Spin Control’: Architects of Hollow Military See no Evil’

(Washington, D.C.): There is good news and bad news about the op.ed. article published in today’s Washington Post by former Clinton-Gore Secretary of Defense William Perry and his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili. The good news is that, with their essay entitled “The U.S. Military: Still the Best by Far,” these prominent Democrats¹ have further intensified a needed debate over the condition of today’s armed forces — and tomorrow’s.²

The bad news is that Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili’s contribution to that debate has been less than helpful. In important respects, their assessment of the question at hand — namely, has the reduction in the size and capability of the U.S. military over the past decade been excessive, leading to a condition where it “cannot adequately protect American national interests?” — is highly misleading, transparently politicized and, since the authors should know better, seemingly intentionally disingenuous.

In the final analysis, it may well be that, as two of the leading architects of the hollow military Mr. Clinton is bequeathing to his successor, Secretary Perry and General Shalikashvili cannot objectively discuss their handiwork. If so, it would be better for all involved if they did not inject themselves into the public debate about their dubious legacy.

A Bill of Particulars

The following are among the more troubling of the arguments and contentions advanced by Clinton-Gore’s first-string defense “spin doctors”:

• The Peace Dividend’

Perry-Shalikashvili: “[A] dramatic reduction in the threat [following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR ]allowed for…a significant reduction in the size of our military forces….The most obvious benefit of [the resulting] reductions in force and support structure was a reduction in the defense budget. If these reductions had not been made, the current defense budget would be almost $400 billion instead of almost $300 billion.

“This peace dividend,’ amounting to about $100 billion a year, has been a major contributor to the balanced budget that our country now enjoys. The question of course, is did the nation pay too high a price for this benefit? In particular, was the capability of the military forces reduced to the extent that they cannot adequately protect American national interests? Our answer to that question is an emphatic no.”

The Facts: It is, at best, premature to answer this question in the negative since the full costs of the so-called peace dividend’ being touted by Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili have yet to become clear. Between Fiscal Year 1993 and 2000, the Clinton-Gore team deferred or canceled some $426 billion worth of procurement purchases by the Defense Department. The savings were not a product of sound military policy; rather, they were the result of the Administration ignoring procurement requirements — including many identified in its own four-year plans (i.e., the 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR) and the 1997 Quarterly Defense Review (QDR)) — creating false savings in the defense budget that translated primarily into additional funds for domestic priorities.

According to Daniel Goure and Jeffrey Ranney, authors of Averting the Defense Train Wreck in the New Millennium:

The military departments already deferred $426 billion of procurement purchases during FY 1993- 2000. These deferred purchases accounted for 52 percent of the procurement budget demand during this period. Under the February 1999 military spending plan for FY 2000-2005, DOD plans to defer during FY 2001-2005 another $389 billion….These deferred purchases in turn raise future procurement budget levels — if QDR forces are to be maintained. For example, if the $815 billion cumulative deferred purchases are added to the procurement demand for the next 15 year period (FY 2006-2020), the procurement budget will be $4,367 billion or 23 percent higher than if no deferrals been made since FY 1993. (Emphasis added.)

In short, the “peace dividend” is not only a myth, but the United States has actually been earning negative interest on this dividend — and we will be lucky if the only currency in which the full price has ultimately to be paid is in dollars.

• One Major Regional Conflict

Perry-Shalikashvili: “The United States has a military force that is capable of dealing decisively with any likely regional conflict (and the convincing demonstration of this capability in Desert Storm, Bosnia and Kosovo decrease the likelihood of such a confrontation).”

The Facts: One should not need to remind a former Secretary of Defense and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the standard against which U.S. forces have been supposed to be sized and equipped is to deal with not a single major regional theater war (MTW) but two, “nearly simultaneous” ones. And current military leaders — the men and women who understand all too well the limitations with which they have been saddled, thanks to the cumulative effect of years of underfunding — are under no illusion about the United States’ ability to execute the two-MTW strategy. For example, on 10 February 2000, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki, told Congress: “The first MTW would be moderate risk. The second one, risk would be in the high category with risk here measured in the amount of time it would take us to bring that second MTW to conclusion. You measure that risk in national treasure, lives, and expended dollars.”

More recently, the Commander of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command, General John Jumper, USAF, elaborated further on the degree of risk we are currently running. In an interview with CBS News last week, General Jumper revealed that the entire Air Force had to be drained to perform its operations in Kosovo, which meant that if it had to face a second major campaign, it would have been “unable to perform. We would have had very great difficulty trying to respond to a crisis of equal proportion.”

What is more, what the former Secretary and JCS Chairman euphemistically call “convincing demonstrations [that would] decrease the likelihood of [even one future] confrontation” actually suggest no such thing. These “demonstrations” — i.e., Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo — have not ended, to say nothing of ended satisfactorily. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein has defied the West and survived to resume his rebuilding of conventional and unconventional weapons with which to threaten its vital interests. Bosnia is at peace only as long as armed international forces stand between the warring factions. And Milosevic remains the leader of Serbia, poised to strike again at Kosovo, Montenegro or others when it suits his purposes.

Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili also conveniently failed to mention other, not-so-successful Clinton-Gore military campaigns in places like Somalia and Haiti, in which thugs and gangs have successfully withstood the “overwhelming force” brought to bear, at least temporarily by the United States. It is hard to imagine that their ilk — far from being deterred — have been other than emboldened by the experience and will be tempted to do worse should the U.S. military be weakened further.

Perry-Shalikashvili: “During the force reductions of the ’90s, we reduced the procurement budget disproportionately in order to preserve force readiness. This was an appropriate decision at that time, but its legacy today is a due bill as our military equipment ages. Substantial increases must be made in the procurement account to modernize equipment at an accelerated rate, since the aging equipment is itself becoming a readiness problem. This has been recognized both by the Department of Defense and Congress, and procurement authorizations have increased from $40 billion to $60 billion during the past two years. In our judgment, these authorization levels will have to be sustained for a number of years at this level or somewhat higher to effectively recapitalize the force.

“We…believe that this force superiority can be sustained at current budget levels (but to do so will take careful management by the Defense Department and uncommon discipline by Congress).” (Emphasis added.)

The Facts: The apparent internal contradiction of these statements — unless Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili mean that they favor raping maintenance and pay accounts to compensate for “recapitalization” programs they acknowledge are needed so as to stay within “current budget levels — is all the more astounding in light of the actual budgetary realities. As Dan Goure and Jim Ranney have noted:

If defense spending was maintained at [Clinton’s proposed] Gross Domestic Product level for FY 2001-2010, it would leave enough procurement dollars to pay for modernization and replacement of only 44 percent of the QDR force equipment…A 56 percent reduction of the QDR forces would clearly call into question the capabilities of the U.S. armed forces to carry out the national military strategy.

• We Spend More Than Anybody Else

Perry-Shalikashvili: “While American defense spending is (in current dollars) about $100 billion a year less than Cold War levels, it is still greater than the combined defense budgets of Russia, China, Germany and France. As a result of this investment, combined with the U.S. military’s advantage in technology and training, the United States today has the dominant military force in the world, and whichever nation is second is far behind.”

The Facts: The idea that gross U.S. defense expenditures must somehow relate to the size of those of potential adversaries (and/or friends) is one of the most insidious of arguments advanced by the “see no evil” crowd.³ It makes about as much sense as saying that local police departments should receive no more for protecting their communities than criminals spend in connection with the commission of their crimes.

Overwhelming force — not the relative size of one’s defense budget — is the only thing that deters the aggression of other nations and, in the event deterrence fails, that permits the situation to be remedied with a minimum of wasted lives and national treasure.

The United States will simply not be able to ensure that it can apply overwhelming force in the future without a significant increase in defense spending to ensure that both today’s military is fully combat-ready and to recapitalize that force so that tomorrow’s will be able to meet the Nation’s defensive requirements. Consider the following warning signs: In 2010, the average age of Apache helicopters, Abrams main battle tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles will all be beyond their design life — and there are currently no funded plans to buy replacements. Despite the decreased size of the Army, about $5,000 less will be spent per soldier on modernization in Fiscal Year 00 than was spent in FY 89. Despite the reduction in ships, the Navy is still facing a personnel shortage resulting in around 12,000 unmanned at-sea billets. In the past 7 years, Air Force readiness for combat units has declined from 85 percent to just 65 percent. By 2010, the average age of Air Force strategic bombers will be 36 years — well in excess of their 15-25 year estimated service half-life, and there are no approved plans to buy more.

The Bottom Line

As the Center noted on 10 August:

A nation with a projected $1.9 trillion budget surplus can afford consistently to allocate a minimum of four percent of its Gross Domestic Product to ensure its security. Such an commitment of resources would assure the readiness of both today’s armed forces and tomorrow’s for many years to come, while allowing important new defense initiatives — like Gov. Bush’s laudable pledge to protect the American people against ballistic missile attacks at the earliest possible time — to be fulfilled. We must not forget that the alternative has, in the past, often proven to be far more costly: unnecessary, avoidable wars whose price in blood and treasures dwarfs the savings achieved via pound-foolish “peace dividends.”

This election is an opportunity not only to acquaint the American people with the full magnitude of the crisis facing our military, but to seek a mandate from them for correcting it by adopting what might be called the “Four Percent Solution.” If all candidates will pledge, as Gov. Bush did so eloquently last week, to “use these good times for great goals,” there is surely no greater goal than assuring we have the freedom to pursue our other ones in peace and security.

¹While, like most military officers, Gen. Shalikashvili has not publicized his party affiliation, a report that appears in today’s New York Times makes clear his intimate connection to the Gore political machine: “Mr. Gore…instructed Mr. Christopher to consult freely and frequently with an informal group that consisted of Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman and former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, both of whom have faced ethics inquiries, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

² For more on this developing debate, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Four Percent Solution’ (No. 00-D 72, 7 August 2000).

³See Whose Foreign Policy, Mr. President? (No. 00-D 55, 8 June 2000).