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United front

Adm. Michael Mullen, the relatively new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has three big objectives as he starts this year’s wrestling match with Congress. His first objective is for the chiefs to take a united stand on any major changes lawmakers demand in President Bush’s military budget for fiscal 2009.

Mullen told me he has a commitment from the chiefs to take this unified approach to budget issues rather than have each service lobby its case directly with lawmakers to save this or that program.

In this presidential election year, Congress almost certainly will redistribute Bush’s defense dollars, either out of conviction or to make political points. Cuts in such expensive programs as the Air Force’s F-22 fighter plane — now priced by the Pentagon at $355 million per copy, including research and development costs — probably will be attempted. And the ailing national economy is bound to resuscitate the guns-vs.-butter argument, which until now has been eclipsed by the Iraq war. Political pressures will thus test the unity of the chiefs that Mullen has forged.

Besides fighting the battle of the budget, Mullen will be under the gun as the Pentagon tries to obey congressional orders, inserted in the fiscal 2008 Defense Authorization Act, to take a new and extensive look at the division of labor among the services to see whether it still makes sense given the changed threats.

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, championed these marching orders, which require a reappraisal of the roles and missions of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps every four years.

One life-and-death question the chiefs and civilian defense leaders must address in any serious roles-and-missions reappraisal is what armed service or agency should be given the lead role to prevent terrorists from attacking the U.S. with a nuclear bomb.

Another question, less significant but still controversial, is whether the Air Force should be put in charge of unmanned aircraft or whether each service should operate on its own in that regard.

“The roles and missions of our military services are largely unchanged since the Truman administration and the Key West agreement of 1948,” Skelton said in stating his case for the agonizing reappraisal. “After almost six decades, it’s time to once again analyze the Defense Department’s roles and missions, identify the services’ core competencies, discover the missions going unaddressed and examine possible duplication of effort among the branches.”

More of the same?

As one who has watched the Pentagon undertake, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review of what the armed services are doing and why, I fear the new roles-and-missions exercise will end up being a similar self-justification of what the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are already doing, rather than anything approaching a bold blueprint for restructuring.

Unless Congress demands specific answers, the generals, admirals, captains, colonels and civilian defense executives will go through a mountain of paper, hold hundreds of meetings and then issue a molehill of a report, as has been the case with past QDRs.

Perhaps Mullen will find a way to get the military establishment out of its defensive crouch, but I doubt it.

But I have fewer doubts about him achieving his two other big objectives: caring for today’s service members not only when they are in uniform, but also afterward, and fixing the Army.

“I have very comfortable quarters near the State Department,” Mullen told me, his voice rising with passion. “I look out and see homeless men and women lying in the street. I realize I served with some of them in Vietnam. We cannot let this happen again to the men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m paranoid about this.”

As chairman, he has publicly vowed to focus on the needs of the wounded and on the mental health problems of present and former soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

“We’re going through a tremendous time of change with respect to traumatic brain injury,” he said. “We have to be much more aggressive in dealing with it.”

As for the Army, it is indeed surprising to hear an admiral who has commanded photogenic Navy warships pleading the case for lowly grunts. But Mullen lists fear of breaking the Army through over-deploying its people as one of the two problems that has “kept me awake at night,” with the other being turbulence in the Middle East.

He has vowed to work toward the goal of giving soldiers two years at home for every year of deployment.

“The U.S. military remains the strongest in the world,” said the nation’s top military officer and principal military adviser to the president. “But it is not unbreakable.”

Mullen is a sailor who never expected to rise to the military’s top job. But now that he has it, he strikes me as a skipper who is not afraid of rough water ahead.