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Swap “nail” for “tooth” in Ben
Franklin’s epigram and you’ve captured part of the plight of
today’s U.S. Army. For the past three years, about one in four
Army reservists and National Guard soldiers called to active
duty couldn’t be cleared to climb on a plane and head for one
of the dozens of hot spots where our troops are deployed
around this blood-spattered globe – because of “rotten teeth.”
I kid you not. Tens of
thousands of Minutemen and Minutewomen have had to hit the
dentist’s chair stateside for taxpayer-funded drillin’ ‘n’
fillin’ before heading downrange.
Out of approximately 165,000
National Guard and Reserve soldiers currently on active duty,
the Army surgeon general estimates that around 30,000 won’t be
good-to-go because fighting-fit doesn’t just mean these
soldiers can run like a deer, do push-ups like a paratrooper
and shoot as straight as Alvin York, but also that their
pearlies have to be the right stuff. Since that number of
soldiers costs the Army $3.6 billion per year to support,
heavy dough’s being wasted on folks who won’t initially
qualify as fighting-fit when Uncle Sam comes calling.
The cost for this dental care
alone runs into the millions of dollars, and the need for it
dramatically erodes the readiness of the Army. Not to mention
that U.S. Army dentists plain can’t cope. They’re working
overtime and frequently have to ask civilian docs for a hand.
In one case, “Class 3s” – the Army's label for soldiers who
are non-deployable because of dental problems – were actually
bused three hours from Camp Atterbury, Ind., to Army dentists
at Fort Knox, Ky.
The Army experienced exactly
the same toothache during Desert Storm. But obvious solutions,
such as more funding and the authorization of more Reserve
full-time dentists in order to provide adequate treatment
during active-duty drills, have been ignored during the past
decade.
Now the Army chief, Gen. Peter
Schoomaker, has used emergency authority to exceed the
congressionally set limit of 482,000 soldiers – the maximum
number that can be on active duty – by as many as 30,000
soldiers.
Thirty thousand soldiers.
Almost exactly the number who can’t deploy because of bad
teeth.
And there are thousands of
other Reserve soldiers who can’t deploy because of ailments
such as fallen arches or pregnancy.
Schoomaker himself recently
admitted that 15 percent of his regular Army isn’t deployable
either. That means about 75,000 regular soldiers – more than
half his forces now fighting in Iraq – aren’t good-to-go.
We're talking $9 billion a year for troopers who can’t fight.
Schoomaker’s Pentagon aide says the bulk of this deadwood is
made up of soldiers with “medical, legal or family problems”
or those who are in boot camp.
In fact, if the Army were to
clean up its act, it would have more than enough soldiers at
its present authorized strength to do the job. But that would
be after a fundamental reorganization of the force structure
that’s remained basically unchanged since the end of the Cold
War.
At present, for example,
thousands of critical grunt slots are tied up staffing
redundant headquarters and maintaining obsolete or excessive
outfits such as tube artillery, air defense and support units
designed to put down a Soviet Union that choked to death on
its own blubber more than a decade ago. This plus the
staggering impact of failed social experiments that have
contributed to an Army with too many malingerers who can’t or
won't fight add up to a slack force in serious trouble.
So not only does the Army have
to figure out how to fill teeth more efficiently, it
absolutely must bring its 20th-century organization
fast-forward into the century at hand. That means trimming all
excess padding and filling the ranks with a far higher ratio
of lean-and-mean soldiers truly fit to fight the grueling and
demanding war against terrorism that won’t be going away
anytime soon.
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