■"Navy Plans to Buy Fewer Ships," by Renae Merle, Washington Post, 7 September 2004, p. E1.

Na levo is an old Russian phrase that means, "on the side" (or literally, "on the left"). It has the connotation of being an underground or not quite legal activity.

Navy announcing itíll buy only four ships in 2006, compared to 9 planned for 2005. How can this be when the defense budget is growing leaps and bounds?

All that growth is to pay for personnel, whose costs have risen 30% since 1999, and for current operations, which are NEVER planned in the budget.

Thatís right: we NEVER plan for any operations in the defense budget. Isnít that amazing? We plan only to buy stuff, and train and take care of our peopleóthatís basically it. Every time we actually use them in any operation, the Pentagon has to go scrambling to Congress for supplementals. This is why wars kill force structure, meaning we buy fewer tanks, ships and aircraft. So anyone who thinks the Pentagon dreams of wars so they can buy stuff is just plain misinformed. Wars kill force structure.

This idiotic reality is yet another good reason why we should bifurcate the force into the Leviathan (hopefully only rarely usedóand paid for by supplementals) and the Sys Admin, whose budget would be mostly about operations. We need to separate our preparation for war from our actual operations, and when I say operations I mean the back half stuff, which always ends up costing a lot more than we plan because it ends up taking much longer than we plan.