‘INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW’: DOES BILL PERRY HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE SOUND DEFENSE POLICY?

(Washington, D.C.): When the Senate
Armed Services Committee meets today to
consider the nomination of William Perry
to become Secretary of Defense, one
sentiment is expected to predominate the
proceedings: Bill Clinton has finally
come up with someone possessing the
management skills, stable personality and
good standing with the defense community
to provide the leadership so desperately
needed at the Pentagon.

Under such circumstances, Members of
Congress have sometimes been known to
rush, lemming-like, toward a swift — and
often unanimous — endorsement of a
nominee. In particular, a phenomenon the
Center for Security Policy has dubbed the
“myth of authority” can lead to
a less-than-thorough vetting of an
individual whose reputation, according to
conventional wisdom, is unassailable.⁽¹⁾
It is worth remembering that just
a few short weeks ago, Adm. Bobby Ray
Inman was to receive just such treatment,
an experience that more closely
approximates a coronation than a rigorous
confirmation review.

No More ‘Myth of Authority’

While the “myth of
authority” should always resisted by
Senators, it is especially important that
those on the Armed Services Committee not
succumb to it in today’s hearing with
Bill Perry. This is so because, if
confirmed, the nominee would for the
first time in his long career of
public service be holding a position that
gives him preeminent responsibility for
making defense policy.

To be sure, in his previous positions
— notably as the Under Secretary of
Defense for Research and Engineering in
the Carter Administration and over the
past year as President Clinton’s Deputy
Secretary of Defense — Dr. Perry has
been involved in national security
policy-making. To a considerable degree,
however, his role has been that of a
technocrat, an accomplished expert in
defense technologies rather than a
conceptualizer of grand policy designs.

The public is entitled to know just
what Bill Perry’s policy views
are, however. In a number of areas, they
appear to be troubling — to say the
least. The Senate Armed Services
Committee must, therefore, ensure that
the beliefs and likely policy
recommendations of this nominee are
carefully probed. The following areas,
among others, merit close questioning:

‘A Cooperative Order’

In a Brookings Institution monograph
published in 1992,⁽²⁾
Dr. Perry makes the following astounding
statement:

“An international arrangement
incorporating the concept of
cooperative security and accepting
the consequent constraints must begin
with the central principle that the
only legitimate purpose of
national military forces is the
defense of national territory or the
participation in multinational forces
that enforce U.N. sanctions or
maintain peace….

“Full adoption of this
principle would lead immediately to
important conclusions for cooperative
design of military forces. National
ground forces would be structured for
defense of national territory and
their territory-taking capabilities
minimized. National capabilities for
deep strike at rear and homeland
targets inside the territory of
others by missile or long-range
aircraft would be constrained.
Some of the ground and air forces
that are in excess of national
requirements could be configured for
use in a multinational
military force that could enforce
U.N. sanctions when necessary….”
(Emphasis added.)⁽³⁾

Members of the Armed Services
Committee and many other Senators have
recently expressed strenuous opposition
to such sentiments when revealed in the
past writings of Morton Halperin, in
drafts of Presidential Decision
Directive-13 and in practice as the
Clinton Administration has sharply
reduced the defense budget and misused
U.S. military forces in Somalia and
Haiti. They should establish at once
whether Dr. Perry continues to subscribe
to them.

Export Controls

For many years, Dr. Perry has been a
vocal critic of what he considered to be
excessive U.S. controls on the transfer
of militarily relevant technology. In his
capacity as Deputy Secretary of Defense,
he has played a decisive role in the
Clinton Administration’s determined
campaign to eviscerate the preponderance
of such controls and to dismantle the
most effective mechanism for effecting
their multilateral observance, COCOM.⁽⁴⁾

Of particular concern are decisions
approved by Bill Perry that will permit
virtually any country in the world to
obtain (either directly or indirectly)
highly sophisticated computers —
including powerful supercomputers,
precision machine tools and advanced
telecommunications systems. These and
similar technology decontrol efforts may
or may not materially affect the business
prospects for U.S. exporters. What they
will surely do, however, is facilitate
the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, reduce U.S. indicators and
warning capabilities and add greatly to
the costs of maintaining America’s
qualitative edge against potential
adversaries.

The Armed Services Committee should
make reviewing Clinton Administration
policy in this area — and specifically the
absence to date of any analysis of the
national security implications of these
policies — a high priority in
the weeks ahead. An appropriate place to
start is with the Secretary of
Defense-designate and his mystifying
failure to comprehend the incompatibility
of liberal decontrol of technology
exports, which he favors, and the
counter-proliferation efforts that are
supposedly a high priority for the
President he serves.

Aiding China’s Military
Build-up

Bill Perry’s worrisome attitude toward
export controls in general is
particularly troubling with respect to
the specific case of technology transfers
to the People’s Republic of China. The
Deputy Secretary of Defense has had a
significant role in the on-going effort
to curry favor with China through
bilateral information exchanges, visits
and sales of sensitive dual-use
technologies. In fact, according to
yesterday’s Washington Times,
Secretary Perry will co-chair a new
U.S.-PRC joint commission on
“defense conversion.” Dr.
Perry’s opposite number on the Chinese
side will reportedly be Lt. Gen. Ding
Henggao, chairman of a notorious official
organization known as COSTIND that is
dedicated to industrial espionage and
technology acquisition.

Dr. Perry’s activities in this area
seem peculiar in the extreme given that
they are occurring at a moment when
members of the Armed Services Committee,
friendly nations in East Asia and others
are growing increasingly concerned about
China’s offensive build-up. The Committee
should examine how it is that Dr. Perry
seems intent on ignoring evidence that
the only “defense conversion”
in which the PRC is interested is that
which would convert U.S. technology
(civil and military) into militarily
relevant applications for the Chinese
armed forces.

The Defense Budget

An area of clear concern to the Armed
Services Committee must be the overall
state of the U.S. military. Most members
are aware that the cumulative effect of
cuts in defense spending effected during
the Reagan, Bush and Clinton
Administrations has been to imperil the
armed forces’ readiness, morale,
qualitative edge and power projection
capabilities.

Secretary Perry has evidently
persuaded himself that it will be
unnecessary to seek additional resources
to correct these problems because of
improvements he hopes to make in Defense
Department acquisition processes and the
utilization of high technology. While
there are certainly changes that can
usefully — and should — be made in both
areas, it is imprudent to expect that
they can be achieved sufficiently rapidly
(assuming they can be achieved at all)
to offset the impact of sustained and
massive budget reductions.

The Bottom Line

It is especially important that the
Armed Services Committee establish
whether Bill Perry has what it takes to
be the Secretary of Defense the nation so
desperately needs at the moment: A
leader with sound policy judgment who
will, above all, be able and willing
to tell the President of the United
States the unwelcome truth.

The reality is that U.S. global
interests can not be safeguarded just by
refusing to cut more from the defense
budget, as President Clinton pledged to
do in his recent State of the Union
address. Neither will more
belt-tightening and programmatic or
procurement efficiencies of the sort
promised by Secretary Perry permit
sufficient force structure to be retained
or necessary modernization, adequate
training and recruitment and retention of
quality personnel to be undertaken on a
sustained basis. Continuing on the
present course is a sure-fire formula for
a return to the “hollow army”
that characterized the U.S. military when
Bill Perry last held high office in the
Carter Administration.

U.S. policy toward North Korea,
Serbia, Iraq, Iran and, of course, a
probable revanchist Russia are all
important subjects for the Senate to
review with Dr. Perry. Unfortunately, if
the new Secretary of Defense cannot grasp
or bring himself to pronounce that
more military spending will be required
if the United States is to be able to
deal effectively with any — let
alone all — of these and other looming
crises, his answers to these questions
will ring as hollow as the American armed
forces are sure to become.

– 30 –

1. For more on the
“myth of authority,” see the
Center’s recent Decision Brief
entitled, Inman Flame-Out
Breaks the Code on ‘Myth of Authority’:
Raises Questions About ‘Expert’ Opinion
Re: Clinton Policies, ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_05″>No. 94-D 05, 19
January 1994).

2. This monograph,
entitled A New Concept of Cooperative
Security, was co-authored by Dr.
Perry and Ashton Carter, currently an
Assistant Secretary of Defense, and John
Steinbruner.

3. Ibid.,
p. 11.

4. The
Coordinating Committee on Multilateral
Exports is set to shut down on 31 March
1994 even though there has yet to be any
multilateral agreement achieved on
establishing a new organization to assume
at least some of COCOM’s
functions.