couldn’t keep pace with inflation rates, which ballooned from nearly 9 percent in 1973, the year that the AVF began, to 14 percent in 1980, the year that President Carter lost his campaign for reelection. Sailors who helped launch and recover planes aboard aircraft carriers earned less than hamburger flippers at McDonald’s. Among some of the youngest enlisted personnel, salaries fell below the federal government’s poverty level,1 which made the military less attractive to new recruits and more likely to lose qualified people, along with their experience and skills.
In 1979, the Navy reported that it had 20,000 fewer petty officers than it needed.2 The Army missed its recruitment goal by 15,000 soldiers.3 In that year, six out of the ten Army divisions on U.S. soil were deemed “not combat ready.” This was troubling because the burden of stopping and reversing a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe rested on the ability of U.S. forces to return to the continent and fight. If the U.S. Army’s predicament at home wasn’t sufficiently alarming, in Europe itself, one out of four U.S. combat divisions were rated as “not combat ready.”
The military responded by filling the ranks with large numbers of the unqualified. As the 1970s drew to a close, fresh recruits caused enough disciplinary problems or proved so unqualified that 40 percent of them had to be fired. Combat unreadiness was central to the military’s hollowness. General Frederick Kroesen, who had commanded U.S. troops in World War II and risen to become commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, described the U.S. Army in Europe as “obsolescent.”4
What the military calls “modernization,” the replacement of old equipment with new and more technologically advanced hardware, added to the hollowing effect of the 1970s. A chart of money spent on procurement since 1948 looks like jagged wide-angle pictures of Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains: sharp peaks divided by deep precipices. The summits occur during the Korean conflict, the Vietnam War, the Reagan buildup, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As the defense budget started to climb out of the trough that followed the end of the Vietnam War, Defense Department leaders wanted to replace antiquated weapons with new technologically superior ones.
The bottom of the post–Vietnam War dip in weapons procurement occurred in 1977 and 1978. New systems such as the Navy’s Aegis radar—which integrates a ship’s tracking and fire control systems—had been developed to replace twenty-five-year-old technology. The Defense Department started purchasing these and other systems, such as the Air Force’s F-15 fighter and the Army’s Apache attack helicopters, to modernize the entire military.
But there was a cost. Defense budgets couldn’t pay for both modernization and readiness. Fuel, flight hours, spare parts—all part of the large amount of logistics needed for training—are some examples of what’s required to keep a military force ready to fight.
The same logic applies in other competitive human activities. If an aspiring Olympic downhill skier can’t find financial support for training, lodging, food, and transportation—in addition to equipment—the athlete will lack the necessaries to hone his competitive skill.
Insufficient resources for readiness compounded the problem of attracting the high-quality personnel who are needed to operate more technologically advanced equipment and magnified the weakness that Army Chief of Staff General Meyer described as a hollow military.
Fundamental differences between the Navy’s idea of its role in protecting the nation and basic security assumptions of the Nixon and Carter administrations cannot be separated from the especially acute readiness problems that U.S. seapower faced. The Navy saw its mission as responding to crises around the world, while the White House, throughout the 1970s, concentrated on shoring up the central front in Europe against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Naval leadership would align its strategy later, but at the time the Navy had yet to articulate a strategic idea that fit administration policy.5 An official from the Carter administration’s Office of Management and Budget told the Navy “to get its act together.”
Then events intervened. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the failure of the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue American hostages held in Tehran, the hollow force’s emergence as an issue in the 1980 presidential campaign, and Republican president nominee Ronald Reagan’s arguments that peace depended on strength occurred in less than a year. These events prepared a solid base for popular support of large increases in defense spending. The defense budget measured 5.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1979. Seven years later it had climbed by over a fifth to 6.8 percent of GDP.6 In constant (2015) dollars, defense spending during the same period rose from slightly over $400 billion to slightly over $600 billion annually.7 The hollow force disappeared.
But not before the new administration learned the scope of naval unpreparedness. When John Lehman became secretary of the Navy at the beginning of the first Reagan term, he found that the Navy had “less than a week’s supply of most major defensive missiles and torpedoes.”8 The magazines of the fleet’s 479 ships were incomplete, and the shelves of logistics dumps were not full enough to replenish them. The media reported that $9 billion was needed to buy enough ammunition to reach authorized levels.9
Spare parts for ships and aircraft were one-third of the amount required. Such critical aircraft as the anti-submarine carrier-based S-3 Viking were so poorly supplied with spare parts that only three out of ten were capable of performing their missions.10 The Navy was so short on reserve aircraft that if they were used to fill gaps in the service’s twelve existing air wings—one wing per carrier—there were enough planes for only nine carriers.11 Insufficient funding was responsible for a backlog of twenty-six ships awaiting overhaul. The new Navy secretary reported that maintenance had been put off at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center’s gym for so long that the building “collapsed flat on the ground in 1981.”12
A similar hollowing affected the Navy’s fleet size. Measured in displacement, the U.S. Navy possessed more tonnage—3.5 times as much—in every category of combatant than the Soviets in the mid-1960s. Then, the U.S. Navy decommissioned aging World War II ships, and the Soviet fleet increased modestly. By the mid-1970s, absent resources to preserve the U.S. lead, the Soviets had caught up sufficiently so that its surface and submarine fleets, excluding the immense U.S. lead in aircraft carriers, out-displaced that of the United States.13
Displacement comparisons don’t tell the whole story. At the height of the hollow force of the 1970s, about 1978, the Soviet fleet consisted of 446 surface combatants to the United States’s 217. The advantage that the United States enjoyed in aircraft carriers, twenty-one to three, could never compensate for a numerically superior surface fleet’s ability to cover key global choke points, maintain presence, conduct convoy operations, deny access, or challenge denied access.
Other comparisons give a better picture. Ship-days measure the amount of time a single naval ship spends on patrol out of its home waters. Fewer ships mean fewer possible ship-days. In 1965, Soviet ship-days in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas as well as in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans numbered 7,500. For the same places and in the same year, the United States recorded almost 110,000 ship-days. Nine years later, U.S. ship-days had dropped to 61,300. Soviet ship-days had increased to 53,100.14
In other words, just as the Navy needed to modernize a fleet that was being decimated because of age, the Johnson administration was shifting defense budgets away from military hardware needed in the future and spending money on current operations in Vietnam. Its pre–Vietnam War level of shipbuilding funds was halved throughout the war.
The prospect of a hollow military has returned. Beginning with Leon Panetta, President Obama’s first secretary of Defense, all three secretaries of Defense of the Obama administration pointed out this possibility. A few months after taking office, Panetta, responding to the administration’s plan to decrease defense spending by $350 billion over ten years, said that additional
