POLITICIZING NATIONAL SECURITY: IS THERE NO LIMIT TO WHAT CLINTON & CO. WILL DO?

(Washington, D.C.): At this writing, there appears to be
a reasonable chance that the Defense Department will tell
President Clinton what he desperately wants to hear, namely that
approving the Base Closure and Realignment Commission’s
recommendation to shut down two Air Force maintenance depots will
harm national security. By so doing, the Pentagon would get Mr.
Clinton off the hook: He can then claim that defense concerns,
not political interests, dictate that he must leave 12,000
employees of McClellan Air Force Base on the government payroll
— an action his handlers tell him is essential to his electoral
prospects in California.

Pork By Any Other Name

Let there be no doubt: The case for keeping these depots
open is rooted in politics, not in the Nation’s security.

These facilities are sprawling monuments to inefficient big
government. While they perform essential maintenance and repair
functions for the Air Force, they do so at substantially greater
cost than could private industry. Worse yet — as a founding
member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors,
Richard Perle, has noted — in an era when research, development
and production of new weapons are being flat-lined, the armed
services’ continued reliance on government depots for maintenance
denies the private sector work that would help preserve an
industrial base capable of doing all these critical
functions.

Secretary of Defense William Perry, a man with considerable
experience in the defense industry, knows full well that the
Pentagon would be better off without the depots. He has said as
much in the past to industry representatives. Were he now to
claim otherwise by arguing that the bloated workforce at
McClellan is essential to the U.S. security requirements, he
would be guilty of a shameful subordination of the real
national security interests to the expediency-driven politics of
the Administration he serves.

Politics Running Amok

Unfortunately, this would hardly be the only instance of such
a politicization of the Pentagon. Consider but a few of the other
recent instances:

  • Leaving the U.S. vulnerable to missile attack: The
    Clinton Administration exhibits an obsessive political
    commitment to the obsolete 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
    Treaty, which effectively precludes the U.S. from
    defending itself against ballistic missile strikes.
    Accordingly, Dr. Perry and his senior subordinates
    determinedly dismiss the danger posed to the American
    people by the proliferation of long-range ballistic
    missiles. They argue that no malevolent country can
    acquire missiles capable of reaching the United States in
    less than 10-15 years. Yet, scarcely a day passes when
    there is not a new revelation about the transfer of
    advanced missile technology by the likes of Russia, China
    and North Korea to Big Power-wannabe states like Iran,
    Pakistan and Brazil. In the face of the emerging
    missile threat, it is inconceivable, Administration
    politics aside, that the Pentagon would continue to
    refrain from fielding anti-missile protection for the
    American people.
  • Transferring strategic technologies to Beijing: A
    top Pentagon official reluctantly acknowledged to
    Congress recently that the United States may have to
    adopt a policy of “containment” towards
    communist China in light of Beijing’s pursuit of policies
    and capabilities inimical to American security interests.
    The Clinton Defense Department, nonetheless, is fixedly
    pursuing a politically driven sales campaign providing
    the communist Chinese virtually any and all militarily
    relevant technology it seeks. Indeed, congressional
    sources report that, of all the contentious issues in
    the Fiscal Year 1996 Defense authorization bill, the
    Pentagon lobbied hardest against legislation that would
    cut off Department funding for a joint U.S.-Chinese
    Defense Conversion Task Force that has provided political
    cover for wanton American tech transfers to China.
  • The truth is, such transfers are not converting
    People’s Liberation Army (PLA) industrial facilities from
    defense to commercial activities. They are instead simply
    enhancing the PLA’s lethal capabilities. It is also
    apparently increasing the contempt the Chinese leadership
    feels for its interlocutors in Washington.

  • Killing the B-2: In addition, the Pentagon
    leadership heavily lobbied members of the Senate Armed
    Services Committee last week to block additional
    procurement of the B-2 bomber. Here again, the issue was
    politics but, interestingly, not the politics of
    California employment.
  • The Clinton Administration is committed to end
    production of the single most capable aircraft ever made
    for reasons having more to do with appeasing Democratic
    party ideologues (notably, Representative Ron Dellums)
    and with obeisance to a politically dictated — and
    grossly inadequate — defense budget. Even though the
    national security clearly dictates building additional
    B-2s as a means of effectively and rapidly projecting
    American power world-wide at low risk of loss of life on
    the part of U.S. servicemen, Secretary of Defense Perry
    insisted to Senators that no more than 20 stealth bombers
    were needed.

  • Whitewashing Vietnamese cooperation on POW-MIAs:
    The Pentagon is also playing its part in a heavily
    politicized bid to normalize relations with communist
    Vietnam. Defense personnel who should know better are
    treating the roughly 200 pages of documents recently
    turned over by Hanoi to U.S. officials as proof positive
    of the Vietnamese transparency and cooperativeness
    concerning unaccounted-for American POW-MIAs. This is, of
    course, utter nonsense.
  • Like the East Germans, Soviets and other
    totalitarians, Hanoi has maintained exacting records
    concerning personnel of interest to the State.
    Undoubtedly, whole archives in Vietnam are filled with
    data that would clarify, once and for all, the fate of
    these missing employees of the Department of Defense. But
    the confirmation such information would certainly
    provide that the Vietnamese knew much more about these
    POW-MIAs than it has revealed to date would be extremely
    inconvenient — to both Washington and Hanoi — at a time
    when the Administration and its friends on Capitol Hill
    are about to mount a decisive push to provide U.S.
    taxpayer-underwritten investment guarantees and economic
    assistance to the perpetrators of such war crimes.

  • Diverting funds to the erstwhile Bosnia ‘Rapid
    Reaction Force’:
    Finally, the Clinton Administration
    has, for blatantly political reasons, decided once again
    to treat Pentagon accounts as a slush-fund whose tapping
    will allow it to make good on misbegotten foreign policy
    initiatives for which Congress is unwilling to
    appropriate money. According to press reports, it is
    blithely diverting as much as $95 million from Defense
    Department funding to help underwrite the costs of a new
    allied expeditionary force in Bosnia.
  • The only rationale for committing such funds is the
    hope that the presence of this force will postpone the
    moment when Mr. Clinton’s pledge to insert 25,000 U.S.
    troops to help extricate the U.N. peacekeepers gets
    called. Unfortunately, the hapless rules of engagement
    and command arrangements for what was once called a Rapid
    Reaction Force will ensure that it is neither
    “Rapid” nor capable of useful
    “Reaction.” As a result, the U.S. will be
    throwing good money after bad, compounding past mistakes
    in Bosnia and complicating further NATO’s future options
    there.

The Bottom Line

Legitimate U.S. security interests are being jeopardized by
the Clinton Administration’s politicization of the Pentagon. As
with parallel efforts to ensure that the intelligence community
hues to a politically correct party line,(1) the Administration is
allowing core national security capabilities to be compromised.
To the extent that senior Defense Department policy-makers allow
themselves and their department to be used for such purposes,
they impugn their own integrity and demoralize those who work for
them in the belief that the first business of government is not
politics, but to provide for the common defense.

– 30 –

(1) See the Center for Security Policy’s Transition
Brief
entitled Apres Woolsey, le Deluge? Congress Must
Beware of Actions, Appointments That Will Weaken U.S.
Intelligence
(No. 94-D 127,
30 December 1994).

Center for Security Policy

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