Who’s the Isolationist? Clinton’s Indifference to Security Policy in His Second Inaugural Will Make Cohen’s Life MIserable

(Washington, D.C.): President
Clinton’s first term was characterized by
a remarkable paucity of serious attention
paid to America’s role in the world and
the emerging threats to its security.
According to conventional wisdom,
however, a President eager to secure
avoid the “second-term jinx”
and make his mark on world history — and
Mr. Clinton is said to be wholly absorbed
with these objectives — will turn his
attention to foreign affairs in his
second term.

If so, it is remarkable that Mr.
Clinton devoted a mere two paragraphs of
his second inaugural address to foreign
affairs and national security. The
totality of his remarks about security
policy are contained in the following
eight sentences:

“The world is no longer
divided into two hostile camps.
Instead, now we are building
bonds with nations that once were
our adversaries. Growing
connections of commerce and
culture give us a chance to lift
the fortunes and spirits of
people the world over. And for
the very first time in all of
history, more people on this
planet live under democracy than
dictatorship.”

* * *

“We will stand mighty for
peace and freedom and maintain a
strong defense against terror and
destruction. Our children will
sleep free from the threat of
nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons. Ports and airports,
farms and factories will thrive
with trade and innovation and
ideas. And the world’s greatest
democracy will lead a whole world
of democracies.”

Leaving aside for a moment the
fact that these words suggest that the
President either does not know what he is
talking about or is purposefully
misleading the American people, his
lack of serious attention to the current
and prospective global situation
highlights an important contradiction
between Mr. Clinton’s words and actions.
Although the Republican-led Congress has
repeatedly been accused of being animated
by “isolationist” impulses, it
is the Clinton Administration — despite
all its grand and sweeping talk of being
“internationalist” — that is
contributing to a decreased American role
in the rest of the world.

Hollowing
Out the Military

Nowhere is this more clear than with
respect to the backbone of U.S.
international leadership — the American
military. Although Mr. Clinton glibly
speaks of “stand[ing] mighty for
peace and freedom and maintain[ing] a
strong defense against terror and
destruction,” his downsizing of the
defense budget means that the United
States is rapidly losing its ability to
project the power necessary, in the
President’s words, “to lead a whole
world of democracies.”

According to the Associated Press,
Mr. Clinton will propose a defense budget
for FY98 of roughly $260 billion. That
translates into roughly $5 billion
less than was appropriated for the
U.S. armed forces in FY97. Interestingly,
such a reduction in resources for the
Pentagon was explicitly opposed last week
by the outgoing Secretary of Defense,
William Perry. Secretary Perry
cautioned that, “We should
not reduce below the force structure we
have now….[U.S. military forces are]
about the minimum required to allow the
United States to be able to maintain its
role as a global power.”

A Bill of Particulars

Such a grim assessment is validated in
an upcoming article by John Hillen, a
respected defense policy analyst at the
Heritage Foundation, due to appear in the
Spring 1997 issue of Orbis. The
following are among the highlights of
this article, entitled “America’s
Alliance Anxieties: Superpowers Don’t Do
Windows”:

“Unilateral disarmament is a
recurring pattern in American
history, and the post-Cold War
years are no exception. Since
1991, the U.S. military has
suffered at least a 35
percent decrease in both
force structure and defense
funding. As a result, the
force is the smallest fielded by
the nation since 1940.

“Unfortunately, these
slashing cuts have occurred only
on the supply side. On the
‘demand side’ — commitments
overseas — the military has
actually been saddled with new
responsibilities. In
short, the U.S. armed
forces…are being asked to more
with less, leading to two severe
consequences. The first is a disparity
between stated U.S. commitments
and the forces fielded by the
nation….The second is
the resulting strain (on
both personnel and materiel) the
armed forces suffer as they
attempt to compensate with an
accelerated operational tempo.

“…On any given day in 1996
the Army had some 105,000
soldiers permanently stationed
overseas and another 40,000 on
temporary duty in some sixty
countries. This demand, coupled
with reductions in force size,
means that many soldiers
are deploying at a rate 300-400
percent higher than during
the Cold War. In a time
of relative peace, nearly 15
percent of active-duty army
soldiers are deployed on
twelve-month hardship tours of
duty. A General
Accounting Office investigation
in fact found that some
Army units were deployed more
than 210 days per year.

“Expressing his concern
about the high operational tempo,
the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff
set a target of a maximum of 120
days of temporary duty per unit.
That target was drastically
exceeded by many units, including
AWACS units (average 136 days),
RC-135 units (168 days), combat
air controllers (160 days),
EC-130E units (175 days), and
some electronic warfare units
that spent more than 300
days annually on deployments.

“The Navy has also exceeded
its budgeted operations tempo for
the past several years and
predicts that it will do so again
in FY 1997. With the decline in
the number of its warships, the
Navy has been forced to ‘gap’ the
assignment of aircraft carriers
and other warships, meaning that other
forces must forego routine
training, maintenance and rest in
order to cover the gap left by
the absence of a carrier.

“The Department of Defense
is unable to invest in the
recapitalization of the armed
forces. Procurement
accounts — money used by the DOD
to fund new equipment and weapons
systems — have dropped some 70
percent in the past ten years,
precipitating a 1996 rebellion by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who
begged Congress to restore $20
billion in funding for new
weapons systems….Overall,
projected DOD budgets only
continue to live off the capital
investments of the Reagan-era
military buildup. As a result, by
2005 all of the tanks and
most of the U.S. military
aircraft will be older than
the soldiers and pilots using
them.

“History suggests that
military powers should use the
breathing space between major
conflicts to replenish their
military stocks, train (and rest)
their personnel, and aggressively
experiment with new doctrines and
equipment. Instead, the U.S.
military is being driven into the
ground by an already high
operating tempo compounded by a
series of peripheral peace
operations.

“Speaker of the House Newt
Gingrich (R-GA) has recognized
that this effort is ‘stretching
our military [to] the verge of
the breaking point. He noted that
‘at some point somebody
needs to stand up and say there
is a minimum size to being the
world’s only superpower, and we
have gotten smaller than that in
terms of our regular units, and
we have an obligation to insist
on a military in which people can
serve without being burned out by
the sheer constancy of their
being used.'” href=”97-D11.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
(Emphasis added throughout.)

The Bottom Line

As the Center for Security Policy noted on 2
January 1997,⁽²⁾ this year promises to be a decisive one
for the American military:

“A new Secretary of Defense
will be sworn in. Several
blue-ribbon studies concerning
defense spending and priorities
will be published by leading
Washington think tanks. An
internal Pentagon Quadrennial
Defense Review (QDR) will be
completed. And a congressionally
mandated National Defense Panel
will second-guess the QDR’s
conclusions and recommendations
— and offer some of its own.

“It is widely
expected that the upshot of these
several developments will be to
inflict still further cuts in the
U.S. military’s force structure.
The justification for doing so
will be to free up funds within a
fixed (or declining) ‘top line’
so as to permit more resources to
be applied to long-deferred
research and development and
procurement activities.

“Unfortunately, there are
ample grounds for concern that
savings realized through cutting
back divisions, air wings and
ships will not find their way
into urgently needed investment.
They may, instead, go toward
additional peacekeeping
activities, humanitarian relief
operations or other non-defense
functions. Alternatively, the
temptation for the President
and/or the Congress to pocket
these funds for deficit reduction
or another national priority may
prove irresistible.”

Among the daunting challenges
facing Secretary of Defense-designate
William Cohen, whose
confirmation hearings will occur tomorrow,
none may be more difficult — and
wrenching — than securing the resources
required to sustain the sort of flexible,
formidable and technologically superior
armed forces the Nation will need in the
years ahead. In the face of
palpable presidential indifference to
this requirement, the burden of leading
and educating the executive and
legislative branches and the American
people on security policy will fall
disproportionately on Secretary Cohen.
Given the immense stakes for the United
States, its people and interests, it can
only be hoped that the independence,
brilliance and tenacity for which Bill
Cohen became renowned during his years in
Congress will be brought fully to bear in
this vital task.

– 30 –

1. The cited
remarks by Speaker Gingrich were made on
the occasion of his acceptance of the
Center for Security Policy’s 1996 Keeper
of the Flame Award on 18 September 1996.
For a transcript
of this important address, please contact
the Center or visit its site on the World
Wide Web.

2. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled The B-2: A Key
Component of the Cost-Effective Defenses
Needed for the 21^st Century ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_1″>No. 97-T 1, 2
January 1997).