The United States has had two big demonstrations of American military
power on George W. Bush's watch that have been spectacularly successful.
The irony here is that Bush fought these wars with the military Bill Clinton
bequeathed to him.
"A commander-in-chief leads the military built by those who came
before him," then-vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney said during
the 2000 campaign. "There is little that he or his defense secretary
can do to improve the force they have to deploy. It is all the work of
previous administrations. Decisions made today shape the force of tomorrow."
On this point he was certainly correct. Despite frequent Republican criticism
during the 2000 presidential campaign of Clinton-era military deterioration,
the force that was so successful in Afghanistan and Iraq -- while continuing
to perform a myriad of tasks around the world on a daily basis -- was
clearly quite capable. Republican assertions that the military was underfunded
and overstretched and that readiness was poor were contradicted by those
performances in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, by Vice President Cheney's
own standard, this force did not result from anything done by the current
administration. The first Bush defense budget went into effect on Oct.
1, 2002, and none of the funds in that budget has yet had an impact on
the quality of the men and women in the armed services, their readiness
for combat, or the weapons they used to destroy Taliban or Iraqi forces.
As a presidential candidate, then-Gov. George W. Bush routinely declared
that he wanted a new military shaped for a new world. In his frequently
cited speech at the Citadel military academy in September 1999, he said:
As president, I will begin an immediate, comprehensive review of our
military -- the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy,
the priorities of its procurement -- conducted by a leadership team
under the secretary of Defense. I will give the secretary a broad mandate -- to
challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense
for decades to come. We will modernize some existing weapons and equipment,
necessary for current tasks. But our relative peace allows us to do this
selectively. The real goal is to move beyond marginal improvements -- to
replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies. To use
this window of opportunity to skip a generation of technology. This will
require spending more -- and spending more wisely.
This was a bold vision of the military that accurately expressed the
need for major, ongoing change. Unfortunately, it has not been matched
with sufficient vision and programmatic commitment by the Bush administration.
The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, the comprehensive review promised
by candidate Bush, fell substantially short of its stated objective. It
did not articulate a sweeping new strategy, it did not call for any change
in existing force structure, and it did not suggest any major redirection
of investment in future systems. Moreover, until the events of Sept. 11,
2001, the Bush administration had not suggested any major increase in
defense spending. In most respects, the review looked very much like what
one might have expected from the Clinton administration. Essentially,
the only major change was the increased emphasis on missile defense.
The Bush administration had barely started to make its mark on defense
policy before hostilities in Afghanistan began. In the spring of 2001,
it requested and received a $5 billion supplemental appropriation for
the 2001 defense budget, but that constituted less than 2 percent of defense
spending for the year -- mostly for pay raises -- and went largely
unnoticed before the war began. The most recent defense budget submitted
to Congress by the Bush administration would increase defense spending
significantly, but it fails once again to make tough choices and provide
a necessary vision of leadership. While U.S. forces in Iraq were a model
of what a transformed U.S. military should be, the Pentagon continues
to invest in Cold War military hardware -- fighter aircraft, destroyers,
and other weapons designed to fight advanced Soviet military capabilities.
In fact, the Clinton administration actually spent more money on defense
than the previous administration of President George H.W. Bush. The smaller
outlays during the first Bush administration were developed and approved
by then-Defense Secretary Cheney and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Colin Powell. The Clinton administration did not coast on Reagan-era
procurement funding. During the 1990s, the Pentagon invested more than
$1 trillion in developing and procuring new weapons and information technology
that gave U.S. forces such an unprecedented advantage in the last two
U.S. military campaigns. But more significant than the budget increases
was the shift that occurred in the mid-1990s. That shift involved much
greater emphasis on precision weapons, sensors, robotics, advanced communications,
training, readiness, and orienting the intelligence community toward direct
support of military operations. It was that shift that produced the superb
military that not only swept through Iraq at a rate that defied historical
precedent, but used its awesome force with unprecedented precision and
effect, unprecedented low collateral damage, and unprecedented low casualty
rates. It was the American Revolution in Military Affairs begun in the
Clinton administration that was unveiled in Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The combination of Joint Defense Attack Munitions (JDAMs) and unmanned
aerial drones -- both products of that shift -- made it possible to
find and destroy targets, including mobile targets, more precisely and
quickly during Operation Enduring Freedom, the response to the Sept. 11
attacks, and in Operation Iraqi Freedom than in any previous war. As many
as 70 percent of all munitions dropped on Iraq were the precision-guided
munitions developed and built during the Clinton administration. Funding
for the JDAM program began in 1993, Clinton's first year in office. The
advanced, GPS-guided Tomahawk cruise missile, which proved far more accurate
and reliable than the earlier cruise missiles used in Desert Storm under
the first President Bush, was funded in 1999. Unmanned aerial vehicles
like the Predator and Global Hawk, which enabled U.S. forces to use combat
aircraft in close air support in unprecedented ways, also originated in
the Clinton years.
The Clinton administration also tried to maintain the quality of military
personnel by increasing their pay, and it improved retirement and health
benefits for military retirees. During his presidential campaign Bush
charged that the Clinton administration had overburdened the U.S. military
with too many deployments overseas, and he promised to pare those military
obligations. "Resources are overstretched," he said. "Frustration
is up, as families are separated and strained. Morale is down. Recruitment
is more difficult. And many of our best people in the military are headed
for civilian life."
Yet in the name of fighting terrorism, Bush is expanding the U.S. military
presence overseas faster than Clinton ever dreamed of doing. U.S. forces
are not only deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Bush administration
has sent advisers and support to the Philippines, Indonesia, Kuwait, Djibouti,
Qatar, Yemen, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. The extra $70 billion a year that
the administration has pumped into the Pentagon has bought more smart
bombs and bigger paychecks, but it has not brought about a significantly
larger force. Despite our expanded global war on terrorism, only about
27,000 troops have been added to our 1.4 million active-duty force.
Even with these troop additions, the military is more overstretched now
than it was when Bush took office. During the first three months of 2003,
the United States had more than twice as many troops on overseas missions
at any given time as it did in 2000. This has made it harder to recruit
and keep the soldiers, sailors, and airmen we already have. Bush did not
create military overstretch, but he did campaign on fixing it. Instead,
it has gotten worse.
Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deserve enormous credit for
the military victory over Iraq. Clinton deserves to share in that credit.
Despite Republican cries of a "hollow military," the Clinton
administration left behind a highly capable force that served the nation
well when an unpredicted threat emerged. How do we know? Cheney said so.
