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Mission creep in Somalia. Mission corrosion back home. These two iphrases describe the mixed fate of the in 1993.
The initial commitment of American to Somalia “was consistent with our attitudes about suffering,” Ambas-
as power and water.
Certainly many Somalis expected the Americans to be in their country a long time. Somalia was like a post-nuclear war society, utterly collapsed—not in the instant burst of an atomic weapon, but a society destroyed just as completely in
everyday Somalis—of infinite American wealth. The popular expectation was clearly that truckloads of dollars would follow the arrival of the American troops; the Americans were going to rebuild their country.
The American agenda, however, was
sador Robert Oakley told an auditorium packed full of Marines at Quantico last December. But Oakley also was speaking with events of the previous 12 months in mind, a rocky year where the principal activity in Somalia changed dramatically from feeding to fighting.
“Mission creep” was the vivid shorthand used by many top Marines to express their primary apprehension about Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. They feared that opening the roads and getting the food to the interior would ineluctably lead to larger efforts: to disarm the various factions, to reestablish a local police force, to reestablish basic services such
slow-motion, through years of civil war and anarchy. Wide-eyed young Marines remarked. "This place is like a Mad Max- Road Warrior movie,” referring to films set in a primitive, brutish post-nuclear war future.
Somalis like Abdi Abukar, who translated for this writer during his two-week stay in Somalia, watched in wonder as giant jet cargo planes flew overhead, as Navy ships dotted the offshore horizon, as tough-looking Marines patrolled downtown Mogadishu, their M-16 rifles at the ready. This perception of infinite American military power gave rise to a corollary perception in the minds of many
In early May 1993, President Bill Clinton welcomed home from Somalia most of the Marines led by Lieutenant General Robert Johnston. Their mission, initially humanitarian, had shifted gradually to one of a police force.
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not reconstruction. It was triage. "We thought after the first 30 days we'd done our job (in Somalia); then, after 60 days we found ourselves in 'mission creep,'" recalled Major General Anthony C. Zinni, operations director for the multiservice U.S. task force originally deployed into Mogadishu.
As the New Year opened. President George Bush was in Somalia, shaking hands, patting shoulders and otherwise congratulating the Marines and their sister services on the famine-relief effort. The port and airfield at Mogadishu had been reopened. The Marines had penetrated deep into the Somali interior, bringing relief and a measure of public safety to muddy, fly-infested towns like Bardera, at the southern tip of the so-called “crescent of famine.”
In a few stunning weeks, the Marine- led task force had virtually snuffed out Somalia’s extortion economy, in which
The U.S. Navy is retiring—or selling— all its big tank landing ships. The Fairfax County (LST-1193), here in the Atlantic with her causeways, goes to Australia.
the various non-government relief organizations had been forced to pay exorbitant "protection” fees and ad hoc “taxes” to gun-toting Somalis for the privilege of helping to keep their countrymen from starving to death.
The responsibility for continuing security was to be handed over to the United Nations, hopefully as early as February—but the schedule slipped by months. To one Marine officer, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s trip to Mogadishu in early January provided a “warning signal that all was not to go as planned or expected.”
Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid staged an anti-U.N. rally, under the pretense that Boutros-Ghali was seeking to take over Somalia as a trusteeship under U.N. control. The demonstration turned ugly. Boutros-Ghali could not get to his own U.N. headquarters and had to be helicoptered to his meeting with Ambassador Oakley and Lieutenant General Robert B. Johnston, U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. task force commander.
At an impromptu press conference later that day, a shaken Boutros-Ghali downplayed the impact of Aidid’s choreographed demonstration. But a Marine officer who helped Boutros-Ghali to safety concluded after this press conference that the Secretary General “was going to delay as long as possible the
turnover to the U.N This was the
unmistakable start of mission creep, and Aidid gained the time he needed to play clan power politics.”
Despite Lieutenant General Johnston’s repeated urgings to begin planning the inevitable turnover, a U.N. team did not
show up until March, according to sources. The whole turnover was delayed.
“1 think we were there way too long,” Zinni recounted. “You have to remember, however, that this operation was new for the United Nations, too, and they didn’t want to be the ‘stuckee,’ as it were,” he added.
As a consequence, U.S. military forces became more involved in resettlement planning and attempts to re-establish a national police force. To counter the anti- U.S. and anti-U.N. propaganda Aidid was pumping out on his radio station, the U.S. military countered with a newspaper, titled “Roja,” which meant “hope” in Somali.
The Marines became the targets of sniper fire and occasional minor ambushes. "Disarmament [of Somalis] became more of a requirement,” said Major General Charles E. Wilhelm, commander of the Marine forces under Johnston.
After the third sniping incident, one of Aidid’s weapons compounds was virtually leveled by Marine helicopter gun ships. “The Somalis will test you, and if they do, you’ve got to snap their garters pretty sharply,” Zinni said. The Marines mounted raids on Mogadishu’s arms bazaars and other sites believed to be weapons storage areas. “We ran 212 strike operations, and came up with some-
thing in about 106 of them,” he recalled.
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Nevertheless, Johnston, Zinni, and other Marine leaders knew the situation was explosive. They were in a country roughly the size of California with a force about the size of the Los Angeles Police Department. They were stretched thin, and by February the once-smiling crowds of Somalis had grown surly. Rocks were thrown at Marines driving through downtown Mogadishu. Marines experienced a heightened sense of claustrophobia as they drove through crowds of curious, cloying, begging, hustling, hostile Somalis—mostly kids out of schools long
closed by the civil war and jobless, desperate refugees driven to town by famine in the outback.
Occasionally, someone in the crowd would dart forward to steal loose gear. On 2 February 1993, a Somali youth tried to snatch the sunglasses off the face of Gunnery Sergeant Harry Conde as he sat in the right front seat of a mini-convoy of two high-mobility vehicles driving through town.
“Something covers my face . . . I’ve been struck (but) what do I do? ... I need to defend myself. I feel real threatened,” Conde said later. Conde swung in his seat, fired a single blast of buckshot from his M-79, which ripped into the abdomen of the erstwhile thief and tore through the forearm of a second youth in the line of fire.
Conde was court-martialled on 5 April, convicted of aggravated assault, fined $1,706 and reduced in rank to staff sergeant. Lieutenant General Johnston probably had little choice but to order the court-martial; thousands of his troops had kept their cool under similarly trying circumstances, but the Conde case exemplified the perils of conducting a humanitarian mission with Marines trained as warriors.
In a 15 March letter to the editor in the Honolulu Advertiser, former Marine
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Proceedings / May 1994
9-8. NAVY (R. BAYLESS)
and Los Angeles policeman Michael Welch explained the hazardous differences: "The action in Somalia is much closer to South Central Los Angeles than a war zone. ... I say this from experience. ... I worked (those] streets as a policeman, taking various shots into our patrol car from gangs. ... 1 also spent 1983 to 1987 as a U.S. Marine. The jobs are not even close. If you want men . . . to act like trained police officers, hire police officers. If you want a war zone neutralized and bad guys dispatched, call the Marines.”
The police role was another, and risky, form of mission creep for the Marines.
The transition to a U.N.-led operation did not begin in earnest until March, and it was not until 26 April that Marine Corps forces turned over operations in Mogadishu to Pakistani troops. By that date. Marine Corps strength ashore and in the ships offshore was approximately 2,070, down from a peak of 11,600 in January.
On 4 May, Lieutenant General Johnston turned over command to United Nations forces headed by Lieutenant General Cevik Bir of Turkey.
By the time they withdrew, U.S. forces Were drawing hostile fire pay. While Johnston’s troops had participated in the largest humanitarian exercise ever conducted by U.S. forces, they were not awarded the Humanitarian Service Medal; they received the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal instead. While a request to award the Humanitarian Service Medal is awaiting Secretary of the Navy John Dalton’s decision, the Expeditionary Medal is de facto evidence of mission creep.
The Marines were not in Somalia in any significant strength when Aidid’s rnilitia ambushed a Pakistani force on 5
June, killing 24, nor were they involved in the fighting on 3 October, when virtually an entire company of U.S. Army Rangers was killed or wounded in an intense fire fight with Aidid’s forces.
“That was our worst fear, mass casualties to us,” Zinni said. Another Marine officer confided, “We got out of Somalia in May with our honor intact.” In truth, the Marines departed with tangible signs of success. In November 1992, the month before the U.S. deployment, about 300 Somalis were dying in Bardera each day. By April 1993, the month before Johnston turned over the command to Bir, the death rate had plummeted to about five per day. Over the same period, the street price of an AK-47 assault rifle increased from $50 to $1,000, clear evidence of the growing scarcity of weapons. The black market price of a 50-pound bag of wheat dropped from $100 in November 1992 to about $7-$10 by April 1993, a price that reflected the huge increase in the availability of food.
Moreover, the Marines under Johnston had run a large multi-service and multination operation, and they had done it well. U.S. Army forces, sources relate, arrived late. There were problems with the Air Force airlift; as C-141 jets broke down, entire cargoes had to be unloaded and repackaged for transport on KC-10 aircraft.
Many officers believe that the Somalia operation stands as the harbinger of similar deployments that will engage U.S. forces for the remainder of this decade.
“The Marines under Lieutenant General Johnston had the most visibility and the most success in the first half of 1993 of all U.S. forces. Now the Navy is signing on for success,” one Marine officer said. He noted the unprecedented Navy participation in the Expeditionary War-
The Marine Corps’ maritime prepositioning ships—here unloading in South Korea—have been a big success. They are leased, however, while the U.S. Army’s prepositioning ships will be owned outright.
fare Conference at the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Virginia, last November. “Even the submariners were there, showing how they could adapt, retrofit, or modify their boats to lift forces,” he said with a grin.
At home, the Corps’ leadership spent much of 1993 fighting the corrosive effects of budget and end-strength cutbacks. Results were mixed. The Marines agreed to a significant reduction in amphibious shipping.
“The current fiscally constrained requirement is to be able to lift 2.5 MEBs,” said Lieutenant General Charles Krulak, Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico, Virginia. “However, the Navy and Marine Corps agreed in 1993 to a short-term decrement in the 'amphibious footprint’—the amount of embarked rolling stock—to two MEBs- worth,” Krulak added. He explained that this move was taken to release resources to continue modernizing the amphibious fleet.
Even this reduced lift goal may be overtaken by the accelerated retirement of amphibious ships. The last ten Newport (LST-1179)-class tank landing ships will be retired by the end of 1995 to save money. Construction of the first LPD-17, a new class intended to replace 38 amphibious ships of various types, including the LSTs, will not begin until fiscal year 1996.
Add two years to commissioning, and there’s a four-year gap. But the longer- term prospects suggest an outright collapse in the size of the amphibious fleet from what has been a relatively stable force level—about 60 ships—to a force one-fourth that number. This prediction assumes a ship “life" of 30 years and takes into account the present construction rate of about one new amphibious ship every two years, or half a ship per year. As naval writer James George quipped, “It does not take a Cray computer to calculate that, at this building rate, eventually there will be an amphibious fleet of 15 ships." He is highly skeptical of upbeat plans to increase construction to two amphibious ships per year later this decade.
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The first signs of too many many deployment commitments, and too few ships to sustain them, emerged in 1993 with the embarkation of Marine units on board aircraft carriers under the "adap-
tive joint force packaging concept.” About 600 Marines were on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) when President Bill Clinton visited the carrier in February 1993.
The carrier’s air wing was reduced from 81 to 68 planes to accommodate the Marine detachment of 10 helicopters. Despite the creative attempt to embark Marines on non-amphibious ships. Marine officials quietly fret about the loss of capability. The number of helicopters to move the Marines ashore is very limited; they will be launched from farther at sea in order to protect the carrier from enemy shore-based antiship missiles; and there are fewer fixed wing aircraft aboard the carrier to provide initial fire support.
Nevertheless, adaptive force packaging proceeded apace, with the deployment of the USS America (CV-66) and her battle group later in August, albeit with half the number of Marines (278) and more helicopters (14).
These evolutionary trials aside, the
Regularly scheduled deployments to the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific are demanding—but wait, there’s more. VMFA (AW-533) flew to Aviano, Italy, in the summer of 1993 as part of Operation Deny Flight—the U.N.-backed effort to keep belligerent aircraft out of the war in Bosnia.
Marines faced a more immediate problem in 1993: the potential reduction in active-duty end strength from about 180,000 to as few as 159,000. At least, this was one of the more serious options on the table in Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s Bottom-Up Review, last year’s major effort to downsize and reshape
America’s forces for the post-Cold War era. The 159,000 figure would have taken the Marines below the low point of their Cold War strength—170.600 in 1960.
“At 159,000. our deployment schedule was sky-high; it would have been nearly day-on/stay-on for the troops,” Krulak recalled. “We were staring at major and negative impacts on recruiting, with young Marines going home telling their buddies thinking about joining the Corps that the deployment schedule will eat you up,” he said.
More was at stake than meeting a Draconian deployment schedule. Marine officers familiar with the internal debate confide that at 159,000, the Marines would have been unable to maintain the three active ground division-three aircraft wing structure codified in law since 1952. A “hollow” Marine Corps would have put the structure up for grabs, and with it, a total re-evaluation of the Corps’ mission. The Corps’ independent existence was at stake.
The Marines emerged from the review with a planned strength of 174,000, barely enough to sustain the existing structure. “We deployed 107,000 Marines in Desert Storm. At the 159,000 option, we had only 89,000 Marines in the FMF. At 174,000, we still will have 106,000 in the FMF,” Krulak pointed out. In absolute and relative terms, the Marines did better than the Army, which emerged from the review facing an active-duty strength reduction of about 20 soldiers for every single Marine reduction in end-strength.
Sources relate that the Army’s acquiescence to this unequal drawdown came with a price: Approval of a $2.5 billion maritime prepositioning force program of 11 ships for the Army. Those ships will
come on line by the end of the decade, right about the time Navy and Marine Corps budgeteers will be scraping for the money to renew or replace their 13 maritime prepositioning ships, whose leases expire between 2004 and 2010. The timing is portentous: if the Army has a new program in place, why spend the money to extend or replace these 13 older ships, and at a time when budget pressures could well be greater? (See “The Future of Amphibious Warfare Takes Shape,” this issue, pages 86-88; and “An Army Heavy Brigade Goes Afloat,” pages 89-92.)
Beneath the harmonious talk about jointness lurks the potential for a real bloodletting over roles and missions. The Army has been openly advertising itself as a power-projection force, while the Marines and their Navy allies counter with the “911 force” slogan—dial us in an emergency. In this regard, the review was a compromise: The Marines got their strength numbers, but the Army got its foot in the door of the maritime prepositioning mission with a program of its own. The two services’ MPS programs appear to be a redundancy that cannot survive the looming budget battles.
Marine helicopter aviation may be another big victim of a shrinking Defense Department budget. The V-22 Osprey tilt- rotor was exempted from the review, which is to say Pentagon officials deferred the decision to continue or cancel the troubled program. While Marine helicopters continue to age, it looks as if new V-22s will trickle into the inventory much the way C-17 jet transports are entering the Air Force—at the rate of half a squadron per year.
At this modernization rate, the Corps' fleet of 241 CH-46 Sea Knights will be flying for years to come. So long, in fact, that one Marine colonel remarked, “The last CH-46 pilot has not yet been born." The Corps’ older birds are being worked hard, and while the safety record was extraordinarily good in the first half of 1993, a rash of crashes in August and September prompted a 48-hour safety stand-down on 23 September.
These accidents, sad as they are, did not rock the Corps nearly as much as the social issues. What a bagful of controversy: gays, women, ethnic minorities, and young married Marines.
With the “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” policy on gays in the military. President Clinton was striving mightily to satisfy the campaign check he declared he would cash, if elected. As soon as an interim version of the President’s policy hit the street, on 29 January 1993, Major Charles Johnson, a 17-year veteran of the Corps, asked to resign.
“There is no question in my mind that
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we are under an unlawful directive,” Johnson told this writer as he prepared to separate from the Corps on 15 July, the same date that Clinton’s interim policy was scheduled to become permanent. His departure under protest was an embarrassment to the Corps; this was the same officer who, as a captain in Lebanon in 1983, stopped three Israeli tanks from penetrating the Marine area by planting himself in front of one with a drawn pistol. His widely publicized stand that day earned him a medal and a personal commendation from General Robert Barrow, the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Major Johnson’s jump onto an Israeli tank and his jumping out of the Corps may reveal an impetuous streak, but he felt the policy on gays in the military constituted an unlawful order.
Johnson pointed out that the requirement to take action against “immoral practices” was codified in Navy Regulations and, as such, had the force of a general order. Failure to enforce a general order constituted dereliction of duty. Dereliction involves “neglect or culpable inefficiency” according to the Manual for Courts Martial. One Marine Corps Reserve lawyer was sympathetic to the daisy-chain of Johnson’s thinking. “Culpable inefficiency” was at the heart of the “Don’t ask. don’t tell” policy, he said. The "Don’t ask” part, was, in effect, a directive to be culpably inefficient.
Other military lawyers thought Johnson was arguing a moral point but. frankly, they said, the President had the power to lift the ban by executive order. What is legal and what is moral, however, are not necessarily the same thing, and Major Johnson's resignation marked
a move to the moral high ground that no one else was willing to make.
Johnson’s July resignation was followed in August with the formal investigation into charges that Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot Captain Gregory Bonam was the principal assailant of Navy Lieutenant Paula Coughlin at the riotous 1991 Tail- hook Convention of naval aviators at the Las Vegas Hilton.
The case unraveled when Bonam’s lawyer revealed that Navy investigators had never showed Coughlin a snapshot of Bonam taken at the Hilton the night
There is money to continue development of the V-22 tiltrotor but no firm commitment to production. Meanwhile, the Marines continue to deploy their aged CH-46s.
The last CH-46 pilot has not yet been born.
she was assaulted. It pictured Bonham wearing a black and green T-shirt, whereas Coughlin had stated her assailant was wearing a burnt-orange colored shirt. That one snapshot shattered the whole case against Bonam. The charges against him later were dismissed.
The Tailhook fiasco, however, went a long way toward breaking down the remaining prohibitions against women in combat units. In his 28 April press conference announcing that women would be assigned to combat aircraft, warships, and to certain artillery units, Defense Secretary Les Aspin explicitly linked the expanded policy to Tailhook. The decision to expand the combat roles for women, he said, ”... isn’t part of the timing but is part of the message.”
At Aspin’s press conference. General Carl Mundy, the Marine Commandant,
said, “We have no women pilots but expect applicants within a few days.” By year’s end. Second Lieutenant Sarah Deal had completed her aviation indoctrination training prior to reporting to basic flight training. In addition, five other women in precommissioning programs were selected to follow her into flight training.
On 6 August, General Mundy issued what he later conceded was a “hand grenade,” an explosive directive banning the enlistment of married Marines into the active force after fiscal year 1996.
His rationale was contained in a 19 August letter to retired Marine Corps generals, in which Mundy explained that the high number of young married Marines is “simply draining our resources, fracturing our ability to train cohesive units, and consuming thousands of dollars to provide programs to help young girls, away from home, and on their own while their husbands are deployed to Somalia.”
The tabloid case of former Lance Corporal John Wayne Bobbitt, whose abused wife Lorena cut off his penis, stands as perhaps the preeminent example of a dysfunctional first-term marriage. Lorena claimed the beatings and chokings started a month after their June 1989 marriage. The couple were well known to the family service counselors at the Quantico, Virginia. Marine base where Bobbitt was stationed.
Statistics bear out Mundy’s concern
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about the first-term marriage issue. Since 1979, the percentage of married Marine privates through corporal has increased from 14% to 28%, while the percentage of married senior non-commissioned officers and officers has remained fairly constant.
His directive was overturned by Defense Secretary Aspin with embarrassing speed, and the embattled Commandant suffered a storm of outside criticism. Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) led the charge, asserting that even the Pope’s Swiss guards are permitted to be married. As former Navy Secretary James Webb countered angrily in a New York Times editorial, the Pope’s guards don’t deploy for months on end.
The defense department study commissioned to assess the impact of first- term marriages on unit readiness offered evidence that supported Mundy’s concern. In its December report, the study noted that “An ‘average’ married [Air Force] airman . . . can expect to spend one month deployed during his first four-year term of service, while an ‘average’ Marine can expect to spend nearly one year deployed during a similar four-year term.”
In an earlier 13 August report to Marine Corps Headquarters, Major General Charles Wilhelm, commander of the 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California, pointed out that his “average” Marines were deployed 45% of their tours. “If we add the time that he is in the field or deployed within CONUS [the continental United States], we find that he sleeps in a place other than his quarters for 60% of his FMF [Fleet Marine Force] tour,” Wilhelm wrote, adding, “ . . . the lifestyle . . . strains even mature marriages.”
Television journalist Leslie Stahl’s interview with General Carl Mundy on “60 Minutes” brought out the problems faced by a Marine Corps competing for the best-qualified minority officers—and implied that prejudice is the biggest one.
Mundy’s abortive effort to discourage first-term marriages, while criticized in the media, received strong support from inside the military. A Navy captain said, “Mundy was right for a reason nobody will admit—that there simply isn’t enough money, or slack in the operational tempo, to offer a young Marine or sailor a lifestyle remotely equivalent to the civilian world.”
for accession that currently require large percentages of minorities to obtain a ‘waiver’ to gain entry to OCS [Officer Candidate School]. Simply raising . . . score requirements . . . would quite probably result in a Marine officer corps that would be very, very white and ... we would still have . . . disparities in . . . promotion percentages.”
“We are not a bigoted organization,” declared General Mundy in an on-cam- era interview. Indeed, the Corps is faced with a dilemma. According to a study of the minority officer performance issue completed last August by Colonel David Vetter, “ ... we have aptitude standards
As of early 1994, the Marines were finalizing plans to implement counselling for all new Marines about the risks of marriage during the first term. The mandatory training will be unique to the armed forces.
If the Corps has too many young married Marines, it does not have enough minority officers. A CBS “60 Minutes” report aired in October, titled “A Few Good White Men,” charged that minority officers were less likely to be promoted in the Corps than their white counterparts.
Minority officers with prior enlisted service are very competitive with their white counterparts, however, and Vetter recommended an expanded program to commission more black officers from the enlisted ranks.
About 1.200 enlisted Marines have since been identified who possess the scores, without waivers, to become Marine officers. As of this writing, at least 23 have applied to precommissioning programs.
Overall, the Marines waded through the travails of 1993 apprehensive about the future. The deployment schedule remains crippling. The amphibious fleet continues to atrophy. Aviation modernization programs continue to lag, and the social issues spell no end of problems for commanders.
The Marines were able to hold on to an end strength of 174,000, but for how long? In his August letter to retired generals, Mundy said that “Phase II of our campaign ... [is to] ensure that a Rudyard Kipling ‘Thin Red Line’ is maintained” for the Marine Corps, referring to Kipling’s 1890 poem about Tommy Atkins, the English version of G.I. Joe who fought Britain’s colonial wars:
“Then it's Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy ‘ow’s yer soul?
But it’s thin red line of ‘eroes when the drums begin to roll. ”
The Commandant clearly sees the Marines stretched thin, like the under- appreciated British troops who were deployed to defend Her Majesty’s empire in the 19th century. Only now, the sun never sets on America’s globally-deployed Marine Corps. “My thrust is to see if we can’t get our civilian decision makers to ‘buy’ the Marine Corps for the $14 billion a year we need,” General Mundy confided. The $14 billion includes the money spent by the Navy supporting Marine aviation.
It may not be possible to exempt the Corps, as Mundy hopes, from cuts to his “thin red line” of $14 billion. The national debt will soon hit $5 trillion; to paraphrase the Marines’ hymn, America is going from the “Halls of Montezuma” to the shores of national bankruptcy. “Hopefully, this ‘thin red line’ will hold,” Mundy wrote.
It held in 1993, but ‘the thin red line’ may not hold for long against the nation’s rising tide of red ink.
Colonel Evans was an artillery officer while on active duty and served in the Vietnam War. Formerly the military affairs editor for the Chicago Tribune, he is a frequent contributor to Proceedings.