It’s easy to balance the budget when you gut the military. I remember no bullets and no jeep parts.
The Clinton surplus was precisely due to military reductions which were enabled by the fall of the Soviet Union! It was the “peace dividend” that Clinton squandered. Any surplus was due primarily to Ronald Wilson Reagan.
I remember an analysis somewhere back then that showed if you took all the cuts from Clinton - the personnel, vehicles, etc. and put them together it would've made something like the 5th or 6th largest fighting force in the world. So he basically got rid of, cancelled, or delayed an entire Country's worth of military men and machines.