So Much For ‘The Vision Thing’: Clinton-Aspin Defense Budget Is Risky Business

The Clinton Administration’s response to the emerging national security problems from Russia to North Korea to Iran and Iraq to Bosnia is now in: If the posture toward radical defense budget cuts now being proposed is any guide, the answer is "Please Hold."

In presenting the Clinton FY1994 Pentagon request, Defense Secretary Les Aspin has made clear that the "vertical cuts" — i.e., substantial reductions in force structure — it contemplates will go forward, come what may.(1) If endorsed by the Congress, this would mean a $12 billion cut in the Bush Administration’s projections for FY94 (the first tranche of a $126.9 billion reduction planned in Bush levels over the next five years). Bush’s budget would have left defense spending at a 50-year low — a mere 3.6% of GDP by 1997. Clinton’s plan would put it at 3.12% of GDP.

According to Aspin, only after completion of a "bottom-up" review he has ordered as part of the preparation of next year’s budget might defense cuts be reconsidered. In other words, the Clinton Administration is determined to drive the proverbial ox even further into the ditch before figuring out whether it will be necessary to try to get it out again — let alone how that could be done with the least unnecessary expenditure. As a result, the United States military is likely to experience yet another jag in the bust-and-boom cycle that has four times before in this century proven so wasteful and so reckless with regard to taxpayer equities and the national interest.

Economic Determinism

The driving force behind the Administration’s determination to proceed with further, precipitous dismantling of the nation’s defense capabilities appears not only ideological but economic in nature. While many of those shaping the Clinton team’s defense policies have well-established credentials as critics of the military and its programs, the decisive impetus behind their efforts to effect a hasty contraction of the Defense Department and its supporting industrial and logistical infrastructure comes down to money.

Truth be told, the "peace dividend" has already been spent by the White House and OMB as part of the President’s national economic package. According to Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, roughly 80 percent of the "sacrifice" the government is being asked to make to achieve deficit reduction and provide economic stimulus is coming out of Defense Department spending cuts.

For the same reason, it is unlikely that the Administration — if left to its own devices — will reverse the remaining $114 billion that it expects to slash from defense over the next four years (on top of the $50 billion in reductions projected by the last Bush budget). This out-year money, like the FY94 savings have already been earmarked to go elsewhere. Increases in defense spending will seriously diffuse, if not neutralize, the energy and effectiveness of the "laser beam" Mr. Clinton has promised to bring to bear on reinvigorating the national economy.

This preoccupation has, in turn, given further impetus to the Administration’s "see no evil" foreign policy predilections. For example, the enormous implications of revanchism in Russia for the U.S. defense budget are given consideration only to the extent that the threat of renewed spending on the American military can be used to justify and catalyze undisciplined, unconditional aid to Russian "reformers." A similar syndrome is at work regarding: the Iranian-Iraqi modus vivendi which permits Baghdad to sell oil for hard currency despite the U.N. sanctions; North Korea’s defiant pursuit of nuclear weapons and rapid proliferation of weaponry of mass destruction; Serbia’s unslaked thirst for territory and blood.

All these (existing or incipient) crises are being met by an America response whose fecklessness and passivity seems as much a reflection of a determination not to endanger defense budget cuts as it is a failure to appreciate their full implications. Unfortunately, the costs of deferring U.S. attention — including, where necessary, military attention — to these challenges will vastly exceed those entailed were they to be dealt with now through credible deterrence and forceful action.

Specific Areas of Concern

• The Clinton-Aspin FY1994 defense budget is, by its principal author’s own admission, not strategy-driven. It is entirely a function of an arbitrary budget "bogey" and a desperate, hasty effort to figure out how much can be maintained and acquired for that amount.

 

As Sen. Nunn put it in a CNN interview on 27 March: "We’ve been dealing with numbers grabbed out of the air. No one knows where all these cuts are going to come from." Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a distinguished member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors agreed, observing that the process amounts to "starting with a number and fitting a strategy to that. That’s the wrong way to go about it."

 

• No evident reduction has been made in U.S. commitments and responsibilities around the world. For example, even though the Clinton Administration is substantially reducing the number of troops in Europe, it has not suggested that the United States is any less committed to the security of its friends and allies there than before. If anything, that commitment has become broader and more challenging following the liberation of Eastern Europe and the outbreak of a major war on the continent.

 

• The Clinton-Aspin FY94 plan is unlikely to be able to support even the reduced forces it purports to fund. At the very least, a number of modernization programs kept alive this year will be unsustainable next year — particularly if, as promised, further cuts are imposed.

 

• It will, similarly, be problematic to keep the level of ships, planes, tanks, divisions, etc. called for in the Aspin plan at anything like the levels of operational readiness claimed for the FY94 program. For one thing, operations and maintenance (O&M) funds tend historically to be about 80% of those required at any given level of spending — even when a concerted effort is made to safeguard "readiness" against the budgeteers’ predations.

 

• What is more, readiness and combat capability inevitably suffer as fewer forces are asked to: do not only their own work but that of the cashiered troops; deploy for longer periods; fight with aging and obsolescing equipment; and put up with what they perceive to be greater hardships (e.g., less leave, pay freezes, gays in the military, etc.) While intangible and irreducible to a budget "line item," the cumulative, adverse effect of such actions on morale is very real.

 

• Even before the Clinton-Aspin cuts took effect, the U.S. military would have been unable to mount an operation like Desert Shield/Desert Storm — certainly not in a mere six months, with as decisive an effect and at such a modest cost in terms of American lives lost. These results were a function of a massive investment over many years in recruiting, training, equipping and deploying U.S. forces to deal with a far more potent threat than Saddam’s military. It is fanciful to believe that the same capabilities will be available at the radically smaller budget and force structure levels contemplated by the FY1994 budget, to say nothing of — as Secretary Aspin has suggested — for a mere $90 billion per "Gulf War-equivalent" used for by planners to size U.S. forces.

 

• The FY94 defense budget does not begin to rectify serious inadequacies in the United States’ industrial infrastructure needed to field a credible nuclear deterrent force. (See in this regard the attached column by Center director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. from today’s Washington Times.)

 

• Particularly troubling as a result is the inadequate attention and resources being accorded by the Clinton Administration to active defenses against ballistic missile attack. As a result, virtually every facet of the Bush SDI program is being slowed — some to the point of virtual termination.

 

Particularly noteworthy in this regard, is the decision to all but cancel the promising Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor technology at the very moment that the Israeli government and the Western European Union (among others) are recognizing the indispensibility of the sort of boost-phase defense afforded by such a system.

 

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy is profoundly concerned that, if the Clinton Administration has its way, the United States will make penny-wise and pound-foolish reductions in its defense establishment — reductions which are both inconsistent with its abiding global requirements and very costly to reconstruct when, inevitably, it is recognized that such a step is necessary. Needless to say, such a posture is neither in the best interests of the United States nor its allies nor international security broadly defined.

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1. For example, the Clinton-Aspin FY1994 defense budget reduces Navy combat ships from 443 to 413; aircraft carrier battle groups from 13 to 12. It cuts active duty Air Force wings from 16 to 13 (i.e., a reduction of between 164 and 216 planes); reserve wings from 12 to 11. Bombers are reduced from 201 to 191; ICBMs from 787 to 667. Troop levels would fall from 1,728,000 to 1,620,600. Budget cuts include a $6 billion cut in salaries for active duty personnel (an 8 percent reduction) and a small pay cut for reserve personnel. All defense employees would be subjected to a pay freeze.