARMY

It’s coming. It’s coming. The one-platoon Army. A one-platoon army to defend the entire United States of America. Soon to be defending the USA: 30 privates, four corporals, three sergeants, one hundred thousand Pentagon generals and President Bush. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld will tell us that the new one-platoon Army will be capable of fighting two major wars and putting down world-wide terrorism, all at the same time.

Not to be outdone, the Army’s sister services are on the same track. We may soon be defended by a one-ship Navy and a single-plane Air Force.

Is it technologically possible? No, but it seems an economic certainty.

Just look at the numbers.

In the peak year of the Vietnam War, we fielded an Army of 543,000 with a defense budget of $428 billion – or about $800,000 per soldier in inflation-adjusted dollars.

But in Iraq, our peak field army reached only 159,000, while our defense budget soared over $444 billion – a whopping $2.8 million per soldier. In two short decades, our cost per soldier had increased 250 percent!

Naturally, there is a limit as to how much we can spend, and according to the two wars it is about $450 billion in 2005 dollars. So if the cost of a soldier goes up and the budget stays the same, it means fewer and fewer soldiers to do the fighting and more and more generals to do the planning.

We lost the Vietnam War with 543,000 soldiers trying to control an area of 127,240 square miles, which works out to one soldier per 0.2 square miles. But Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted that 159,000 soldiers could control the 168,750 square miles of Iraq – which works out to each soldier covering 1.1 square miles. Constraints on spending and profligate spending meant that each soldier had to control five times as much territory in Iraq. Five times the territory that he was incapable of controlling in Vietnam.

You can see where all this is headed. At the end of the tunnel is a defense department budget of $450 billion, capable of supporting only one platoon of soldiers.

Contributing toward the demise of the U.S. Army is the tremendous amount of budget being wasted by the Air Force and Navy. In fact, if current spending trends continue, we will be down to a one-ship Navy in no time.

For about $20 billion, we can update our Coast Guard’s fleet of ships, helicopters and planes, which protect our coastal waters from drug smugglers and terrorists. But we don’t consider that very important compared with the Navy’s request to build a new razzle-dazzle destroyer at $3 billion a copy. $20 billion would buy only six and a half destroyers, hardly enough to protect our coasts - let alone escort aircraft carriers.

Now the Navy has been told to reduce the considerable costs of the destroyer. Its approach? Reduce the number of sailors required to man the ship, from 3,500 to about 1,500. By saving 2,000 bunks, pay, clothing and food, the Navy is following the Army in trying to work its way down to a one-ship, one-sailor Navy.

And let's not even get into those floating cities called “aircraft carrier groups” with their jillions of high-priced protective ships, submarines and aircraft. The aircraft carrier is highly vulnerable to those low-level, fast-flying missiles with which the Chinese navy is equipping itself. Now that the terrorists can shoot down our helicopters with surface-to-air missiles, is the terrorist mastery of shore-to-ship missiles far behind? Have our admirals been spending our money preparing for the last war? Actually, how do aircraft carrier groups fight four-man terrorist cells?

And don’t count out the flyboys, who are merrily on their way to the creation of a one-plane Air Force. The F-16 was the best-performing and most cost-effective fighter plane ever built, its variations costing between $15 million and $20 million. In today’s dollars, less than $75 mill a plane. But now the Air Force biggies seem to feel that nothing can be built for less than $2 billion or so. This is why requests for air fleets of 400 planes have been reduced to orders of a hundred or so. As the budget moves slowly, but aircraft costs rise sharply, the solution is to buy fewer and fewer planes while employing fewer and fewer flyers. We are definitely headed for the one-plane Air Force.

Now don’t think that all the military planners and their armies of contractors, lobbyists and paid-for senators are asleep at the switch. They actually see the trend toward a one-platoon Army very clearly. That is why they're hell-bent on developing robots, which will serve as infantrymen. An army of robots doesn’t need pay, benefits, health care or clothing. You don’t have to offer them big bonuses to meet the enlistment quotas. And robots cannot upset Secretary Rumsfeld by publically complaining about the lack of armor on the battlefield. There are no relatives to go on television to weep over loved ones. Robots eliminate the whole idea of anti-war protests and allow us to abuse prisoners without worrying about having to court-martial anybody.

Led by Israel, the U.S. Air Force has already found drones to be effective in the skies over Afghanistan and Iraq. Starting with aerial surveillance, the drones have progressed to firing rockets at land-based targets. Pilots who once flew gloriously through the clouds now grouse about having to sit on the ground operating joysticks.

Soon, we won’t need pilots. Instead, we'll recruit elementary school kids to run the drones. After all, game-raised kids have much faster eye-hand coordination than any adult graduate of the Air Force Academy. I’ll bet the average 12-year-old boy could down any fighter pilot in a duel of drones. Without fighter pilots, we could close down the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, thereby eliminating embarrassing problems of cadets, athlete coaches and faculty pushing their evangelical beliefs on people. And it's highly doubtful that prepubescent boys would engage in all the rape, drinking and assaults that the Air Force Academy cadets are so famous for.

I doubt these kinds of scaled-down services could protect the country against anybody ... but they sure would cause less embarrassment for the administration.