In Cato Institute Debate, Center’s Gaffney Joins Speaker Gingrich’s Call for Increased Investment in Defense

(Washington, D.C.): Washington’s Cato Institute today hosted what may prove to be one of the
most timely debates of the year: “Defense Spending: Up, Down or Flat?” Representing the “Up”
view-point was the Center for Security Policy’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., who joined
representatives of three other Washington policy research institutes — Cato’s Earl Ravenal, the
Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments’ Michael Vickers.

In the course of his remarks (see the attached), Mr. Gaffney strongly endorsed House Speaker
Newt Gingrich‘s recent call for a new defense build-up. In testimony before the House Budget
Committee last month, Speaker Gingrich courageously declared: “We have lived off the
Reagan build-up about as long as we can. The fact is that our defense structure is getting
weaker, our equipment is getting obsolete and our troops are stretched too thin.”

The Center for Security Policy commends the Speaker — the 1996 recipient of its prestigious
“Keeper of the Flame” award — for what must be the opening salvo in a sustained campaign of
public education and legislative action on the need for restorative defense spending. As Mr.
Gaffney put it at Cato:

“Corrective actions in these areas will take more than just increased resources. It will
take vision and will. My unshakeable conviction is that the American people have
sufficient common sense to be willing to pay the price for a robust defense posture on
the scale available at the time of Desert Storm. All they require to make such a
sacrifice is to be told coherently, consistently and credibly that the world in which
we now live is not one free — as President Clinton persists in saying — of missile
threats and is one in which vital American interests and even our people are at
risk.

“Most especially, they require from their elected leaders and above all from
their military commanders the truth.⁽¹⁾ It’s time to start telling it.”

The festering conflict with Saddam Hussein offers an important opportunity to re-examine
the premises and implications of arguments for further reduction in defense spending — or even
for continuing the present practice of failing to make the Defense Department whole for the
effects of inflation, to say nothing of compensating it for peacekeeping, humanitarian,
environmental and other non-defense tasks. Such activities may or may not be national priorities;
they certainly should not be funded from limited defense accounts. The Center looks forward to
playing an active role in the debate that, now begun, must continue in earnest until the needed
corrective actions are taken.

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1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Well Done, Weldon: Senior Legislator Refused to
Accept Factually Incorrect ‘Political Correctness’ From Gen. Lyles (No. 97-D 167, 6
November 1997).