An end to complacency

An editorial from The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.

The United States has been pushing the issue of military readiness around its plate for some years now, to small result. Should we scrap some weapons that are in the development stage? What about a joint strike fighter, what's the role of aircraft carriers? Should we close more bases, develop a missile shield, quit worrying about fighting two theater wars at once? And what's the true future threat anyway?

Complacency sounds like that. It is content to round-table the issues, round and round, as if they are abstractions, and there is an anesthetic quality to the droning talk. It is not the work of any political party or Congress or administration. It is business as usual, and it has produced a false sense of security.

Today the nature of the immediate threat is shatteringly clear. The nation must adjust its sights in self-defense. But the fact that our eye turns first for military response to a place half a world away is bound to lead to the discovery of where all this complacency has brought us.

Consider:

-- Today's Navy consists of 325 ships. That is the smallest it's been since 1917. That is 40 percent smaller than the Navy that participated in the Gulf War against Iraq.

-- Today's Merchant marine -- the fleet of nonmilitary cargo carriers on which the nation depends for overseas military supply -- could not mount the effort that was required during the Gulf war, in part because so many American seamen have lost jobs to foreign labor. During the Gulf war, this nation's labor pool of seamen was about 23,000. It's down to 15,000 today. What's more, the U.S. merchant fleet numbers less than one-tenth the 3,492 oceangoing vessels it had at its peak in 1950.

As recently as Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was arguing that a missile shield was a priority investment, even in a time of a limited defense budget.

To our continuing regret, we remain committed to technological intelligence above human resources.

The thing about all these facts is that they are symptomatic. They are revealing of not just the state of our Navy or our Merchant marine but of our thinking about national preparedness, in all the ways that is manifested.

This nation has not been truly tested in years. The new test began on Tuesday.