Journalists Thomas Ricks and Vernon Loeb
They cover the military for The Washington Post. They'll discuss military preparedness for the war with Iraq. They collaborated on the special report "Unrivaled Military Feels Strains of Unending War: For U.S. Forces, a Technological Revolution and a Constant Call to Do More." In it they said, "The more capable the U.S. military has become, the more it has been asked to do, and now strains are beginning to show."
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DATE February 19, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A⨠TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A⨠NETWORK NPR⨠PROGRAM Fresh Airâ¨â¨Interview: Thomas Ricks and Vernon Loeb discuss the preparednessâ¨of the US military for a possible war with Iraqâ¨TERRY GROSS, host:â¨â¨This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.â¨â¨My guests, Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb, cover the military for The Washingtonâ¨Post and have been writing about the military preparations for war with Iraq.â¨They've written about the US military's unrivaled power and its new high-techâ¨weapons. But they've also described the strains that are showing as theâ¨military readies for war with Iraq while fighting a war on terrorism andâ¨preparing for possible action against North Korea.â¨â¨Tom Ricks has covered military activities in Somalia, Korea, Bosnia, Kuwait,â¨the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. He wrote about the military for The Wallâ¨Street Journal before joining The Washington Post. He was part of twoâ¨Pulitzer Prize-winning teams of reporters covering military preparations forâ¨the 21st century and the war on terrorism.â¨â¨Vernon Loeb was The Post's intelligence and national security correspondentâ¨before covering the Pentagon. He covered the Gulf War and served as theâ¨Southeast Asia correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer before joining Theâ¨Washington Post.â¨â¨In a recent piece that you both wrote, you said that the United States nowâ¨stands astride the globe, more dominant than any armed force since the legionsâ¨of the Roman Empire. What's different now for us?â¨â¨Mr. THOMAS RICKS (The Washington Post): Basically, the US military, over theâ¨last 10 years, has harnessed the information revolution and really moved intoâ¨the information age of warfare. No other military in the world was there.â¨And it's usually different, not just from every other military, but from theâ¨US military we had at the beginning of the Gulf War. When the Gulf War began,â¨Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as he watched the videoâ¨of the first cruise missile launched, said, `Now we're going to see if theseâ¨things work.' They had that level of doubt about their own technology. Theyâ¨don't have that level of doubt about their technology now. The US military isâ¨hugely confident that its technology is going to work this time.â¨â¨GROSS: You also write that some of the commanders who've known nothing butâ¨victory are confident to the point of cockiness. How have you seen thatâ¨expressed?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Basically, when I spent a good part of January knocking around theâ¨US military in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and aboard an aircraft carrier, there's aâ¨sense that these people know how good they are. They are very, very good.â¨It's a real contrast to the mood of the commanders going into the Gulf War.â¨Barry McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division of the Gulf War,â¨told me that when they got off the plane in Saudi Arabia on August 1990, theyâ¨had no food, no beds and no idea what they were doing there. They'd neverâ¨been there before. Now you have a US military that's fought there for 10â¨years, that's done constant training rotations through Kuwait. They know whatâ¨they're about. They know what they're doing there. And there's a littleâ¨worry at the margins. It's not a core worry, but the edges you hear a littleâ¨word of worry, inside the military and out of it, about hubris, about, youâ¨know, pride going before a fall, or people figuring out what theâ¨vulnerabilities are of the US military.â¨â¨GROSS: You said that we're so much more militarily advanced than our alliesâ¨that the Pentagon doesn't necessarily like to fight alongside the alliesâ¨because they may slow down the US forces. That's an unusual way of looking atâ¨it. Is that really a concern, that our allies would slow us down?â¨â¨Mr. VERNON LOEB (The Washington Post): Yeah, they wouldn't just slow us down.â¨They wouldn't be able to play the same game we play. The only ally we'reâ¨really comfortable fighting with at all is Britain, and the others just simplyâ¨play a different game than we do. I mean, the US military is into, you know,â¨digital age combat. It's not just the ability to hit a target, but it's theâ¨ability to move information around the battlefield so quickly that you can hitâ¨a target while it's still moving on the battlefield. And the US military, andâ¨perhaps the Brits, are the only military that can come close to doing this.â¨â¨GROSS: Is that one of the reasons, possibly, that President Bush doesn't seemâ¨that concerned about not having more allies going into this war?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I think it probably is because the Pentagon's view of the worldâ¨really does permeate, I think, this administration's assessment, and it ledâ¨into a kind of dead end in that neither France nor Germany is really aâ¨militarily significant country at this point. It sounds harsh to say it, butâ¨it is true, as a military assessment. They simply do not have the ability toâ¨project power globally. They can't move forces, and when they get there, theyâ¨really don't have very adept forces. As individual soldiers, they have allâ¨the bravery in the world, but as units, they don't. They're not very goodâ¨militarily, and I think that really did enter the Bush administration'sâ¨assessment. `We don't need these people. These people actually are kind ofâ¨an impediment on the battlefield.'â¨â¨At the same time, they're finding, it makes it much harder to go to the warâ¨that they're, I think, determined to go into because of that lack of support.â¨The other worry is also that while you may not need these people to fight, youâ¨do need them in the peacekeeping, the post-Saddam Iraq. And it's going to beâ¨harder to get them there now.â¨â¨GROSS: And do you think that because the United States has such superiorâ¨military capability unmatched by any country that the use of that military isâ¨entering more into, like, political strategy...â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, the military term for this is when the only tool you have isâ¨a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. You know, it's--the militaryâ¨calls it the militarization of foreign policy, and there are worries aboutâ¨this.â¨â¨GROSS: What are they?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: That the military is so good at what it does that it tends to beâ¨the tool of first resort rather than the last. And this is not just anâ¨ideological or partisan view. I mean, Bill Clinton seemed very fond of firingâ¨cruise missiles off during his presidency. I once figured out that I think heâ¨fired an average of one every three days in his presidency, if you took allâ¨the cruise missiles he used during his presidency to hit Sudan, Afghanistan,â¨Iraq. And this administration came in, saying, `No, we're not going to doâ¨nation-building. We're not going to go and use the forces that high anâ¨operational level.' Yet, they already have had a war in Afghanistan. Theyâ¨look like they're moving into a war with Iraq. And occupying Iraq is going toâ¨take huge numbers of troops for a long time. The military feels that everyâ¨foreign policy question seems to have a military answer.â¨â¨GROSS: At the same time that we're preparing for this probable war with Iraq,â¨we have military commitments in other parts of the world: peacekeepingâ¨missions in the Balkans, the war--you know, rebuilding Afghanistan, the war onâ¨terrorism, a threat from North Korea. In your assessment, I mean, do youâ¨think the military can handle all of that, and what kind of reaction have youâ¨been getting from commanders and other military people you've been speaking toâ¨about their feelings about whether the US military can support that muchâ¨action?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: When I was knocking around Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulfâ¨region last month, it was really striking to me that on the one hand, they doâ¨feel very confident; on the other hand, they feel tired. One guy made theâ¨point that he'd been in the Air Force seven and a half years and had doneâ¨seven tours of duty in Saudi Arabia in that time. They make the point thatâ¨the US involvement in World War II lasted about four years. They've been outâ¨there doing these sort of things now--the US military has been dealing withâ¨Iraq now for 12 years. And even if you get Iraq included, you're still goingâ¨to have an occupation there and you might have other engagements coming up inâ¨the Mideast. So they feel like they've kind of entered into an age ofâ¨continuous warfare. And I think they don't feel well-understood by theâ¨American people back here, that this is not a sustainable pace for the peopleâ¨in the US military, that being deployed for 220 days a year indefinitely willâ¨ruin your marriage. People are worried about their families, about not seeingâ¨their kids grow up.â¨â¨GROSS: This must be an issue for a lot of people because, as you've pointedâ¨out in your writing, the military is older than it used to be and also moreâ¨people in it are married.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: It's very much a married military and this is one of theâ¨consequences of the end of the draft. Rather than fill out the ranks withâ¨18-year-olds who are going to be there for a year and a half or two years orâ¨something, it's people who are making a career of it, 20 or 30 years. But itâ¨is a real concern in the military that they're going to wind up breaking theâ¨force. You hear this--the Army, especially, talks about it. The Army's kindâ¨of internal lobbying organization called the Association of the United Statesâ¨Army, which is basically a group of retired generals, has been running essaysâ¨in their own magazine warning that if the current pace of operations keeps up,â¨they are going to break the force.â¨â¨GROSS: What does that mean?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: It means that you're--as they put it, you will return toâ¨Vietnam-like conditions, Vietnam era-like conditions in the US Army, with aâ¨demoralized force, with people leaving, with good, seasoned experienced peopleâ¨leaving, being replaced by a less experienced, less trained and less capableâ¨people, and it becomes a much less capable military.â¨â¨GROSS: My guests are Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb. They cover the military forâ¨The Washington Post. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.â¨â¨(Soundbite of music)â¨â¨GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Vernon Loeb and Tom Ricks.â¨They cover the military for The Washington Post.â¨â¨Let's look a little bit at exactly what kind of weapons we're going to beâ¨using now in this new very high-tech military. What are some of the newâ¨high-tech innovations that will let the military do things it was unable to doâ¨before?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Well, the military smart bomb of choice right now is aâ¨satellite-guided bomb that was developed after Desert Storm when the primaryâ¨bomb was a laser-guided bomb. The problem with laser-guided bombs was theyâ¨don't work when it's cloudy or when it's dusty in the battlefields. The haze,â¨you know, obstructs the laser beam. So after Desert Storm, the militaryâ¨decided it needed an all-weather precision-guided bomb. So they basicallyâ¨took the laser-guided bomb and they added a GPS receiver to it, which meansâ¨the bomb is dropped from an airplane, it has its own inertial guidance system,â¨it starts steering it to the target and every second it gets an update fromâ¨global positioning system satellites. And this enables the bombs to strikeâ¨within about 10 meters or less of their target in all weather. So that'll beâ¨the starring smart bomb of the next Iraq war.â¨â¨And similarly, GPS receivers have been added to Tomahawk cruise missiles whichâ¨are fired from sea. So that our precision strike capabilities have increasedâ¨enormously since Desert Storm when I think it was 9 percent of the bombs--onlyâ¨9 percent of the bombs dropped were precision-guided bombs. This time around,â¨it'll probably be more like 90 percent.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: One thing I would add to that is while the next war in Iraq willâ¨look on the television in many ways very similar, that's because theâ¨platforms--ships, aircraft--are basically the same. What's really differentâ¨about the US military is what's inside them. Basically, the informationâ¨revolution has come home to roost in the US military. You know, the relianceâ¨that the US society has, in our business and personal lives, on e-mail to moveâ¨information around has its parallel in the US military for the last 10 years.â¨So now you have images going from aircraft over the battlefield back toâ¨headquarters in, say, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia instantly also shipped to CIAâ¨headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and to intelligence analysts across theâ¨country who are then looking at it, responding to analysts back in Saudiâ¨Arabia, who then communicate information back into the cockpit of a pilotâ¨still in flight.â¨â¨GROSS: Now during the Gulf War in '91, the smart bombs looked really smartâ¨and different from anything we'd ever seen before. When the war was over, weâ¨learned that some of the smart bombs made mistakes, or if the bombs didn'tâ¨make mistakes, some of the people guiding the bombs made mistakes. Is theâ¨military expecting that the smart bombs this time around, even though they'reâ¨more high-tech, will make errors, too?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Well--and smart bombs are dependent upon smart intelligence. Iâ¨mean, you can hit with great precision exactly the wrong thing, as we saw themâ¨do during the Kosovo war when they used satellite-guided bombs to destroy theâ¨Chinese Embassy in Belgrade thinking it was actually a Yugoslav armsâ¨bureaucracy. So smart bombs are very dependent upon good intelligence whichâ¨we're sometimes not that great at. The ability to hit a target withâ¨precision, we have pretty much mastered. The ability to do so with the kindâ¨of intelligence we need is something we're still working on and, in fact, aâ¨lot of people say we're not nearly good enough at yet.â¨â¨GROSS: Now a lot of the military's very high-tech now. You know, we'reâ¨talking about smart bombs and this, you know, e-mail-like system ofâ¨communication hooking up the battlefield to the CIA at home. What about theâ¨ground troops, the soldiers on the ground? Do they have high-tech stuff orâ¨are they basically fighting as if it were World War II?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: To a surprising degree, they don't. When we're talking about theâ¨e-mail, the military keep the US Marines out. I actually got an e-mail thisâ¨morning from a Marine in Kuwait who said, `As soon as the war begins, I'm offâ¨the Net. You're not going to hear from me.' It amazes me howâ¨disproportionately we do not spend on our ground forces. I don't know whyâ¨this is. I've covered the military for over a decade and I'm still deeplyâ¨puzzled by it. Why we have satellites that can see license plates from outerâ¨space, but we still have troops probing the battlefield with sticks to lookâ¨for mines.â¨â¨GROSS: I mean, I read that the troops are going to be carrying about 100â¨pounds on their backs. That's a lot.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: That's a good day. I've seen people carry 120, 150.â¨â¨GROSS: Really?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Yeah.â¨â¨GROSS: What's in there?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, you need everything to live with as if you're going on aâ¨camping trip, and then you need your weaponry and, you know, then ammunitionâ¨for the weaponry and the ability to keep that weapon working, if it's aâ¨machine gun or something. And then you need your chemical suit and yourâ¨chemical protection and a gas mask and then you have a little medical kitâ¨hanging off you. Don't forget it's the desert. You better have a couple ofâ¨quarts of water hanging off you at all times. And then you have body armor.â¨Body armor is actually one the change I've seen in the military, is they'reâ¨much more willing to give the infantry good stuff that actually can stop atâ¨least some small caliber weapons. That was not true 15 years ago. You'reâ¨seeing it more and more these days. It's one of the lessons learned from theâ¨battle of Mogadishu from "Black Hawk Down," is that a little body armor can goâ¨really help forces survive.â¨â¨GROSS: Now what about the chemical bioweapons suits that the ground troopsâ¨have to carry with them, that they really might have to wear? Do you get theâ¨sense that the troops have confidence in these suits, or that their commandersâ¨have confidence in these suits?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: I think they do. We're now actually, I think, on a second- orâ¨third-generation suit, a step up from what they had in the Gulf War. Again,â¨they're very rigorously tested, but, you know, they've never been used inâ¨combat. They've never been used in the real thing, and I think that's whereâ¨the real problems would come in. The problems would not be with the suitsâ¨themselves. It would be with the discipline of the soldiers putting them on,â¨putting them on rapidly enough, putting them on in the correct way. If youâ¨put on the gas mask and the seal is not correct around your chin, it does youâ¨no good whatsoever. So you've really got to train repeatedly putting theseâ¨things on, putting them on quickly enough, making sure once you have them onâ¨you keep them on and you've put them on in the right way. I think those areâ¨where all the uncertainties come in.â¨â¨GROSS: How much have you been able to learn about what the US militaryâ¨strategy is for entering Iraq?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I've written several stories about this over the last seven orâ¨eight months. We've kind of watched this process unfold. There has been aâ¨lot of talk about it partly because it's been a vigorous process. Inside theâ¨Pentagon, there's been a lot of argument back and forth. It started off withâ¨some people talking about an Afghanistan-like approach of using a few Specialâ¨Forces on the ground working with indigenous fighters to pull in US airâ¨strikes. And it's evolved to what other people now call Desert Storm Lite, aâ¨smaller version of the Gulf War, and then from there to kind of more somethingâ¨that looks more like a heavy, big version of the Panama invasion that a lot ofâ¨people have forgotten about, where the US came in overnight and simultaneouslyâ¨hit targets across Panama; I think about 45 targets in the first night,â¨landing troops on them and also conducting air strikes. So I think you'reâ¨going to see that sort of 1989-like Panama version updated with a higher-tech,â¨information-laden military. That's what they hope to pull off.â¨â¨Another thing I'll point out is that it may not begin like a lot of peopleâ¨expect, with cruise missiles down to Baghdad. That may come at the end of theâ¨equation rather than the beginning. There's no particular reason to start offâ¨with that. You might want to hit a few what they call `high-value targets,'â¨the pillars of the regime, maybe where you think Saddam Hussein is, maybe aâ¨few weapons of mass destruction spots that you think you can safely hit fromâ¨the air without sending up a plume of poisons. But you also might see whatâ¨they call a `soft launch' in marketing, of moving in and protectively takingâ¨oil fields, of putting troops into the north and the west and biting off bigâ¨chunks of Iraq without much fighting.â¨â¨GROSS: Americans were just, I think, shocked by the amount of force used atâ¨the opening of the Gulf War, the amount of American military force. Do youâ¨think that it's likely to have that much or even more military force on theâ¨opening night, for instance, or opening day?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I think there will be a multiple of that amount of force, butâ¨it'll be done simultaneously across Iraq and mainly won't be visible. So itâ¨may not look like that.â¨â¨GROSS: What do you mean it won't be visible?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, you're not going to have people out in the oil fields,â¨reporters, necessarily. You're not going to have TV cameras capturing whereâ¨it's occurring if it's way out in the Iraqi desert.â¨â¨GROSS: Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah. Mm-hmm.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: So it may happen offstage, as it were.â¨â¨GROSS: Right. And what do you think the US military is preparing for Iraq toâ¨do if we start the war?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: I think the main thing they're expecting Iraq to do is to disperseâ¨its forces and fall back into Baghdad and perhaps into the regional cities,â¨having learned the lesson from the Gulf War, which was, you know, when youâ¨amass your forces on the battlefield, you are sitting ducks for Americanâ¨technology. And there's also a belief that Saddam Hussein spent quite a bitâ¨of time studying Yugoslavia from 1999 and learning the Serbian lesson ofâ¨decoys, decoys sometimes even with a heat source. So a decoy with a heatâ¨source to one of our infrared sensors looks like a tank when, in fact, it'sâ¨not a tank, and also, again, the dispersion of forces.â¨â¨You know, when your forces are in the city, not massed, just dispersed inâ¨various small groupings, they're very hard to hit from the air, and it's aâ¨great equalizer. It's a great way to neutralize the US technologicalâ¨advantage. So I think that's what they're expecting from Saddam Hussein'sâ¨elite forces. I think the expectation--and this will be interesting to seeâ¨whether this is correct, but I think one of their main expectations is thatâ¨the regular Iraqi military, about 400,000 people, are not going to fight.â¨They feel the fight will boil down to, ultimately, the US military against theâ¨Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard, which are basically regimeâ¨preservation forces amassed around Baghdad.â¨â¨GROSS: And I think the United States has already been telling people in theâ¨Republican Guards and their commanders that since the United States will win,â¨if there is a war, that they might as well surrender, not fight. And,â¨therefore, they'll be good guys after the regime change, as opposed to badâ¨guys who will be punished by the United States. How are they going aboutâ¨doing that? How is the United States military going about sending out thisâ¨message?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, supposedly, they've even sent e-mail. They've gotten intoâ¨e-mail accounts and sent them to commanders of units; not only just tellingâ¨them that, you know, `If you don't fight us, you have a chance of surviving,â¨even in being part of a post-Saddam Iraqi military,' but also telling themâ¨that, `We know who you are and we know where to you find you if your unit usesâ¨chemical weapons, and you will be held accountable personally and directly.'â¨â¨GROSS: Is anybody assessing how effective these communications are?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, it's hard to at this point. I'm sure the US military isâ¨trying. There are CIA people and the Special Operations people inside Iraqâ¨now, and I think they're trying to track that.â¨â¨One of the surprising lessons after the Gulf War was that psychologicalâ¨operations were pretty effective during the Gulf War. When they surveyed POWsâ¨who had surrendered and asked them if they had seen American leaflets, aboutâ¨90 percent, I believe, said they had seen American leaflets encouraging themâ¨to surrender and telling them they wouldn't be harmed, and about half saidâ¨that they had been encouraged to surrender by those leaflets. So while theâ¨military tends to make fun of that sort of thing, you know, the triggerâ¨pullers and the bomb droppers--`Oh, you know, they hate to go out and just doâ¨a mission where all they're doing is dropping leaflets'--the record says thatâ¨those do have some effect.â¨â¨GROSS: Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb cover the military for The Washington Post.â¨They'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this isâ¨FRESH AIR.â¨â¨(Credits)â¨â¨(Soundbite of music)â¨â¨GROSS: Coming up, what could go wrong in Iraq? We continue our conversationâ¨with Thomas Ricks and Vernon Loeb, who cover the military for The Washingtonâ¨Post.â¨â¨(Soundbite of music)â¨â¨GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Tom Ricks and Vernonâ¨Loeb. They cover the military for The Washington Post. They've been writingâ¨about how the military is preparing for war with Iraq. Let's pick up where weâ¨left off.â¨â¨Saddam Hussein has threatened to set Iraq's oil fields on fire the way he didâ¨Kuwait's oil fields. Do you know if the US military has a plan to eitherâ¨prevent that from happening, or to minimize the damage of the firesâ¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I think it's likely to be one of the first steps you see by the USâ¨military. That's one reason I was saying don't expect to see cruise missilesâ¨in downtown Baghdad as the opening gambit. A smart plan would get to thoseâ¨oil fields and get to dams very early on and prevent them from beingâ¨destroyed, the oil fields from being torched, or the dams from being blown up.â¨If you blew up the dams and the dikes in southern Iraq, it would make itâ¨enormously more difficult for the US military to travel across southern Iraqâ¨and to mount an attack in Baghdad.â¨â¨It's a difficult issue, though. Oil fields are long and large. They'reâ¨hundreds of square miles, so you can't just drop a company of infantry and sayâ¨`Protect this.' You have to have supplies, you have to have vehicles to getâ¨around, you have to have fuel for those vehicles. It's a difficult militaryâ¨proposition, and I'm sure that some damage will be done to the oil fieldsâ¨early on.â¨â¨On the other hand, keep in mind that the US military had never confronted anâ¨issue like this back in '91 when the Gulf War was kicked off. They've beenâ¨thinking about issues like this for 10 years. They learned they do, indeed,â¨have to study the nature of an oil field, where the key vulnerabilities are,â¨where the manifolds are, and I think they will move in on key points in theâ¨oil fields very quickly and very early on in any invasion.â¨â¨GROSS: But what about like remote controlled explosives, so, you know, Iraqâ¨could possibly blow up the oil fields without having an personnel on site toâ¨do it?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I'm sure it's a possibility, and I'm sure they're worried about it andâ¨and trying to figure out how to stop it.â¨â¨There's a very long list of nightmares here. I have to tell you, though, thatâ¨most of the nightmares, when you talk to senior military officers, most of theâ¨nightmares that they talk about are not tactical, that is, not part of theâ¨battlefield. Yeah, they're worried about chemical and biological weapons,â¨yeah, they're worried about urban warfare, but what really worries them areâ¨the consequences of a war internally in Iraq. Can you hold the place togetherâ¨after a war, or do the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north kind ofâ¨spin off, officially or unofficially, into their own independent worlds?â¨â¨If you do this badly, if it's messier than you expect, if it takes longer, ifâ¨you have a drawn-out siege of Baghdad, if a lot of civilians are killed byâ¨chemical weapons as they drift downwind, these are all things that couldâ¨really affect the region, and the nightmare scenario is that you really blowâ¨it in Iraq, you mess it up and you destabilize regimes across theâ¨region--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, even Pakistan, and wind up with a far biggerâ¨problem on your plate than the one you began with.â¨â¨GROSS: Do you think, though, the Pentagon, or, you know, anyone else in theâ¨Bush administration thinks that Saddam Hussein might either surrender, flee,â¨or, you know, go into exile?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Or get killed by somebody in a coup. I think they're hopingâ¨against hope. I'm sure that they're following the Afghan pattern there, ofâ¨trying to spread some greenbacks around and encouraging people to act. Iâ¨mean, a coup would be a whole lot cheaper and easier, and easier for theâ¨region than any US invasion. And so while, you know, they don't like a lot ofâ¨the diplomatic yammering that's going on now, with Germany and France puttingâ¨roadblocks in their way, at the same time, it does give them a chance to letâ¨that quite strategy of subversion unfold inside Iraq.â¨â¨GROSS: There are Special Operations forces already in Iraq. To what extentâ¨has the war already begun?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: It's funny, actually, the lead I wrote on that story when I wrote about itâ¨last week was that the question everybody's asking around Washington is whenâ¨the war in Iraq will begin, and the answer may be `It already has.' I mean,â¨one of the classic measures of a war, it's when you have troops on the groundâ¨somewhere, and when you're bombing almost every day. Well, that's what we'reâ¨going in Iraq right now.â¨â¨There are some people in the US military who say the first Gulf War, the '91â¨Gulf War, never ended. They went into kind of a low-key phase. We hadâ¨operations in northern Iraq for years. We had an intense bombing in 1998, theâ¨Desert Fox campaign, which was a very effective campaign, and now it's simplyâ¨escalating again. So yeah, I think you could make an argument that we've beenâ¨at war for 10 years, but the signs of an increasing war, of an escalating war,â¨are there right now.â¨â¨GROSS: Now you were talking earlier about how the United States military isâ¨so more high-tech than any of its allies are, that the allies sometimes wouldâ¨only slow down the United States as opposed to really helping in a militaryâ¨campaign. What does the military want our allies to do, outside of givingâ¨bases to the US military?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: In a word, peacekeeping. After the war is over, there's going toâ¨be a huge demand for troops in Iraq, you know, anywhere from 50,000 toâ¨250,000, and Rumsfeld is no big fan of peacekeeping. He doesn't like to tieâ¨up US forces, you know, the world's pre-eminent fighters, doing peacekeeping.â¨Right now in Afghanistan, you know, who's heading the internationalâ¨peacekeeping mission but Germany? We have 1,000 forces there, still doingâ¨basically combat patrols, and we're relying on Germany and a whole bunch ofâ¨other NATO allies to do the peacekeeping there, and that's certainly a modelâ¨we want to follow in Iraq, so the Pentagon does not want to have three Armyâ¨divisions tied up in Iraq for the next five years.â¨â¨GROSS: The US military wants to keep Israel out of a war with Iraq. What areâ¨the plans that the US military has to keep Israel out and to offer protectionâ¨to Israel?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, we've had troops in the region, I think probably operatingâ¨out of Jordan, going into western Iraq. The Israelis have also hadâ¨reconnaissance troops in and out of western Iraq, last summer, all for theâ¨purpose of making sure that the western Iraqi desert is not a launching pad,â¨either for Scuds or, more likely, for drone aircraft loaded with chemical andâ¨biological weapons. I actually think it's going to be easier in thisâ¨situation than it was in '91 to keep Israel out of the war. Jordan is beingâ¨much more cooperative now than it was in that conflict, so I think you'll haveâ¨US forces quietly operating out of Jordan. You'll probably have US aircraftâ¨flying out of the Mediterranean Sea off of carriers across Israel and acrossâ¨Jordan into western Iraq, which you did not have in '91. All that, I think,â¨will make it much harder for Iraq to try to get off strikes against Israelâ¨that would regionalize the conflict and make it an Arab-Western conflict.â¨â¨At the same time, during the last war, Saddam Hussein never really wasâ¨personally threatened with the loss of his regime or his life. This time thatâ¨clearly is the US intent, so there is a kind of worry that there's anâ¨apocalyptic ending where as he realizes he's not going to survive, hisâ¨regime's crumbling, his forces, wherever they are, hidden across mountains,â¨out in the desert, do get off a few final shots, and that is a worry thatâ¨Israel has, and I think wants more reassurance from.â¨â¨GROSS: How worried is the military that as they're preparing for this war inâ¨Iraq or further down the line, as they're fighting a war in Iraq, that theyâ¨won't need to deploy forces to North Korea as well, and be, you know, facedâ¨with a conflict on two fronts?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: I think they're really worried about that. I think a lot of peopleâ¨in the military see North Korea, actually, as a greater threat than Iraq and aâ¨greater threat because there is far less they can do immediately to stop Northâ¨Korea if North Korea wants to do something incredibly provocative. In fact,â¨North Korea's now saying that they're withdrawing from the 1953 armistice thatâ¨ended the Korean War, so that as the US gets deeper and deeper into Iraq,â¨Korea acts more and more aggressively. So I think that's a large worry forâ¨the US military.â¨â¨I think they're also increasingly worried about al-Qaeda staging terroristâ¨attacks, either here in the US, somewhere abroad or increasing terroristlikeâ¨attacks in Afghanistan in concert with an invasion of Iraq. I think the upperâ¨echelons of the military are full of people asking very tough questions aboutâ¨the war, perhaps not to Rumsfeld and Bush but at least internally. I thinkâ¨there is far more enthusiasm for this war at the White House and among theâ¨civilian leaders of the Pentagon than there is among the uniformed leaders ofâ¨the military. The uniformed leaders of the military are basically saying,â¨`We're confident we can carry out this mission. We'll do the mission if we'reâ¨told to do the mission, we'll salute like good soldiers, but we have a lot ofâ¨questions about whether we really need to do this right now.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I have heard some muttering over the last six months in theâ¨Pentagon. `You know that Clinton administration? They weren't so bad afterâ¨all, you know? Didn't like them back then, but, you know, in retrospect, theyâ¨were easier to handle, easier to push around than these guys.' Rumsfeld hasâ¨pushed very hard on the military, has said basically, `I'm in control. Thankâ¨you very much for your advice. Now I'm going to do what I want to do here.'â¨The military's not used to that. The military got its way much more with theâ¨Clinton administration, and they still are getting used to the change.â¨â¨GROSS: My guests are Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb. They cover the military forâ¨The Washington Post. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.â¨â¨(Soundbite of music)â¨â¨GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Vernon Loeb and Tom Ricks.â¨They cover the military for The Washington Post.â¨â¨Vernon, you recently wrote about the defense budget, and pointed out that theâ¨money for war in Iraq and for the rebuilding of Iraq isn't really budgeted in.â¨Where is the money supposed to come from?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Well, it'll come from the deficit, basically. The Bushâ¨administration just sent up its new budget. It's the biggest increase of anyâ¨department in the federal government. It's the sixth straight militaryâ¨increase in a row, and yet it includes no money for the war on terrorism inâ¨Afghanistan and no money for the war in Iraq, which will have to beâ¨appropriated in a supplemental bill later by Congress. What that basicallyâ¨means is we're going to deficit-finance the war. We're running a big deficitâ¨now, and we're just going to keep adding to it as we fight the war. Soâ¨despite this rather large buildup in defense spending over the first threeâ¨years of the Bush administration, it's not nearly enough to pay for the war,â¨and in fact, it's not even nearly enough to pay for the military. We'reâ¨basically, even with these large increases, having to choose betweenâ¨continuing current systems or discontinuing some of them in order to pay for,â¨you know, research into the newest generation of weapons that Rumsfeld wants.â¨So money is a huge question, and I think it will become a bigger and biggerâ¨question as the war rolls along and the debate over defense spending reallyâ¨heats up on Capitol Hill.â¨â¨GROSS: So some of the more conventional weapons are getting old because we'reâ¨spending the money on the new weapons?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: If you looked at the US military inventory, it was built with theâ¨idea that labor was a free good because you could have a draft and you couldâ¨bring in as many hands as you needed to maintain things, to fix them. Withâ¨the end of the draft, it took the military about 10 years to recognize thatâ¨maintenance suddenly was a hugely expensive thing to obtain, and so the newâ¨military weaponry they're buying, new aircraft for example, is much easier toâ¨fix, much faster to fix. Some of the Cold War aircraft, you have to actuallyâ¨lift off the wing to get at the engine, on the Harrier, for example. When youâ¨repair an F-18, you basically take out one computer card and put in anotherâ¨computer card. The mechanics say it's boring; the pilots say, `This is great.â¨I can have my plane back in 15 minutes.' That's a huge difference.â¨â¨GROSS: Do you get the feeling that the military is competing with homelandâ¨defense for money?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: The military is competing with everybody for money and winning theâ¨competition hands down. In fact, the Bush administration is alreadyâ¨underfunding homeland security and holding the line on everything else whileâ¨it continues to build up military expenditures. I think the military budgetâ¨for '04 is $379 billion. That's more than a billion dollars a day, or $42â¨million an hour, as Rumsfeld likes to point out. The rest of the budget, theâ¨rest of domestic discretionary spending, is $316 billion. So the military isâ¨already far larger than the rest of the entire federal budget.â¨â¨GROSS: Combined?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Combined.â¨â¨GROSS: Oh.â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: We spend--a few other comparisons--we spend 10 times what Britainâ¨or France does on our military, and we spend twice what all of the other NATOâ¨countries combined spend on their militaries.â¨â¨GROSS: It was recently announced that journalists will be able to actuallyâ¨cover battles, that journalists will be assigned to accompany combat units inâ¨Iraq, which they were not allowed to do during the Gulf War. What kind ofâ¨tough decisions do you think the reporters with the front-line troops willâ¨have to make?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Well, simply going in itself and doing it is a fairly toughâ¨decision. When I look at some of the things these reporters are having to doâ¨now, you know, to get vaccinations, some of them a little bit scary, toâ¨prepare themselves for dealing with a chemical environment. You haveâ¨reporters looking at the prospect of wearing a chemical suit for days or evenâ¨weeks at a time. And that's a difficult life. Front-line infantry life isâ¨extraordinarily difficult, and I think it's my biggest concern for reportersâ¨going into it is it really is another world. It's almost a psychoticâ¨environment to be in, to be in front-line foot ground combat. I think justâ¨going in's going to be difficult.â¨â¨Once they're in there, there's going to be issues about casualties, how youâ¨report casualties, how you talk about them, how you talk about troops who areâ¨undergoing enormously emotionally wrenching problems. There's going to be aâ¨lot of problems with civilians. You're going to have displaced people acrossâ¨the battlefield. You're going to have refugees, and you're going to haveâ¨hungry kids and thirsty kids asking troops for food and water. And myâ¨experience is that no matter what their orders are, American troops giveâ¨hungry and thirsty kids food and water. They don't like walking by them.â¨â¨GROSS: And they might not have any water for themselves if they do that.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Or they've been told not to do it, or there's always theâ¨concern--you see this played out in exercises where the soft-hearted soldierâ¨gives the kid food, the kid comes back the next day, he gives him food again,â¨the third day the kid throws an explosive over the fence and blows him up.â¨â¨GROSS: Right.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: And they teach you, don't do this. Baghdad, no matter how wellâ¨the war goes, could be a pretty difficult experience.â¨â¨I'm equally worried, though, about the independent reporters. Because of theâ¨Gulf War experience, no media fully trust the promises of the US military onâ¨this, and so every organization is going to have both embedded reporters andâ¨independent reporters. And I think it's going to be an enormously lethalâ¨environment to be trying to drive an SUV or a Land Rover around in.â¨â¨And you're probably going to see independent reporters flexi-cuffed by USâ¨troops and thrown down in the dust because the US troops don't know who theyâ¨are. You're going to have US reporters trying to hide out in Baghdad probablyâ¨as the war begins, and who knows how they'll be treated by civilians angry atâ¨having that capital invaded.â¨â¨GROSS: Would either of you ever want to be a reporter covering this war whereâ¨weapons of mass destruction might be used?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Unfortunately Tom and I are stuck back here at the Pentagon. Iâ¨think we'd both love to be embedded with one unit or another. I actuallyâ¨covered the Gulf War in Israel, and one of my jobs was to cover the Scudâ¨missile landings in Tel Aviv. I've often thought that, you know, had Saddamâ¨used his chemical warheads back then, I'd probably be dead. But I think, youâ¨know, any military reporter worth his or her salt would love to be out thereâ¨with the forces.â¨â¨GROSS: Tom?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: I don't know. It would be something, I'd have to say, that I'dâ¨talk to my wife and my kids about before I went. It's really a job ideallyâ¨for a single person to be out there on the front lines. At the same time I'mâ¨not that worried about US forces and chemical weapons. The best militaryâ¨answer to a chemical weapons attack is to step on the gas pedal. And a lot ofâ¨civilians don't have that option. But a fast-moving force is very hard toâ¨attack with chemical weapons effectively. So I'm not so worried about that.â¨But I am worried about reporters wandering around independently. You could beâ¨enormously vulnerable. As a reporter over in Afghanistan looking acrossâ¨minefields and just thinking, you know, if your taxi goes the wrong way,â¨suddenly you're trapped in a minefield. That's what really worries me forâ¨reporters.â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Yeah. The far more dangerous assignment will be to be anâ¨independent foreign correspondent over there. I think the reporters embeddedâ¨with US forces by and large are going to be pretty well taken care of. I'mâ¨not convinced that even if you're with the 101st Airborne the embeddedâ¨reporters are going to be with the leading edge of that force. I wouldâ¨suspect they'll be somewhat to the rear. But when you're an independentâ¨foreign correspondent out there on your own, you can get killed in all sortsâ¨of ways. I remember those reporters in Afghanistan who were killed convoyingâ¨from Bagram to Khost. They just got held up by a bunch of bandits andâ¨executed. So it's an extremely dangerous environment, but I'm not sure it'sâ¨that dangerous for reporters embedded with US forces.â¨â¨GROSS: My guests are Vernon Loeb and Tom Ricks. They cover the military forâ¨The Washington Post. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.â¨â¨(Soundbite of music)â¨â¨GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb.â¨They cover the military for The Washington Post.â¨â¨Vernon, you were just in and out of Kuwait. You made a really fast trip thereâ¨over the weekend. You spent more time getting there and getting back than youâ¨were actually there. I think you were there for like seven hours. What didâ¨you find out during that seven hours in Kuwait?â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Well, the main thing I found out was that there are no Kuwaitisâ¨around, which was kind of surprising. They flew me on a helicopter fromâ¨Kuwait City down to a new base they've got about 40 miles south of Kuwaitâ¨City. And the general I was with was marveling at how there was all thisâ¨beachfront property and there wasn't a Kuwaiti to be found. The country isâ¨full of Americans. The day I was there the Kuwaiti government ruled theâ¨northern half of their country off-limits to civilians. So what you've gotâ¨basically in Kuwait City is the huge American logistics machines, wide-bodyâ¨aircraft, coming in one after another, tanks all over the place. And then upâ¨north you've got all the forces actually massing. So Kuwait is like a giantâ¨US military camp right now.â¨â¨GROSS: Tom, one of the things you've recommended to reporters who will beâ¨going to cover war in Iraq is that they read Ernie Pyle, the World War IIâ¨correspondent. What is it that you so respect about the late Ernie Pyle'sâ¨writing that you think should be a model?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: There are a lot of lessons to be gleaned from Ernie Pyle, from hisâ¨reporting techniques. He pays as much attention to the enlisted troops as toâ¨officers. I think especially for today's Ivy League-laden newsrooms it's allâ¨too easy to be swayed by credentials and paying too much attention toâ¨officers. I tell myself, I know I'm doing my job when I'm talking to theâ¨sergeants, not talking to generals. That if I have talked to a sergeantâ¨lately, I know that I'm doing good reporting.â¨â¨What I particularly liked in going back and looking at Pyle's essays in theâ¨collection called "Brave Men" is that he didn't just go and look at theâ¨glamorous units. He also did really good reporting on units that don't getâ¨that much attention. My favorite section of "Brave Men" is an account of anâ¨engineering unit in Sicily. Not much happens in this account. They clear aâ¨road, they fill some huge potholes, they build a bridge. But in the course ofâ¨this, he shows you what they're doing, why it's important, what is significantâ¨to these men. And he actually brings them to life. The sergeant in hisâ¨account of these engineers is the central figure, not an officer. And theâ¨sergeant is sort of this bluff, loud guy. I've always thought that Sergeantâ¨Horvath in "Saving Private Ryan" was based on the sergeant in this engineeringâ¨unit. He just seemed so similar. He's a force of nature. He's thisâ¨personality he's using to basically get this bridge built at a crucial time soâ¨US forces can move forward.â¨â¨We don't get as much Ernie Pyle type reporting as we used to, partly 'causeâ¨the US military is warier of having reporters around, partly because we don'tâ¨have a lot of experienced reporters. There's not that many veterans inâ¨newsrooms anymore. So military units are kind of alien beasts to them ratherâ¨than familiar things that they grew up or spent time in themselves.â¨â¨GROSS: Ernie Pyle died in the war, died covering the war.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Yeah, he was shot in the Pacific near the end of the war.â¨â¨GROSS: So that's something to think about, too.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Yes. Unfortunately, yes.â¨â¨GROSS: Right. Is there any way out of war now, do you think? Everybody'sâ¨been asking this question. I'd be interested in hearing your opinions.â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: I've been saying for weeks now that it's inevitable. It just seemsâ¨to me the Bush administration's mind is made up. Yeah, they're willing to goâ¨through another couple of weeks of diplomacy now, but I think basicallyâ¨they've decided that this is a war they have to fight; better to get it overâ¨with now than wait two, three months to really no end. So, yeah, you canâ¨conceive of situations where Saddam suddenly disarms, which strikes me asâ¨totally unlikely. You can dream up the exile scenario. But I think the warâ¨is going to happen and I would be very surprised if by mid-March the Unitedâ¨States is not at war with Iraq.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: During the Gulf War, the first Bush administration's nightmareâ¨scenario was that Saddam Hussein at the very last moment withdrew his forcesâ¨up into the northern part of Kuwait but kept the Kuwaiti oil fields.â¨Similarly my guess is right now this administration's nightmare scenario isâ¨that at the very last moment Saddam Hussein says, `Fine, you can have allâ¨these biological, chemical weapons. I'm sorry I didn't tell the truth. Hereâ¨they are,' and you can have inspectors here for a year or two. We haveâ¨inspectors, everything's all over the country, he's totally disarmed and heâ¨says, `Now leave' after two years and everybody says, `That's right, the guyâ¨fessed up; he's clean.' And then he takes that enormous oil revenue and poursâ¨it all into acquiring nuclear weapons.â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: But that's what it would take, I think, to avoid a war at thisâ¨point.â¨â¨GROSS: You've both covered the military for several years. I know youâ¨understand the military's need for secrecy on certain war-related information.â¨Is there a place where you draw the line between the secrecy that a militaryâ¨needs to keep and the secrecy that's kind of above and beyond when it comes toâ¨not giving information to journalists?â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: It comes up all the time. What you don't want to do is endangerâ¨troops or endanger current or future operations. You're constantly trying toâ¨balance that with the sense that: Are the American people being told whatâ¨they need to know? Are they going in with their eyes open? I wrote a story aâ¨week ago about US Special Operations troops inside Iraq. And, yes, we wereâ¨trying to be sensitive to US concerns. We talked to the US government aboutâ¨the story before it ran. We withheld details, the parts that the governmentâ¨asked us to withhold. Nobody asked us not to publish the story, by the way.â¨â¨And still, I got a lot of hate mail from across the country about it, and Iâ¨wrote back to these people saying, `Yes, we have those concerns. We did workâ¨with the government on this to try to publish it in such a way that it was notâ¨harmful.' But you need to keep in mind also that this is a democracy and ifâ¨the American people are having a war waged in their name, they should knowâ¨about it. And I don't want people coming back two years to me as a reporterâ¨and saying, `Why didn't you tell us what you knew when you knew it? Why didâ¨you hold back?' So you constantly try and balance those two things.â¨â¨GROSS: Tom Ricks, Vernon Loeb, thank you so much for talking with us.â¨â¨Mr. RICKS: Thank you.â¨â¨Mr. LOEB: Thank you.â¨â¨GROSS: Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb cover the military for The Washington Post.â¨â¨(Credits)â¨â¨GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.