For all of his talk about “strengthening America” and all of his reliance upon his own military record to bolster his candidacy, John Kerry’s plan for America’s armed forces is surprisingly light in detail and short on substance. In fact, it reads like something that was thrown together in three minutes of thought and six days of focus group discussion. In truth, it’s a non-plan- a plan that promises very little and can deliver little of what it promises.

The Kerry-Edwards plan consists of a handful of firm commitments, the two most notable being to “double” the strength of the Army’s active duty Special Forces and to increase the active duty strength of the Army by 40,000 personnel. This, with a few promises to increase the number of military police and civil affairs soldiers as well as a promise to create new specialized units to deal with the problems posed by weapons of mass destruction, is the sum total of the Kerry-Edwards plan with regards to the combat capabilities of the Armed Forces.

Significantly, the phrase “missile defense” appears nowhere within the plans for improving America’s defense contained within the Kerry-Edwards campaign book “Our Plans and Priorities.” It does appear three times in the padding section of the book (selected statements of John Kerry and John Edwards thrown in to ensure the book would be of a decent length). The first time it appears is one page 197, where Kerry affirms that, “we must invest in missile defense. But not at the expense of other priorities.” The second mention comes a few sentences later where he declares that, “(w)e cannot afford to spend billions to deploy an unproven missile defense system.” The phrase appears a third (and final) time on page 224, where it’s again brought up to be criticized, with Senator Kerry lamenting the amount of money spent on Ballistic Missile Defense, comparing it to the amount of money spent on securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. Just to prove to you that I’m not relying upon deceptive searching tactics, let me also inform you that the word “missile” appears exactly five times in the whole of the book and only in relation to missile defense in the three instances which I have mentioned.

The word “Navy” appears exactly twice in the whole of the book, both times in reference to John Kerry’s time in the United States Navy. The phrase “Air Force” appears twice, once promising to add a single squadron of helicopters and once referring to the fact that Harry Truman created it. The phrase “Marine Corps” does not appear once in the book’s two hundred and fifty-two pages.

Simply for the sake of comparison, I would point out that the word “Vietnam” somehow manages to appear in the book eight times. Of those eight, five explicitly reference John Kerry’s service (“when I was in Vietnam I learned,” “when I came back from Vietnam I”, etc, etc, etc).

So, I think that any reasonable person would have to concede that John Kerry’s defense promises are a little bit slim. He likes to talk a lot about strengthening the military, but he’s light on ideas for how he’s going to do it. But he has given us a few ideas, so let’s talk about those.

First of all, his promise to “double” the Army’s active-duty Special Forces while increasing overall force strength by only 40,000 is simply absurd. At the present time the Army’s Special Forces contain roughly 13,300 active duty personnel. At the present time the authorized strength of the active duty army is 502,400. So, in other words, the Special Forces represent about 2.5% of total Army personnel. If the Army was increased by 40,000 (or to 542,400) and the Special Forces doubled (to 26,600), the Special Forces would suddenly become 4.9% of the Army.

The problem with this should be obvious: you can’t just stick anyone in the Special Forces. The various branches of the Special Forces are the best of the best: the Green Berets, the Rangers, and Delta Force. Only a small percentage of the Army is capable of meeting the standards necessary to become a Green Beret or a Ranger. As it stands now, most who attempt to qualify for either force will fail. This doesn’t reflect badly on them as people: after all, most of the people who try to qualify for the Special Forces have already qualified for the Airborne, something that puts them in an elite group in and of itself. It simply means that, as good as they are, they aren’t quite in the 98th percentile of all soldiers.

So, if the Special Forces are increasing as a percentage of the Army, how are they going to find enough personnel of the same quality as their existing personnel? There are two answers. First of all: they aren’t. They’re going to have to, to some degree, reduce standards for qualification. The second thing that they’re going to have to do is reach into the ranks of the Army in search of those soldiers who could be members of the Special Forces (or were at one time) and pull them in. This, of course, would have a severely deleterious effect on the remainder of the Army. After all, which officers, non-coms, and soldiers are you going to pull in from the rest of the Army if you need to fill the Special Forces?

In other words, while John Kerry’s plan will make the Special Forces more numerous, it will also make them (on a man-for-man basis) weaker. At the same time, it’ll rip the living heart out of other units, especially the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Air Assault.

As for the other major part of John Kerry’s plan (to add an additional 40,000 active-duty troops to the Army), I have little to say. I have little to say because Kerry has little to say. He doesn’t promise that these 40,000 will be used to from X number of new combat units (and in fact, it appears that a substantial part of the 40,000 is already committed by the few specific commitments he’s made). For example, 13,300 of them will be used up in the increase in Special Forces (either replacing individuals from the rest of the Army send to the SF or representing new recruits). Ultimately, the increase in the force strength of the regular army proposed by Kerry appears to be less than 20,000: less than enough to add a single Division and hardly enough to cure the problems about which he complains.

It is notable that John Kerry’s military plan seems to completely ignore the massive organization transformation going on within the Army as we speak. Under the plan presently being put into effect, the role of the present Division will fade over time with the “Brigade Unit of Action” (BUA) becoming the primary combat unit in the United States Army. The new Brigades will be restructured to emphasize “teeth” over “tail”, reducing administrative staff and increasing the number of combat soldiers while decreasing the overall number of personnel per brigade. In the “Future Force”, like in the present day Marine Corps and Army Special Forces, everyone will be trained as a rifleman first. The result is that, under current plans, the active duty Army will increase from thirty-three Brigade Combat Teams today to forty-eight in 2007. In other words, the combat power of the Army will be increased by half again without actually increasing the number of personnel on active duty.

John Kerry’s plan for the military makes exactly zero mention of any of this (and, in fact, attacks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to follow through on “transformation”) leading one to jump to the conclusion that either he’s unaware of this plan (perhaps he was “too busy” for the briefings) or he and his advisors don’t think it to be significant. In either case, the implications are troubling.

Kerry’s plan totally ignores the virtual revolution that is taking place in the organization of both the Army and the Navy under the stewardship of Donald Rumsfeld. At long last the Armed Forces are breaking free of outdated Cold War organizations and reshaping themselves to fight our new enemies. Not only will the “Future Force” massively increase the power of the Army, but Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Navy has strongly augmented the combat strength of the Navy.

Little noticed, but very important, was last year’s decision to discard the Cold War-era “Carrier Battle Groups” (CVBG’s) and “Amphibious Ready Groups” (ARG’s) for new-model “Carrier Strike Groups”, “Expeditionary Strike Groups”, and “Surface Strike Groups.” While this might sound like a bunch of Naval jargon it represents, in truth, nothing less than a revolution in military affairs.

See, during the Cold War, Aircraft Carriers had to operate under the constant threat of massive attack by Soviet forces. As a result Carrier Battle Groups, big units often consisting of as many as a dozen ships, were created. With the end of the Cold War the major air-sea threat to our Carriers disappeared, but the Carriers continued to travel in these big groups, largely as a result of inertia. This slowed down deployment rates and created a Navy which more or less entirely revolved around the Carriers. Additionally, with the increase in the number of AEGIS ships in the Navy and the development of Cooperative Engagement Capability, a trio of ships today can be more effective than a dozen were twenty years ago.

By reducing the number of escorts per carrier, the Navy is now capable of a much higher deployment tempo. Operating this way during the Iraq War, the Navy managed to place seven Carriers on station, more than it was able to deploy during the first Gulf War when the force consisted of fifteen Carriers. At this very moment there are a full seven Carrier Strike Groups underway as part of “Summer Pulse ‘04”, an exercise designed to demonstrate the awesome power and majesty of the United States Navy.

In addition to this, the reduced number of escorts per ship has allowed the creation of the new Expeditionary Strike Groups, centered upon the Navy’s Amphibious Assault Carriers which can, if needed, essentially function as small Aircraft Carriers (in addition to carrying Marines about). Where the old Amphibious Ready Groups were often accompanied by just a single escort, the new ESG’s are accompanied by a number of surface ships, allowing them to truly project power as necessary, even acting as a substitute for a Carrier where required. (After all, a US LHD carrying eighteen Marine Harriers and escorted by a pair of Arleigh Burke-class Destroyers is probably the equal of any non-American Aircraft Carrier in the world).

You’d think that John Kerry, a man so determined to defend America, might be interested in this: after all, he is a Navy vet. But he doesn’t bother to comment on it either positively or negatively. In fact, he doesn’t bother to say anything about the Navy at all, save that he served in it.

Frankly, I suspect that his failure to mention the Navy, Air Force, or Marines in his plans should be considered somewhat alarming. A sin of omission. Certainly I can’t be the only one who suspects that he may well seek to compensate for his increases in the Army by going after some of the other services? I can already see the arguments being trotted out about the Navy’s Carriers. Probably the Air Force’s new fighter programs too.

Reading his “plans” one begins to wonder if he’s ever shed his true anti-military beliefs. His promises are so minor, so inconsequential, and leave so much unmentioned.

In closing (and the audience cheers!) I’d simply add that John Kerry’s military program, for someone who claims to be for a strong national defense, is alarming to say the least. Someone needs to start asking Senator Kerry just what he thinks about individual military programs and overall military spending.