The author of the above is Gregory L. Vistica, Washington Post Staff Writer, indirectly quoting Richard H. Shultz Jr., who is identified as a scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a Pentagon consultant.
Who exactly is doing the Clinton legacy damage control? I say the Washington Post. Shultz is saying what happened. But look at the bigger picture. The President and the Secretary of Defense should have been adamantly pressing to use effective methods. Why were these intermediate parties so influential that they ended up playing it safe? In other words, it was not because of President Bill Clinton's reluctance, but it was because President Bill Clinton didn't engage the matter at all.
Clinton and his SecDef Les Aspin wanted to eliminate 2 Army Special Forces Groups (1st and 3rd), one Ranger Battalion, and an Air Force Special Operations Wing and the overall AF SO headquarters which at the time was (I think) 21st Air Force. (I'm not sure how they planned to downsize the SEALs). The Pentagon fought them on this and they wound up disbanding 2 Army Reserve SF Groups (11th and 12th) instead of active ones, and only 2 squadrons (IIRC) and the HQ instead of a wing. The USAF stopped training some special ops insertion and extraction capabilities because of funding cuts. Training funds were also cut to support increasing peacekeeping & domestic law enforcement missions. We had fewer people and took it out of hide in optempo.
Special ops guys weren't alone. Numerous conventional units were cut from the reserve components at the same time, and the active duty units of all services were just about on bread and water.
Aspin had to resign in disgrace after the Somalia operation went down the tubes in October 1993, but new SecDef William Cohen carried out all of the Aspin cuts.
One thing that isn't often mentioned, but devastated the military, is the Democrats' fecklessness on foreign policy, almost foreign-policty-by-TV-headline, that was poison for morale. Two things in particular hurt here: the tail-between-the-legs bugout from Somalia (this was instrumental in handing us 9/11) and the futile, risky, exhausting adventure in Haiti, where we knocked off one strongman and put another who was just as bad (maybe worse) in his place. SF lost people in Haiti, both to being KIA by the local creeps, and to having their careers destroyed for saying the wrong thing to Administration suits.
Then there was all the COO and social engineering. Bill Clinton's first initiative as president was to force-feed gay activists to the military, on which he ultimately had to back down, but it illustrates that he still was the immature youth who "loathed" the military.
What do you expect from the administration that sold space in Arlington for campaign contributions?
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F