High and Dry

Not enough fuel for the fleet

To beef up the Navy, the Reagan Administration has almost doubled the money spent on building new ships and warplanes hi the past three years. Yet if war broke out, the Navy would still not be able to send to sea enough carriers or air wings to fight effectively, according to a study released last week by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Traditionally, Congress and the Pentagon like to build showy weapons systems but tend to skimp on less glamorous things. The Administration has increased spending on maintenance, spare parts, fuel and other elements of combat "readiness" by only 7%. As a result, states the GAO report, only eight of the Navy's 14 aircraft carriers could put to sea within two months of the outbreak of war, and only 60% of its warplanes are combat ready.

Navy Secretary John Lehman insists that he is trying hard to overcome the readiness neglect of the past ten years. The Carter Administration could put only six carriers to sea, he says, and the Navy now has 20% more combat-ready planes.

The GAO, however, claims that the Navy overstates its readiness statistics and that in any case will not meet its own requirements until 1990. Indeed, it may never do so unless Congress realizes that military spending is for combat preparedness, not for bringing bacon home to their districts. - This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.