Daily Socotra

11 March 2007

Principles of Accounting

Duchess of Richmond: ...this year, soldiers are the fashion.
Duke of Wellington: [ironically] Where would society be without my boys?

The Duke of Wellington was the Man of the Peninsular War, before he beat Bonaparte for the last time and became Man of the Age. I have been in his house, and was impressed. He was the proper general at the proper time to manage a nasty series of encounters with Napoleon's expansionist army.

Bonaparte had expected his forces would be welcomed with rose petals in Spain, but they were not. It was a miscalculation that eventually was resolved by an exile, and a return, and a desperate fight at a place that has become metaphor- Waterloo.

Bonaparte's nemesis was a slim and acerbic man of little sentimentality. He had few illusions about the nature of his British soldiers, and in return, he was not beloved as other legendary commanders. “Little Mac” McClellan, the Union General was beloved, but that was because his men knew he would never do anything to endanger them unnecessarily. Consequently, Mac rarely won a battle, which is a painful opportunity cost for a supreme commander.

Wellington's troops did know something about him that was far more important. He would be victorious, and that is the better of the bad outcomes offered by war.

Follies of self-delusion are not what I meant to start about this morning. There is plenty of that here in town, more than enough to go around.

The windows are open at Big Pink, and bless them, the party boys in the State Department rental house have been at it all night. Somewhere in the small hours, a series of explosions boomed over the darkened streets. There were no sirens that followed, and it appeared the power stayed on. A mystery.

Then a phone call in the night. It was a distinctive ring-tone associated with my younger son. It was the better of two possible results. He had escaped mayhem and arrest on a tropical island famous for random violence and is home.

Suddenly alert, I had to confront the mutable nature of time. The clocks have been moved ahead for spring, but three full weeks earlier than normal.

That is how I found myself with Wellington, somewhere in central Spain, in 1812. He is at his ironic best as he writes the Foreign Office in the matter of a discrepancy in the accounts of one of his battalions. He had a good grasp on the principles of his trade:

“Gentlemen,

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters...Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence...

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance.

2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

Your most obedient servant

Wellington”

It is too delicious to be real, though it certainly would be in character for the Iron Duke. It certainly represents a fundamental truth about the profession of arms, one that we have conveniently ignored in the wake of the shocking revelations that the Army has contracted for substandard housing outside the gate of the Walter Reed medical center.

I have been inside the hospital many times, and actually been treated there. I was impressed by the brusque quality of the care. I was appalled when the Department of Defense announced two years ago that they were going to close the complex and transfer all the functions counterclockwise on the Beltway to the massive Bethesda campus of the National Naval Medical Center.

I honestly do not know what they were thinking. Did they think they would study war no more? That they could let a contract and outsource the misery?

Walter Reed is in a dicey neighborhood, which is why I was not surprised that the contract housing for the wounded was in bad shape. Publicly announcing the closure of the hospital could not have encouraged the Army to sink money into rehabilitating buildings it did not even own.

Budget-wise, the service was in a pickle. There is not enough money for everything, not for the armor for vehicles or new helicopters or the tools to defeat the bombers. Certainly not for the refurbishment of facilities slated to be abandoned. I have seen this happen before, and will doubtless see it again.

All the while, the wounded returned, and more of them as a percentage of the combatants than ever before. New body armor and better/quicker application of medical care has dramatically reduced the number of soldiers and Marines killed on the field.

The ratio of combat-zone deaths-to-wounded has been cut in half from that observed in Vietnam, the first conflict with rapid Medevac capabilities. The percentage killed on the field has dropped from 24 percent in SE Asia to 13 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is that better armor means more horrific wounds to unprotected areas, i.e., head, neck and limbs. These have the predictable consequence of increasing lifetime demands for specialized care, none of which are the province of the active Army beyond a limited point.

Wellington would have understood this, since he knew that there is a bottom line to the profession of arms that has only a tangential relationship to budgets and accounting sheets.

The actual cost of the enterprise in which we are embarked is so breathtaking as to defy the imagination. In addition to the staggering cost of maintaining a force in the field a world away, a mighty whirling machine of ceaseless energy, additional hidden expenses must be paid. That includes such sundries as ensuring minimum standards better housing for those awaiting treatment at military health facilities.

But first, let's think about replacing all of the vehicles used by the Army and Marines at one fell swoop. It is un-programmed, of course, if not completely unexpected. Would 43,000 vehicles be a good number? Could it be more? What about the machines that fly, and have been ground down by sand and grit?

What of the money diverted from the ordinary cost of maintaining an army in garrison? It must be replaced somehow, though it will not be as compelling an issue as support to those who have been sent to fight.

Of course, that fails to deal at all with those costs outside the Department. Consider for a moment the separately funded Department of Veterans Affairs, a government activity with an annual budget of around $60 billion, but a mission cycle measured in centuries. The Department is entrusted with providing lifetime care for wounded veterans and retirees.

The footprint is vast, and should properly be included in the Defense Accounts, since its function is intrinsically linked. The Department has 235,000 employees, second only to Defense in size. It maintains 5,558 buildings; 158 hospitals, 840 community-based outpatient clinics, 133 nursing homes, 206 community-based outpatient psychiatric clinics, 57 regional benefits offices, and 120 national cemeteries.

It is not fair to tag the war in Iraq with the whole bill- there are over twenty million veterans of all the wars who rely to some degree on the VA, after all.

If the DoD operates on a five year cycle, the VA is more akin to a glacier. Five children of Civil War veterans still draw VA benefits. About 440 children and widows of Spanish-American War veterans still receive VA compensation, and that war concluded most of its operations more than a century ago.

I rely in some part on the smooth efficiency of the VA, as do millions of other vets. It is good to be in fashion this season, as Duchess Richmond observed, though fashions change frequently.

I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I am pulling for the wounded and think we should do our best for them. It is a debt of honor, though that too is a matter of fashion. The Iron Duke said it best. “Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won.”

It is a basic principle of accounting.