Nuts, bolts, & death.

• Author: Summers, Harry
• Position: U.S. Department of Defense spending policy

NUTS, BOLTS, & DEATH

The unofficial motto of the tank companyin Japan I was assigned to in 1949 was "on requisition.' Among many things on back order was a starter-solenoid for the company's tank retriever. It still hadn't arrived when our company was sent into combat in Korea. The only way the retriever, a kind of armored tow truck, could be started was by being towed itself, and when in the midst of a combat recovery operation it stalled after the driver was shot, the crew couldn't get it going again. My company commander and two of my garrison roommates were killed as they tried to escape--all because of a missing piece of wire that cost about seventy-five cents.

Sadly, that's not just ancient history. In his newbook, The Straw Giant, long-time defense journalist Arthur Hadley tells of flying on a 20-year-old B-52 bomber with bald tires, a leaking hydraulic system, and a gyro system repaired in flight by a crumpled fruit juice can. Writing in The New York Times last July, Adam Yarmolinsky pointed out that the fiscal 1987 Pentagon budget that was prepared in February, when compared with budget plans for fiscal 1987 prepared in 1985, "cuts spare parts purchases for the Air Force by 39 percent; the Navy, 22 percent; the Army, 32 percent.'

Certainly there is fat in the operations andmaintenance (O&M) budget from which spare parts are purchased. Individual services, for instance, normally refuse to share maintenance facilities, even for identical vehicles. Studies by the Pentagon, Congress, and the General Accounting Office (GAO) show that sharing maintenance facilities can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Across-the-board cuts in the O&M budget won't solve this problem. They simply create another one: impaired readiness of combat units in the field. Since solenoids, unlike military bases and weapons systems, don't have a constituency, these funds have few champions in Congress. Not surprisingly, House and Senate conferees on the fiscal 1987 defense authorization bill agreed last September to cut an additional $2 billion from O&M, despite acknowledging the fact that such a reduction would hurt combat readiness.

The folly of this approach is, of course, thatpreparation is the most important thing our armed forces do in peacetime. That's why we keep them around. This is as true today as in the days of George Washington, who once said, "There is nothing so likely to produce peace as be well prepared to meet the enemy.' But training for war...