The next book in my series on the Downside Legacy at Two Degrees of President Clinton deals with the Armed Forces. This is a rough draft of Chapter I – for the discussion:
Under the Clinton administration, military budgets and resources were viciously slashed well beyond anything anticipated by the prior administration as a dividend for the ending of the cold war.
"Our forces are almost 40% smaller than a decade ago - shrunk from 18 Army divisions to 10, from 22 Air Force wings to 12 and from 528 Navy ships to 315. The defense budget is 25% smaller than of the peak Reagan years and represents 2.8% of gross domestic product - the lowest percentage since before Pearl Harbor…
Most of the major [military equipment] systems now in use were designed in the 1960s and '70s and procured during the '80s buildup...
The annual U.S. investment in new military equipment has decreased 70% from the 1980s. As a result, U.S. defense industries are in the doldrums, with their workload at subsistence levels and their talent being drawn away by the civilian high-tech sector's big salaries and stock options." [1]
The Clinton administration began the bombing campaign in Kosovo [March, 1999] with the U.S. military already in tatters. Representative Henry Hyde described the conditions:
"The Army has reduced its ranks by more than 630,000 soldiers and civilians and closed over 700 installations at home and overseas… Since 1987, active duty military personnel have been reduced by more than 800,000…
The Navy has total of 22,000 empty slots in a 324-ship fleet.
The armed services already suffer a severe ammunition shortfall going into the Kosovo engagement. According to the Service Chiefs, the FY99 ammunition shortfall for the Marine Corps is $193 million. For the Army in FY00, it is a shocking $3.5 billion.
The equipment we have is aging.
A-10 pilots flying over Kosovo have been forced to spend their own money to buy inferior, off-the-shelf GPS receivers at local stores and attach them with Velcro to their planes to use in conjunction with their outdated survival radios should their planes crash.
At a congressional hearing held in February [1999] at the Navy’s Strike and Air Warfare Center in Fallen, NV – the world-renowned ‘Top Gun’ fighter pilot school – Members were told that mechanical problems had grounded 14 of the center’s 23 aircraft.
More than half of the B1-Bs at Ellsworth AFB are not mission capable because they lack critical parts." [2]
The reductions of budget and personnel were not met by reduced workload. To the contrary, although forces were reduced by one third, they were nevertheless assigned three times as many operations in far-flung places all over the globe. When the active military could no longer keep up with the demand, reserves were called up.
"The Clinton/Gore Administration has stretched our military forces thin in the past seven years. Between 1960 and 1991, the United States Army conducted 10 ‘operational events.’ In the past eight years, the Army has conducted 26 operational events --- 2 1/2 times that number in 1/3 the time span. Today [April 1999], there are 265,000 American troops in 135 countries." [3]
"Beginning with a cruise missile assault against Baghdad in June 1993 (the first of several all-but-forgotten pinprick attacks against Iraq), Clinton has fought (and lost) a sharp skirmish with Mohammed Farah Aideed in Somalia; occupied Haiti; bombed Bosnian Serbs who defied American efforts to broker a Balkan peace; placed U.S. troops at the forefront of a NATO-led incursion into Bosnia; inaugurated a highly publicized war on terror by obliterating a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan; threatened, postponed and then in December 1998 executed a ‘major’ air campaign against Iraq, the prelude to a war of attrition that has continued ever since; threatened, postponed and now executed a large-scale bombing campaign to punish Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for not signing the peace agreement proffered last month [February 1999] in Rambouillet, France." [4]
Under Clinton’s leadership, priorities were turned on their head. Beginning with the issue of gays in the military - the rough and tumble military culture was forced to comply with Clinton administration demands for political correctness regardless of whether they were counter productive to the mission of fighting and winning wars. Recruitment results read like an indictment against this wrong-headedness, as only the Marines were able to meet their personnel requirements. The Marines were exempt from the requirement for gender integrated training.
"When Sara Lister was forced to resign her Pentagon position [November 1997] after labeling the Marine Corps as ‘extremists,’ there were those among the fair-minded who wondered whether she had been treated too harshly…
Women do play a vital role in our national defense. We could not and should not do without their participation. But that is not the same as saying that every barrier to women in the military should be removed. Frequently, there are considerable trade-offs, which military leaders are entitled to take into account. When the Army integrated women into the ranks of its medics, for example, it found that two women, unlike two men, do not possess the upper body strength needed to carry a fully laden stretcher.
Faced with the mandate to assimilate women into these positions, the Army neatly redefined carrying a stretcher as a task that requires four soldiers. Thus, the social engineers win another battle, and a new niche is opened for women. Few seemed to notice that, in the process, readiness has just declined by 50%." [5]
"Nowadays, basic training resembles summer camp. The Navy no longer Drills its trainees with rifles, and issues them a ‘blue card’ to hand to their trainer if they feel discouraged." [6]
"Finally, I mentioned that only one service is successfully meeting its recruitment goals. Instructively, that service is the United States Marine Corps, home of Lister's ‘extremists.’ It alone resists the feminist's demands to integrate basic training; it alone cultivates unabashedly a reputation for breeding warriors who don't need to call for a ‘time out’ when things get tough…
And when such an event [civilians under siege] happens, the hopeless and besieged won't be looking anxiously over the horizon for a group of American troops liberated from their masculine constructs, polite and courteous, attentive to the sensitivities of others. They'll be looking for the Marines." [7]
With Clinton at the helm, the military was no longer focused on warfare readiness, but rather it was reassigned to seemingly neverending international missions in support of the Clinton objective of spreading democracy through globalism. The move toward globalism itself encouraged the defense industry to look offshore for financial health. No apparent thought was given to the possible conflict of interest when a crucial supplier may be owned in part by a potential enemy-object of the very weapon systems being supplied.
Even at the material level, this lack of planning became apparent. The politically correct decision to use tungsten instead of lead or depleted uranium for munitions was not preceded by a major stockpiling. The supplier for tungsten is China.
In 1969, Clinton organized venomous anti-government, pro-enemy, anti-military war protests - for which he has yet to apologize. He was more than a simple draft dodger, expressing his loathing of the military in this December 3, 1969 letter to his ROTC Director, Colonel Eugene Holmes.
"Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam. I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did. I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine, After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans for the demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16…
Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest, best men I know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity…
The decision not to be a resister and the related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system…
And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal.
Forgive the length of this letter. There was much to say. There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait. Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.
Merry Christmas.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton" [8]
The military is legally prohibited from complaining about the president. For eight years they endured, serving at the pleasure of a man who loathed the military:
"For those convinced that ‘Wag the Dog’ is just a Hollywood invention, I offer a hard-to-find report titled ‘An Investigation into the Magnitude of Foreign Contacts.’ This document, penned, not by any Hollywood producer, but by Federal Reserve economists (document No. RWP97-14), is essentially a scientific quantification of the ‘Wag the Dog’ theory. The researchers employ a lengthy and complex mathematical model to illustrate the potential advantages of small-scale wars to presidents in distress." [9]
"The administration's military adventures have been starkly consistent with the report's findings since its release in late 1997 (at the same time Clinton's fortunes turned south with his Paula Jones deposition). The authors hold that the benefit a leader can receive from starting a war is directly related to the perceptions that war affects in the electorate - thus, Clinton's seeming tendency to profile his wars against his scandals." [10]
"Finally, and most disturbingly, he seems to wage war only when it stands to benefit him personally. War has been waged neither in Rwanda nor North Korea, and we cut and ran from Somalia - humanitarian and credibility concerns notwithstanding." [11]
"It was a sure sign that U.S. power and prestige have diminished when, at Kosovo peace talks, the Albanian delegation mistook the U.S. secretary of state for a cleaning lady. The incident is a metaphor for what critics call the squandering of U.S. superpower status since Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected eight years ago." [12]
"Emerging from the hastily prepared October summit with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, President Clinton looked defeated — and it was far from the first time. Veteran White House and State Department officials say that has cheapened the perceived power of the United States as much as any lost battle." [13]
Caspar Weinberger offered this explanation for what has happened to the military: "The Clinton administration never seems to understand the military, nor in many cases even to like it. As almost its first act, the Clinton administration began advocating reversal of years of careful handling of the issue of homosexuality in the armed forces. This had the effect of polarizing the military and resulted in one of the standard halfway compromises by which difficult issues are brushed under the rug." [14]
EndNotes: