Message to the President From an Admirer: You Made a Mistake on Vieques

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s announcement that the U.S. military would no longer be able to train on the island of Vieques was a grievous error. At it happens, the damage it could inflict is not limited to denying the armed forces realistic mock combat experience — the absence of which will likely translate directly into otherwise avoidable loss of life and may even jeopardize our troops’ performance in future conflicts.

The Vieques decision also has the potential to cause the Bush-Cheney Administration long-term political problems every bit as consequential as was its predecessor’s benighted effort to allow avowed homosexuals to serve in uniform.

In a column distributed today in National Review Online, the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. dissected the impetus behind and implications of the decision to appease opponents (foreign and domestic) of continued training on Vieques. It can only be hoped that arguments like those advanced by Mr. Gaffney will encourage the President to cut his losses — and the Nation’s — by quickly reconsidering this ill-advised and indefensible action.

The best that can be said for the Bush administration’s decision to stop military training on the island of Vieques is that it is a Solomonic one. Alas, in this instance, it has all the appeal of actually splitting the proverbial baby in two.

In one fell swoop, the president’s subordinates, led by his top political adviser, Karl Rove, have eliminated the one and only training range in the Atlantic where submarines, ships, aircraft, and amphibious troops can conduct realistic and vital combined-arms exercises. The U.S. military which had repeatedly been assured by the Bush team that “help is on the way” and the Clinton years of subordinating national security to political considerations were over–is understandably appalled, and furious.

After all, those responsible for ensuring the safety and combat effectiveness of Navy and Marine Corps personnel sent into harm’s way (e.g., every Atlantic seaboard-based unit deployed to the Persian Gulf) understand that troops whose first exposure to what Clauswitz called “the fog of war” comes in actual battle are likely to suffer needless casualties and perhaps be unable to prevail.

Even more troubling to the military was the president’s off-the-cuff explanation for this decision, as explained this week in Goteborg, Sweden. The three reasons he cited were: “One, there’s been some harm done to people in the past. Secondly, these are our friends and neighbors, and [third] they don’t want us there.” Unfortunately, these conditions apply, to one degree or another, just about everywhere the U.S. armed forces practice their necessarily noisy, disruptive, and/or destructive craft.

They certainly apply in spades in Okinawa, the lynchpin of America’s forward presence in East Asia and home to training areas every bit as essential to the readiness of U.S. forces in the Pacific as Vieques is to their Atlantic-based counterparts. Indubitably, the basis upon which the Bush administration has bailed out of Vieques will undercut the Japanese government, which has faced increasingly insistent pressure from Okinawans to end the U.S. “occupation” of their island.

For that matter, it is not unreasonable to anticipate that communities in the United States itself, tired of the inconvenience of being neighbors to live-fire ranges or simply lusting after the valuable real estate currently reserved for the military’s use, will want equal treatment with the Puerto Ricans. Even in the absence of the ominous Vieques precedent, such demands were on the rise thanks to the reality that fewer and fewer Americans have any connection to the armed forces. Now, such claims may become irresistible.

Matters are made worse by the indignation of the Puerto Rican activists and their friends (like Sen. Hillary Clinton, Al Sharpton, Gov. George Pataki, and Fidel Castro) who want to know why two years more must pass before the bombing, gunfire, and armed landings stop at Vieques. Having disconnected the order for the Pentagon to find someplace else to train from the requirement to find that place first, there is no obvious basis upon which demands for an immediate cessation can be resisted. The pressure will only further exacerbate an already growing rift between America’s civilians and the military sworn to defend them.

In the wake of a firestorm of criticism over the Vieques decision, the White House has tried to insist it was made “on the merits.” And yet, the contention that it was motivated by, as spokesman Ari Fleischer put it, the president’s commitment to “ensuring that our military is trained for the mission required,” is laughable. Had that really been the top priority, we would have resumed live-fire training at Vieques suspended by President Clinton and made clear that the island would remain an active exercise area for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the young Bush administration which came to office on a platform of ending the Clinton-Gore practice of compromising vital national security interests in order to satisfy perceived political dictates has engaged in just such behavior. For example, a few weeks ago, the White House overrode legitimate Pentagon objections to the sale to a foreign buyer of this country’s last manufacturer of the equipment needed to mass-produce high-quality electronic chips. The Washington Post reported this week that that action, which could have highly deleterious implications for defense production in the future, followed a meeting between a principal backer of the deal, Intel, and a man who at the time held $100,000 worth of Intel’s stock, Karl Rove.

The Bush administration has also alarmed those familiar with the deplorable condition of the armed forces bequeathed by Bill Clinton. They had been encouraged to expect that the promised “help on the way” would promptly translate into additional resources needed to fix well-documented shortfalls in maintenance, training, and procurement. Budgetary restraint has, however, been the order of the day to date, causing the president’s (Fiscal Year) 2001 supplemental request to be seriously inadequate. The same seems likely to be true of an amendment now being made to the Pentagon’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2002. Insult has been added to injury to the extent that the military’s top commanders feel their views and concerns have not been heard, let alone given proper weight, in the administration’s deliberations.

Ironically, if President Bush is perceived to be pandering to ethnic constituencies, big-business interests, and single-minded tax-cut advocates at the expense of his commitment to rebuild the U.S. military and restore American power, he runs a serious risk not only of undermining national security. He may also alienate a key element of his political constituency without which neither he nor his Republican party will fare well in future elections: the active-duty military and the millions of others in and out of uniform National Guard and Reserve personnel, veterans, defense contractors, their employees and unions, and other patriotic Americans who once formed the Reagan defense coalition. Corrective action on this front is urgently needed, now.