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February 5, 2003 12:42

Will Colin Powell Stand Tall?

By David H. Hackworth

While a bellicose North Korea belts out nuclear material for an assembly line of bombs, and al Qaeda keeps blowing up people, places and things from Afghanistan to Yemen, tens of thousands of American fighters and their supporters are pouring into the Persian Gulf region to take out Saddam.

And from every quarter of Pax America, our commanders, not unlike their ancient Roman counterparts, say they need more toys and boys to cinch the accomplishment of their missions around a war-weary world where more than a million of our best and brightest are playing Supercop.

For example, our admiral running the Pacific wisely wants more forces to deal with the paranoids from Pyongyang in case they put steel and fire behind their words of war, while our general out in the Persian Gulf - counting the weeks before he clobbers Iraq - isn't happy that combat units have been cut from his order of battle. Meanwhile, his counterpart in Afghanistan wants more troops for peacemaking that gets hotter, messier and bloodier with the passage of each day. And the skippers responsible for homeland defense are rightfully complaining that the USA is being left high and dry without the men and material to handle the job.

A month ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld boldly said he could do it all. But it was no big surprise when Gen. Peter Pace, his Pentagon assistant, quietly refuted this assertion a few weeks later. Between the reserves and active-duty forces, the Pentagon can field only about 2.5 million effective fighters and supporters, which means we just don't have enough troops for all the missions currently on the Pentagon's military menu.

Despite the heavy activation of reservists and even the call-up of retired folks, many units today are badly stretched, and other units - especially reserve outfits - are far from good-to-go. Morale, the most essential factor in war, is not exactly over-the-top. Cooked books and ghost soldiers, along with failed social experiments, have left many units severely undermanned. A staggering number of soldiers, sailors and airmen have been unable to deploy overseas for reasons such as disability, discipline and dope problems, pregnancy and child-care issues.

The exact number is one of the Pentagon's most-guarded secrets. Perhaps Congress should ask?

We started down this mine-laden path more than a decade ago when the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz first advocated - to Bush-the-Elder and then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney - that the USA become the sole superpower and dominate the world. You know, steal a few lines from 1930s Germany with a good-guy "enlightened" democratic spin on the proposed New World Order. But Bush I turned his back on Wolfowitz's Greater Middle East Marshall-like plans, the Cold War ended, and our military muscle was ruthlessly whacked in half.

Then President Clinton delivered the body blow of political-correctness-run-amok that just about brought down what was left of a once-magnificent Desert Storm military force.

When Bush II got in the saddle, he bought into the NWO gospel according to Wolfowitz and a coterie of like-minded, draft-dodging superhawks - including Washington insider William Kristol - that containment, the strategy that brought the Soviets down, should be replaced by the NWO big stick, beginning with the democratization of Iraq.

But since none of these warmongers - who were of dying age for Vietnam but chose to escape-and-evade - has walked the walk, Colin Powell needs to draw on his been-there wisdom and authority and summon up the grit to tell Mr. Bush to slow down on Iraq, at least until we rebuild our military into a force capable of chewing what we've already bitten off. Or for sure the NWO doctrine will do unto Bush II what Vietnam did unto LBJ as our country sallies forth to rule the world.

Kristol told The New York Times that he lies awake at night worrying that something could go wrong with the war with Iraq. "Chemical weapons could be used against American troops," he says. "A biological weapon could be set off in America." I'm sure many of us lie awake at night, too, with the same terrible thoughts - including Robert McNamara, another unrestrained defense intellectual who never served in the trenches and whose similar abstract thinking fueled the Vietnam disaster.

http://www.hackworth.com is the address of David Hackworth's home page. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831. Look for his new book, "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts," (Rugged Land LLC, New York City).