Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Truth About Clinton's Military
Radiofree West Hartford ^ | April 16, 2003 | Jonathan Clark

Posted on 04/18/2003 5:40:43 PM PDT by ddodd3329

click here to read article


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-28 last
To: schaketo
What is the source please for Billy Jeff's Draft up to Bill Clinton's birth date lottery number is 311, drawn December 1,1969, but anyone who has already been ordered to report for induction is INELIGIBLE! The reason I am asking is that there are some liberals in the chatroom I am in who always claim President Bush was AWOL. This would be a great comeback to them. Thanks in advance
21 posted on 04/19/2003 6:34:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Weekly Rant

The Truth About Clinton's Military


By Jonathan Clark


April 16, 2003


After three weeks of conflict, Baghdad fell to United States Marine forces.  People in every corner of the world watched live as the Iraqi people aided by US Marines toppled the statue of Saddam and rode the head through the streets.  Years of pent up frustration and fear were released for the whole world to see.  It left the Arab Street in shock, it left 'Old Europe' looking very stupid, but as always the American left was out as soon as it happened attempting to spin the event.


It started on Wednesday with a column from Tribune Media Services writer, Matthew Miller.  Miller, who it should be noted, served as Senior Advisor to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995 - the Clinton years part I.  In his April 9th column he attempts to credit Bill Clinton with the effectiveness of today's military.


"The remarkable feats in Iraq are being performed by Bill Clinton's military.


This should be obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology or partisanship. We've been told repeatedly how much more lethal and accurate our forces are in 2003 than they were in 1991 - so much so that we needed only 250,000 troops to drive to Baghdad and change the regime, as opposed to the 500,000 we sent merely to oust Saddam from Kuwait in Gulf War I. Something like 90 percent of the bombs and missiles we use are "precision guided" today, versus roughly 10 percent back in 1991. The catalogue of how today's military is smarter, faster and better than it was back during Desert Storm is a credit to U.S. ingenuity and a source of national pride."


Miller then had the audacity to attempt a re-write of history to paint Clinton as a supporter of the military and sustained defense budgets.


"But politics explains why Bill Clinton insisted the Pentagon maintain a Cold War budget even without a Cold War, to protect his party's right flank."


I hate to confuse the situation with the facts Mr. Miller, but quite the opposite is true.  The Clinton/Gore Administration stretched our military forces very thin from 1993 to 1999.  In addition, they increased spending on social experiments while cutting defense spending.







  1. In June 1998, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group deployed with 770 fewer personnel than it did on its previous deployment three years before.

  2. At about the same time, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, another carrier, began a 6-month deployment 464 people short of its 2,963 authorized billets.

  3. In late 1998, the USS Enterprise deployed for the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf short 400 personnel.




22 posted on 04/19/2003 11:20:01 AM PDT by vannrox (The Preamble to the Bill of Rights - without it, our Bill of Rights is meaningless!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]

To: Thoro

Weekly Rant

The Truth About Clinton's Military - Continued


By Jonathan Clark


April 16, 2003



The equipment we have is aging:








And I can tell you that speaking with pilots first hand as of August 2001, they were complaining about the lack of flight time due to the age of the aircraft and the need for servicing and lack of replacement parts.


On Friday, the leading House Democrat, Nancy Pelosi chimed in with her two cents.


She said, "I have absolutely no regret about my vote on this war. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget - probably $100 billion - we could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less. The cost to our economy. But the most important question at this time, now that we're toward the end of it is, is what is the cost to the war on terrorism?"


Pelosi talked of the toppling of Saddam's regime as if were some sort of public works project.  And as Mrs. Pelosi praised the troops, she also said their success was owed "in large measure" to former President Bill Clinton.


Pelosi continued with the left's defense of Clinton saying "This best-trained, best-equipped, best-led force for peace in the history of the world was not invented in the last two years. This had a strong influence and strong support during the Clinton years," she said.

The problem with this line of reasoning besides it being factually incorrect is that if this is 'Clinton's Military', then this is also 'Clinton's Economy'.  As always they want to have it both ways.


Funny how just last week, the pundits were blaming Bush for basically what amounted to their own impatience with how they thought the war should have progressed.  Now that the success is so overwhelmingly apparent, they attempt to re-write history.  The one thing that folks like Pelosi and Miller overlook is the intangibles.  The biggest is the military's adoration of President Bush. From top to bottom, the U. S. military loathed his predecessor, Bill Clinton. They genuinely adore Bush.  And it is a mutual adoration.  This intangible piece provides motivation not seen during the Clinton years.  From 1993 through 2000, our military had no clear focus.  It was used primarily in diversionary tactics by Clinton when the heat of attention to his many scandals became more than he wanted to bear.  Have we forgotten Clinton's military escapades into Haiti, Kosovo, Mogadishu and Waco?


And don't forget that the Franco-German wing of the Democratic Party put themselves in to a position in which America had to suffer a loss in this conflict in order for them to come out on top.  They have done the same thing with domestic issues.  They are continuing this failed strategy by attempting to 'raise the bar' on what defines success in Iraq.  The problem is that it's not 'playing well in Peoria' anymore.  More and more people are getting their news from reliable sources like Fox News.  And after finding out how CNN withheld the truth about Saddam's brutality, more will follow.


The cold hard truth of the matter is that Rumsfeld and Franks put together a well motivated military force in short order that executed a well designed plan in which they overwhelmed the enemy and shocked the world.


Sermons over, pass the plate.


* Military Depletion Source: 1999 Congressional Fact Sheet

23 posted on 04/19/2003 11:21:07 AM PDT by vannrox (The Preamble to the Bill of Rights - without it, our Bill of Rights is meaningless!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: vannrox
Thanks, but I did a Google search and found it. Added it to my favorites.
24 posted on 04/19/2003 12:56:28 PM PDT by Kaslin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: vannrox
During the last four years of Clinton we lost many pilots and officers who, even though they had as little as 5 to 10 years to retirement, wouldn't take it any more and went to civilian jobs. That loss would take millions of dollars and decades of training and experience to replace. Remember during Bush's run for the White House he kept saying to the military hang-on, it won't be long.
25 posted on 04/19/2003 5:29:23 PM PDT by maranatha
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: Tailback
Not to mention the pitiful state of maintenance that arose because Klinton was diverting all the funds to Bosnia, Haiti, etc. Before I left the Army in 1996, I was in the scout platoon of an M1 battalion. Of the roughly 50 tanks, fewer than 10 could actually, legally roll out of the motorpool, because most were missing $10-20 parts that caused the tanks to be safety deadlined. When I learned this from one of the Battalion Maintenance wrenches one day, I immediately thought of the state of Karter's military, with it's F-14s and 16s grounded because of not enough spare parts. Disgusting!

Klinton's Army was an extremely unfunny joke. For all of my problems with Bush, I do have to admit he's apparently done a fine job rebuilding the Army.

Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!

26 posted on 04/19/2003 5:38:12 PM PDT by wku man (Today is Patriots' Day...remember what happened 228 years ago today!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: Free_at_last_-2001
I just finished it, also. I don't think I have ever felt such rage while reading a book! Klintoon still needs to be tried as a traitor to this country.
27 posted on 04/19/2003 9:17:32 PM PDT by basil
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]

To: Tailback

According to this (tongue planted firmly in cheek) Bill Clinto created the whizbang hitech armed forces that routed Saddam:

Bush's Army—or Bill's?
Should Clinton share the credit for victory in Iraq?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, May 2, 2003, at 5:12 PM ET


At last weekend's White House Correspondents' Dinner, one gossip column reports, liberal comedian Al Franken went up to Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative deputy defense secretary and said, "Clinton's military did pretty well in Iraq, huh?" Wolfowitz responded by proposing that Franken perform an anatomically impossible act.

The exchange was no doubt conducted in the spirit of good-natured invective that pervades these events (and perhaps under the influence of other spirits as well). But it does raise a serious question: How much of the swift U.S. victory in Gulf War II can be credited to decisions made by George W. Bush—and how much to the legacy left by Bill Clinton?


Continue Article









The short answer is that plenty of credit is due to both presidents—and plenty more to neither.

Weapons systems and war strategies often take years, even decades, to evolve. After the allies won the first war against Iraq, Operation Desert Storm in 1991, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said he called up Caspar Weinberger "to thank him for all those $600 toilet seats he bought." (His reference was to the Pentagon-procurement scandals of the Reagan years, when Weinberger was secretary; the scandals so dominated the defense-budget debates of the era that many people were surprised that the U.S. military could fight, that its weapons worked.) Cheney's point was that he, President Bush, and their generals may have fashioned the war plan—but they executed it with inherited arsenals.

Similarly, the wonder weapons of Gulf War II—the weapons that allowed for "a combination of precision, speed, and boldness the enemy did not expect and the world had not seen before," as the second President Bush put it in his victory speech last night onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—were developed and built during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

The most dramatic of these weapons was the Joint Defense Attack Munition, or JDAM (pronounced JAY-dam). JDAM is a kit, attached to a Global Positioning Satellite receiver, that can turn nearly any dumb bomb into a smart bomb. The pilot punches in the geographic coordinates of the target; the bomb receives signals from GPS satellites, which guide it to those coordinates; it explodes within 10 to 30 feet of the target. JDAM is a vast improvement over the earlier generation of laser-guided smart bombs. Lasers couldn't see targets well through rain, smoke, or dust, and a laser bomb cost $100,000 to $200,000 while a JDAM kit costs $18,000. So the military was able to buy a lot of them. In Gulf War II, JDAMs were vital for knocking out Iraqi tanks and artillery on the battlefield, and they made it possible to destroy urban targets without doing much damage to neighboring buildings or civilians.

Yet the first JDAMs—or, as some of them were originally called, GAMs (for GPS-Aided Munitions)—were developed, produced, and used in the Clinton years. Congress accelerated the funding for the program in 1993. The first test, in which a B-2 bomber destroyed all 16 targets from a 40,000-foot altitude at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, took place in October 1996. Boeing delivered its first production model in June 1998. A small number were dropped on Serbian targets during the war for Kosovo in 1999. The Navy started putting them on F/A-18s in the fall of 2000.

Another marvel of Gulf War II was the Predator drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle that loiters in the sky for 20 hours, takes video pictures of the ground below, and streams the imagery back to command headquarters. An advanced version of this drone also carries Hellfire air-to-ground missiles; it not only views the target but destroys it. This feat was most famously accomplished over Yemen on Nov. 4, 2002, when a drone-fired Hellfire destroyed a vehicle carrying six al-Qaida leaders. Drones were also used to dramatic effect in the Afghanistan war of October 2001 and no doubt (but to what degree we don't yet know) in Gulf War II. Certainly the combination of JDAMs and drones made it possible to find and destroy targets, including mobile targets, far more quickly and precisely than in any previous war.

The Predator, too, originated in the Clinton years—its first test flight was in 1994. Predators flew more than 50 sorties over Kosovo (though a fair number of them crashed or were shot down). The Hellfire-armed drone came later—its first test occurred in February 2001—but, a couple of years earlier, by the end of the Kosovo conflict, Predators were carrying a laser, which they used to designate targets on the ground for laser-guided bombs. The longer-range, more-enduring Global Hawk drone, too, had its first flight under Clinton, in March 1998.

Tactical Tomahawk, the GPS-guided version of the Tomahawk cruise missile—which, in Gulf War II, proved far more accurate and reliable than the earlier, terrain-contour-matching cruise missiles used in Desert Storm—was first funded in 1999.

In one sense, then, Franken was right. In two other senses, though, he was either beside the point or plain wrong.

First, presidents generally have little to do personally with big changes in military strategy or hardware. There are exceptions. John F. Kennedy ordered a buildup of non-nuclear forces in Europe and inculcated a romanticism for counterguerrilla warfare and the Green Berets. Richard Nixon built up the Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile system (but then negotiated it away by signing the ABM Treaty). The dream of ballistic-missile defenses also enticed Ronald Reagan and, now, George W. Bush, both of whom lavished such programs with unprecedented billions of dollars. Jimmy Carter poured money into the air-launched cruise missile as an alternative to the B-1 bomber, which he'd cancelled. (The Air Force outmaneuvered him, though: The Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft, which Carter wanted built instead, turned out to be the B-1 in disguise; after Carter left office, the Air Force removed the mask and openly resumed the program.)

In other words, the military generally goes about its business, and it is often a mere coincidence which president pays for researching, developing, or deploying a particular weapon. It is doubtful that Clinton knew what a Predator was, nor is it likely that Bush could have passed an exam on the topic before the war in Afghanistan made it famous. Contrary to many Republicans' claims, Bill Clinton did not weaken the U.S. military—far from it. On the other hand, as defense analyst William Arkin put it, "If Jesse Jackson had been president, we would still have JDAM."

However, in another sense, Bush—or at least the Bush administration—does deserve credit for the victory. In the most basic consideration, Clinton probably would not have fought this war, at least not in the way it was fought. When Clinton confronted the Serbs over Kosovo, he firmly resisted using U.S. ground forces—beating back proposals even to threaten putting troops on the ground as a bargaining lever. He also directed that all U.S. pilots fly above 10,000 feet, well beyond the range of Serbian air-defense missiles. He wanted no American combat casualties—and he got none. It is impossible to say whether Clinton would have loosened his standards in a war with Iraq (assuming for a moment that he would have gone to war with Iraq). But it is a fair judgment that Clinton had little appetite for wars that would kill American soldiers. It is doubtful that he would have approved the sort of bold, swift, and unabashedly risky offensive that Bush approved for Gulf War II. It was to a large extent Clinton's arsenal. It was Bush's war.


Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.


28 posted on 01/30/2006 12:29:47 PM PST by robowombat
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-28 last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson