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.

(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).