Military Exploits:
Of Men and Money,
And How the Pentagon
Often Wastes Both
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On the Roosevelt, It's All Job,
No Adventure, Scrubbing
Floors With Steel Wool
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'Just a Professional Janitor'

[First in a series on military spending]

IN THE ADRIATIC SEA -- It's lunchtime aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and Petty Officer Keschina Storts is in charge of the pork-chop line. She's an aviation-electronics specialist by training, but her job at the moment is to count sailors lining up for rations. Three other sailors stand at the front of other lines doing the same thing. Their assignment: to find out how many of the 4,600 men and women aboard this aircraft carrier prefer pork chops to hamburgers, "so we know how much food to order," says galley supervisor Timothy Tuck.

Several hours into her 12-hour shift, Petty Officer Storts's little aluminum clicker is up to platter No. 615, about the same rate as the last time pork chops were offered. "I know there are better uses for my time," says Ms. Storts, a 23-year-old mother of two from Fontana, Calif., who is on a months-long rotation in the galley. "But this is where the Navy wants me right now."

So it goes for much of the crew. Throughout the 96,000-ton ship, from the signal bridge to the galleys three stories below the flight deck, sailors perform many of the same tasks their predecessors did 30 years ago. They stand watches that video cameras and remote sensors could handle. They chip and repaint heavily trafficked parts of the ship every three months, though commercial ships have found ways to make paint last as long as three years. And they scour floors with steel wool designed for dishes, not decks.

It's a paradox that bedevils all branches of the U.S. military today: undermanned and overstaffed, as the armed forces consistently fall short of recruitment and retention goals to fill jobs that often are of dubious necessity. While the military needs to attract technically skilled recruits like Ms. Storts to fight its high-tech "hot spot" wars, it hasn't modernized its personnel practices accordingly.

Pentagon officials "genuinely believe that people are our most important asset, but too often we treat them as though they were a free good," Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig says in an interview. "The world has changed, but the Navy hasn't changed with it."

Of course, the primary function of a Navy ship's work force isn't to perform chores such as cleaning and painting with maximum efficiency: It is to keep the ship running 24 hours a day, as well as to prepare for and fight wars. As a result, a certain measure of redundancy is built into the system.

Nonetheless, inefficient use of human resources is one of several reasons why, while the Soviet Union is a decade deceased, the "peace dividend" the U.S. was supposed to enjoy in the post-Cold War world has been underwhelming -- arguably, more chump change than jackpot. Though the sums are down from the peak years of the Reagan-era buildup, the U.S. still spends $275 billion a year to defend itself, and, increasingly, police the world. As the enforcer for the world's sole superpower, America's "peacetime" military is one of the busiest in the nation's history, carrying out major operations nearly continuously throughout the 1990s. During Bill Clinton's presidency alone, the U.S. has fired more than 900 cruise missiles in combat -- an average of one every three days.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

As Congress engages in its annual debate over how much to increase the Pentagon's budget -- an argument that for years has involved just a few billion dollars one way or the other -- there is little focus on the bigger picture: What exactly are we buying with all the money? Are we using those resources wisely? And do they provide us with the military we need as the global superpower?

This article initiates a series that examines these questions and explores how the Pentagon is struggling to adapt to a new world in which it is hindered by the persistence of some of its Cold War ways. Promising weapons programs are starved for funding in favor of big-ticket armaments designed for confronting Soviets on the high seas and the plains of Central Europe. Recruiters use antiquated methods to chase a shrinking pool of job seekers. Bureaucratic turf wars stall efforts to close unneeded facilities. Huge nuclear-armed submarines roam the oceans poised to fight a war that they won a decade ago without ever having fired a shot. Everyone agrees that if the U.S. military were rebuilt from scratch today, it would look very different -- but few agree on just what those differences should be.

Nowhere is the military's failure to adapt to the modern world more evident than in the way it treats its people. Paying for military and civilian employees is the Pentagon's biggest single cost -- roughly $120 billion annually. But many observers think that amount could be a lot less. For example, a 1998 study by Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank, concluded that updating technology could allow substantial reductions in the number of personnel on aircraft carriers. The study found that if such personnel were reduced by 1,500 sailors -- a figure the Navy says is reasonable -- the Navy could run 15 carriers at the current cost of operating 10 to 12. Navy Secretary Danzig blames a "psychology of conscription" for much of the inefficiency in human resources, and he says he is committed to purging it.

A 24-hour period aboard the Roosevelt is all it takes to see the huge challenge he faces.

It's a little before 7 a.m., about a week after the end of the Kosovo air campaign, and the crew is settling back into its normal peacetime routine. A division of the ship's boatswain's mates gather beneath a huge portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt in the hangar bay.

Boatswain's mates are the ship's all-purpose sailors. "Our job is the same as when I joined the Navy," says Chief Petty Officer Christopher Comer, a 19-year veteran who supervises the 32-sailor division. "Paint needs to be chipped, and floors need to be stripped and waxed." The painting and chipping are constant. Some passageways are repainted once every two weeks to cover accumulated grime.

Shortly after the morning muster, Seaman Jerome Reed begins stripping and waxing one of the ship's passageways with scraps of steel wool and kitchen sponges. If he had a mechanical buffer, the six-hour job could be accomplished in two. But none of the buffers on board is assigned to his division. Besides, the bosses insist that the floors look shinier when swabbed by hand.

The Navy could buy more buffers or install newer types of flooring that don't need to be stripped, buffed and waxed weekly. Such flooring is already used in most commercial ships and a few naval ships. The barriers to replacing the decks, however, are more cultural than practical. Swabbing the decks is a job that is part of Navy custom and lore. It was conceived not just to ensure clean floors, but also to teach sailors to take pride in their ship. It's the kind of job that some Navy brass say they want to eliminate.

"If you force young, smart sailors to work this way, they will not stay with the Navy," says Rear Adm. William Cross, who is heading an effort to redesign all aspects of the Navy's carriers, from bridge to galleys. The first changes designed to reduce manpower will begin appearing on the carriers in 2008. The largest savings, however, won't be realized until 2018, at the earliest.

"Are we slow in doing this?" Adm. Cross asks. "Yes. But there was a tremendous concern that if we moved too quickly, we would do something inappropriate that would require a very expensive fix."

Others, like Secretary Danzig, say the military's slow response is itself the product of a culture that is just beginning to realize the costs associated with the poor use of personnel. He recalls how, after making a speech to the captain and crew of a Navy ship on using personnel more wisely, the captain told him how much he liked the speech, escorted him to his stateroom and ordered a sailor to stand watch next door in case Mr. Danzig woke during the night and needed anything.

"I don't think I have woken in the middle of the night and needed someone since I was 13," says Mr. Danzig. "If I did, I certainly could have called someone" on the phone in the room.

A RUSH JOB

Today's boatswain's mates are much different from those who joined the Navy 20 years ago. All of Chief Comer's sailors finished high school, seven spent some time at college, and one graduated. Overall, 97% of the Navy's sailors possess high-school or equivalency degrees, compared with 75% in 1979 and 89% of their civilian peers today, ages 18 to 24. The improvement in credentials reflects the success of policies intended to attract recruits equipped to fight in the era of high-tech warfare. But not all supervisors think education is the chief measure of a soldier. Chief Comer, whose sixth-grade education wouldn't get him into the Navy today, says that sailors may be better educated and more intelligent now, but that they also are "more selfish. They want to know what is in the job for them."

Scrubbing decks with scraps of steel wool isn't what 21-year-old Seaman Reed expected when he joined the Navy two years ago. He had been working as a hotel clerk in his South Dakota hometown of Deadwood (pop. 1,828). Hoping to become a paralegal apprentice, he says he scored in the top 10% on the military's entrance exam. That qualified him for the job, but it wasn't available. A recruiter convinced Seaman Reed that as a boatswain's mate, he would have time to try out other, more technical jobs.

"That's what the recruiters told all of us," says Seaman Derrick Cox, a skinny kid from Virginia's coalfields scrubbing away nearby.

"Boy, was that a lie," Seaman Reed sighs.

"I was thinking of waiting" for a job in the pharmacy, Seaman Cox says. "I am kicking myself in the a for not waiting until one opened."

He and his fellow boatswain's mates -- a tight-knit group of urban blacks and rural whites no older than 25 -- routinely work 16 hours a day, leaving no time for branching out. In the evenings, they have enough energy for little more than a game of hearts. Endless ribbing makes the day go faster. When one of the ship's heftier sailors, Larry Stevens, finishes swabbing a deck, he half-heartedly asks for a new assignment. "Why don't you run to the port side and work on the list," cracks Lead Petty Officer Harry Devernera. The sailors explode in laughter.

The most common epithet they fling at each other is "lifer" -- someone who will spend at least 20 years in the Navy. When the other mates call Seaman Reed one, he just shakes his head and smiles. "I am getting out," he assures them.

"I've made a lot of friends I never would have made in Deadwood," he says later. "But I am basically just a professional janitor. I scrub floors and paint."

Many sailors on the Roosevelt and other ships do, of course, perform technically challenging jobs, from repairing jets to running the ship's nuclear reactor. Nonetheless, poor use of personnel translates into poor retention. The Navy tries to get 38% of its first-term recruits, who sign commitments ranging from three to six years, to re-enlist, but only 29% do so, despite generous re-enlistment bonuses. Recruiting and retention shortfalls have left the Navy with a total of 18,000 fewer sailors than it says it needs -- a need based on the way the Navy currently chooses to operate its fleet.

Petty Officer Steven Spears, who works on the nuclear-powered ship's reactor, could have collected a tax-free bonus of as much as $45,000 if he had re-enlisted for six more years. Mr. Spears is married, as are the majority of Navy enlistees, unlike the draft-era military, in which almost two-thirds of all services' troops were single.

"I didn't even want to know how much I qualified for," Mr. Spears says. "In the last year, I have missed my wife's and my daughter's birthdays. I missed Christmas and our wedding anniversary. I'm tired of it." On Oct. 22, when his enlistment ends, he plans to return to his hometown of Cullman, Ala., and start looking for work.

It's an unhappy outcome that has become all too common. Earlier this year, in a General Accounting Office survey of about 1,000 people on active duty in "critical specialities," the Navy scored the worst, with 75% of enlisted sailors saying they intended to leave the military. Only 15% said they would stay. Overall, 52% of enlisted personnel from all services said they were dissatisfied with military life.

A big part of the problem is that the services are burdened with a personnel system designed in 1947 to correct shortcomings that became apparent during World War II. In order to be better able to mobilize for and fight big wars, the military engineered a top-heavy structure of officers who could take over new units as they were formed, with one general for about every 1,100 soldiers.

But America fights a different kind of war these days -- mostly finely tuned, nimble maneuvers of limited duration to quell isolated crises. With the old personnel structure still in place, the result is a kind of peacekeeping battle fatigue that only adds to discontent among the ranks. The Army's 10th Mountain Division, for example, went from providing relief for victims of Hurricane Andrew in Florida to peacekeeping in Somalia to occupying Haiti. Now, it has a brigade on rotation in Bosnia. Since 1992, the amount of time that Navy sailors spend at sea has risen more than 25% because of peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and the Persian Gulf. In the Persian Gulf, some Air Force pilots have done a full five deployments -- albeit shorter than the Army tours in Bosnia -- since the end of the Gulf War.

The Air Force probably has done the most to make its manpower management conform to the needs of the new world order. Concluding that "small wars" such as the conflicts in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo are likely to be characteristic of our time, the Air Force is reorganizing itself into 10 "Aerospace Expeditionary Forces" -- each with an array of more than 150 fighters, bombers and support aircraft and a total of more than 10,000 people -- to respond to crises. So, instead of grabbing forces almost willy-nilly, as in the past, the Air Force will always have two AEFs "on call" for deployment overseas. The system, which is to start taking effect Oct. 1, will give Air Force personnel more predictability in their lives: Each AEF is to be deployable for 90 days every 15 months. The change doesn't come a moment too soon: Air Force pilots are tiring of deploying overseas, especially on high-boredom, low-challenge missions like patrolling no-fly zones over Iraq. Lured by a hot economy and a hiring boom among commercial airlines, pilots are bailing out of the military at high rates, leading the Air Force to predict that it will be short by more than 1,200 pilots for the next three years.

While the Air Force looks to the future, the past is alive, if not well, on the Roosevelt. Seaman Reed is finishing scrubbing the floors, and sailors in the main enlisted galley are struggling to get out lunch in a kitchen that has changed little since World War II. Bread is baked from scratch, rather than from frozen loaves as on commercial ships. There are no microwave ovens and virtually no frozen vegetables or meats -- staples on any cruise ship. There is one can opener; when it breaks, the cooks use knives to open the containers until it gets fixed, usually days later.

"It's not that the Navy doesn't realize that its galleys need to be redesigned," says John Birkler, a Rand Corp. analyst who has studied carriers for the Navy. "But when it comes down to buying new galleys or new missiles, you have to buy the new missiles."

On a typical Navy ship, for every seven sailors, one is involved in preparing or serving food. At the moment, however, the Roosevelt doesn't have enough cooks; it's 39 short of its usual 122 complement, prompting the manager of the ship's six galleys to e-mail a desperate request to higher-ups in Norfolk, Va.

"My staff is regularly working 16-hour days, seven days a week," Senior Chief Petty Officer Herb Weaver writes. "They have no time for anything other than work and sleep."

Several days later, word comes back: There is no help available. Without reinforcements, the galley workers -- others on board call them "cellar dwellers" -- must spend even more of their time in the windowless spaces below the ship's flight deck. Some will go weeks without feeling the Mediterranean breeze or watching the sunset.

"This place is a hellhole right now, and I feel like it is my fault," says Petty Officer Tuck, who oversees the main galley's 15 cooks. "I am burnt."

Others on the Roosevelt are still smarting from the grueling months of the ship's last overhaul, in 1996. The carrier's stay in the Norfolk shipyard was supposed to last two years. But Navy brass ordered the job finished in half the time so the ship could return to sea. (The Navy today is struggling to patrol the globe with a fleet of 322 ships, down from 592 in 1989.)

Medics from the ship's infirmary spent hours laying flooring that was supposed to have been put in by shipyard workers. They did it wrong; much of it had to be re-installed. Ensign Mike Johnston, who supervises the ship's air-traffic controllers, recalls his days as a painter: "We were told the shop wasn't progressing quickly enough so that we needed to do the painting," he says. "Then the shipyard workers came in and redid it. It makes no sense. Our air-traffic controllers need to be practicing and working on their skills, not painting ships."

Capt. Charles Hattau, the Roosevelt's executive officer, argues that using the sailors for such jobs is a necessary evil, albeit a handy one. "You have them doing manual labor because they are free labor," he says. In the Roosevelt's print shop, meanwhile, the clock on the wall has stopped working. So have some of the shop's lithographers. They are trained in the craft of offset printing, a technology that the ship replaced in the early 1990s with the same copying, collating and binding machines found at Kinko's. The new machines require one-third as many people to operate them, but the print shop is staffed at the old levels. And the textbooks on printing that are kept on hand for reference cover equipment the Navy hasn't used in years.

"The books are a problem," says Chief Jose Obregon, who runs the shop. "But they have to study them if they want to get promoted."

By early afternoon, the four sailors on the day shift have finished their work and some of the night shift's. Two lithographers are searching the Internet for a copy of the movie "Pink Floyd: The Wall." Then they tap into a Web site that spoofs the movie "Titanic." Their two supervisors talk on the phone, read magazines and sweep the floor, which already gleams. Loafing once got so bad that Chief Obregon had to ban sailors from the back room because they were sneaking naps and playing video games.

"The new technology is putting us out of a job," says Penny Price, a supervisor in the office.

Is she worried about losing her job?

"The Navy has been talking about eliminating this for 15 years," she says. "So far, we've been fine."

One reason why the Navy continues to train lithographers it doesn't need can be explained by an oddity of military budgets. Supervisors get budgets for materials and equipment. If they come in under budget, they are rewarded. But within individual departments on the ship and on naval bases, there are no budgets for personnel and no rewards for supervisors who figure out how to complete their assignments using fewer people. Supervisors such as Chief Obregon are simply assigned a fixed number of people based on their area of specialty, whether they need them or not. By early evening, most enlisted sailors are finishing their workday. A few will check their e-mails for news from home or settle in to watch a movie on one of the ship's 900 television sets. Some play "Air Commando" in the ship's video arcade. Everybody is thinking about the next port call, in France. Seaman Reed wants to go skiing in the Alps. Other boatswain's mates are frantically trying to trade "watch days," when they are required to remain aboard the ship.

After an afternoon painting for a coming inspection, Seaman Reed heads to dinner, walking past Petty Officer Storts as she tallies the dinner rush. By 5:45 p.m., she has counted 814 sailors who favor chicken for dinner. But "there was a spill, and I had to clean it up, so I probably missed about 50 people," she says.

If the Navy installed an electronic card system, in which sailors swiped meal cards through a scanner that tallied them, Ms. Storts probably could be working on Navy jets instead of counting sailors. Such systems have been in most college cafeterias since the mid-1980s. The Navy, however, is just beginning to install them on ships.

When he finishes dinner, Seaman Reed watches a movie, then reports for midnight watch duty, which lasts until 4 a.m. He and two other sailors are assigned to a small, noisy pair of rooms in the back of the ship, by the rudder. One sailor takes a minute to jot down the readings from five temperature and pressure gauges every 30 minutes; he lies on the floor the rest of the time. Seamen Reed and Quentin Brown are supposed to switch the ship to an emergency steering system if the primary system goes awry.

On watch, the burden is boredom. To pass the time, Seaman Brown reads a copy of Vibe magazine, shoving it beneath his chair whenever supervisors drop by. "You're not supposed to be reading anything down here," he says. "But if I don't read something, I'll fall asleep, and then I'll be in even bigger trouble."

Adm. Cross says there is no reason why ships can't be designed so that the captain can switch to the emergency steering system from the bridge. Remote sensors could also replace the sailor who takes temperature readings. Those changes, however, are still more than a decade away on the Navy's aircraft carriers.

Seaman Reed sits on a small metal box, his arm propped on a fire hose. Yellow earplugs dull the engine noise. For the most part, he stares off into space. "The watches give you a lot of time to think about all the things you've done wrong in your life," he says.

THOUGHTS OF ELSEWHERE

But tonight, he's thinking about his wife. He met her in South Dakota, and they married shortly after boot camp. Before this six-month deployment, he dropped her off at a spartan apartment in Norfolk, where she knew no one. They talk once a month. "The last time we talked, I promised my wife I'd take her out for a nice dinner when we get back to Norfolk," he says. "You know -- something you really have to dress up for, and then after dinner we'll go sit on the beach, and I'll put my arm around her."

That day is three months away. With the Kosovo conflict over, the Roosevelt is going to the Persian Gulf, which is just another vast body of water to Seaman Reed. When his shift ends, he will get no more than three hours to sleep, an inconvenience he must endure whenever he draws a midnight watch, every couple of weeks. At 7 a.m., he will begin another day of scrubbing, painting and watches.

"Have you ever seen that movie `Groundhog Day'?" he asks. "That's kind of what life is like."

Since the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, U.S. military forces have participated in more than 90 operations. More than half involved substantial troop deployments for combat missions, peacekeeping assignments and humanitarian undertakings. Here's a look at the major ones and how much they cost the Pentagon (in inflation-adjusted 1999 dollars):

Sources: The Department of Defense, the Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office, press accounts and three nonprofit groups: the Center for Defense Information, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Affairs and the Federation of American Scientists. Cost estimates came from figures supplied by the CDI, the CSBA and the GAO.