AS I STATED IN THE PREFACE, I am not speaking for the United States military establishment or its members. Again, I am but one of the countless thousands who served this country in the past two decades. From the outset, I did not intend to presume, or want the reader to presume, that this was anything other than one man’s view as a career military officer privileged to participate in our nation’s defense and serve directly for our commander in chief. My background as well as the anecdotes and the facts I’ve presented have led me to my own personal conclusions, opinions, and convictions.
My conclusions, however, have been developed and reinforced through countless informal and impromptu discussions with former military commanders, peers, and subordinates. The opinions I developed as a result of my interactions with the Clinton administration are the opinions of many. No military officer, no matter how politically motivated or apathetic, informed or naïve, comes into a situation of this magnitude without thinking of the consequences. The devastating effects the Clinton administration had on this nation’s military left many of us talking.
It was only after I completed the manuscript for this project that I read Mr. Caspar Weinberger’s 2001 book, In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century. Weinberger was President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense and is owed much credit for the remarkable triumph of the Cold War. As I read page after page of Weinberger’s memoirs, I was gratified that the observations that had pained me during my White House experiences were understood and shared by a professional statesman and a man I had admired since early in my Air Force career.
In Chapter Seventeen of his book, Weinberger, more eloquently than I ever could, sums up the true national security failings and fallout of the Clinton presidency. And he does it from “outside the walls.”
He rues the depth which Commander in Chief Clinton cut into the military muscle of this country. He corroborates the weak and reckless employment of U.S. military forces for largely domestic political gain. And he describes the severely reduced U.S. capability that President George W. Bush has inherited.
The larger picture he offers is that which I saw up close and personal. The challenging future he paints is the one I also see. The conclusions he draws are the ones I had already internalized as I walked out the East Wing gate that last time. Through the experiences that I witnessed and have documented, and from the lessons that Mr. Weinberger urges us to relearn, may this nation recover and never again have our national security interests treated with so much disdain and so little understanding.
With permission of the publisher, I offer this excerpt from Caspar Weinberger’s In the Arena on “The Dangers We Still Face.”
Saddam Hussein has not yet tried to retake Kuwait, but his presence precludes any hope of lasting peace in the Mideast. Reliable intelligence tells us that Iraq continues to manufacture chemical and biological weapons and to shop relentlessly for nuclear weapons, despite UN sanctions.
The Clinton administration, not surprisingly, was erratic and ineffective in dealing with the problem. Our “patience ran out” several times; we sought a “diplomatic solution” with a vicious killer who does not negotiate and who can never be believed or trusted; we occasionally dropped a few bombs or chased an Iraqi fighter jet out of the no-fly zone. But our credibility with our allies and against Saddam was seriously doubted because of Clinton’s deep defense cuts, the irresoluteness of American policy, and the domestic political considerations that seemed to govern Clinton’s foreign policy in the area.
We wondered why Saudi Arabia would not let us use its bases to support an attack that ultimately could have protected it and others in the region from Saddam Hussein’s ever increasing capabilities to destroy them. I suspect the Saudis knew that, under Clinton, we would not do more than carry out a few days of token bombing, if that, if Iraq moved again into Kuwait or elsewhere.
All we sought was to reinsert UN inspectors into Iraq for a few days, with fewer restrictions placed on them, and yet Saddam continued to refuse even that. If we wanted to rid the world of the threats we faced in 1990 and 1991, we should have bombed every one of the disputed sites two or three times each, day and night, and we would have had to be prepared to ignore Saddam’s inevitable lies about injured children.
Bombing alone would not oust this mass murderer, but if we were able to and did maintain a firm offensive, we could inflict enough damage to serve notice that we would not be bluffed any longer, thereby also warning other potential aggressors. We also could encourage and support opposition to Saddam inside and outside of Iraq. We should have eliminated or jailed Saddam himself—and still must do so, if we want any peace in the region.
Unfortunately, Iraq was not the only place where the Clinton administration abdicated its leadership responsibilities. Clinton’s handling of the situation in Bosnia was a humiliation for the West comparable to the attempt to appease Hitler in the late 1930s.
How did this happen? When the uneasy alliance that was Yugoslavia broke apart, four nations—Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia—claimed independence and were admitted to the UN. Serbia, meanwhile, embarked on its longtime goal of creating a Greater Serbia—controlling all of the former Yugoslavia of which it had also been a part. Serbia’s allies in Bosnia cooperated with a shocking “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia’s Muslims, following Hitler’s example.
The West’s ultimate mistake was its failure to stop the Serbs at once. The problem again was the doctrine of limited objectives. Just as those who preached “containment” never intended to win the Cold War and those who sent our troops into Vietnam never planned to win, so too our approach to Serbia. We cautioned many times that we did not plan to defeat Serbia—only to stop its criminal atrocities.
President Clinton compounded this error when, shortly after his inauguration, he sent Warren Christopher to Europe, not to galvanize resistance to the aggression (as President Bush had done in the Gulf) but to inquire weakly what other countries would like to do. Naturally, none of them wanted to do very much, which sent a clear signal to the Serbs that they could pursue their aggression unhindered.
A routine UN arms embargo was put in place against Bosnia, but Russia continued to supply arms to the Serbs. For more than a year, UN and European “negotiators” bleated for cease-fires and “safe areas” and proposed various peace plans that awarded Serbia anywhere from 49 percent to 70 percent of Bosnia. The Serbs agreed to more than thirty cease-fire and safe-area proposals—and sometimes even kept their promises for as long as five or six hours.
The United States played an ignoble role, agreeing to giving the UN full command of the peacekeeping operation, which was manned by 23,000 lightly armed, ill-equipped troops scattered in hopelessly ineffective clusters and without effective rules of engagement. Predictably, these peacekeepers were attacked, ignored, overrun, and taken hostage, and the UN convoys of food and medicine were allowed to pass only when the Serbs gave permission.
This was the much-touted Dayton Agreement, signed in December 1995, which was supposed to create a stable, new “multiethnic Bosnian country.” Instead, we accepted a partitioned Bosnia, which is what the Serbs wanted, with three parliaments (one federal, two regional), two separate armies, and two police forces, overseen by a rotating three-man presidency. Subsequent elections only emphasized that such a Rube Goldberg–like structure could not be built, let alone succeed.
Again, this demonstrated how easy it is to secure an agreement: just give up as much as the other party demands, and then we can have a big signing ceremony, proclaim ourselves peacemakers, and nominate our negotiators for the Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, the victims of Serbia’s aggression continue to suffer.
The United States has always been, and always should be, willing to accept the burdens of keeping peace and helping maintain freedom for ourselves and our allies. When, after two years of fatal, bumbling inaction, we cobbled together a paper agreement solving none of the conflicts that started the war, it was simply common sense to oppose deploying any soldiers, U.S. or NATO, to a mission inviting disaster—a “peacekeeping” mission where there was no peace to be kept.
Much earlier, we should have assembled a Gulf War–like coalition and told Serbia that its military targets would be mercilessly bombed by air forces under U.S. and NATO command if Serbia continued attacking civilian populations. When the brutality of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was again unleashed, this time in Kosovo, we ultimately did support NATO bombing, but with restrictions and restraints bound to make any operation ineffective.I
Ultimately, a new Serbian government ousted Milosevic from power. A few months later, he was turned over to the United Nations’ War Crimes Tribunal, where he is now awaiting trial.
Another murderous regime sits in North Korea. It frightened the Clinton administration into another gross act of appeasement (called a “framework agreement”), initiated by our own appeaser-negotiator, former president Jimmy Carter, who told the North Koreans he would try to get American sanctions against them lifted. The sanctions were lifted in the summer of 2000.
Time and time again, the Clinton administration inexplicably made concessions to North Korea in the hope the Communist regime would stop its nuclear weapons program. Under the “framework agreement,” we even arranged to give the North Koreans two new nuclear reactors—ostensibly for more power, although the reactors are fully capable of producing plutonium, the very stuff of which nuclear weapons are made.
This absurd appeasement proceeded despite increasingly hostile actions by North Korea, including “test” launches over Japan of its new, long-range missiles—which can ultimately reach the United States—and thinly veiled threats against South Korea.
For example, in 1996, when the North sent a submarine with some twenty-five terrorists into South Korean waters, South Korea urged the United States to restart the valuable joint military exercises we had conducted with the South Korean armed forces from 1976 to 1994 (which we had stopped as part of the appeasement agreement we made with North Korea). But President Clinton merely urged “restraint” on both sides. Sadly, this is just one more example of the way in which the Clinton administration cavalierly disregarded and alienated our allies.
Aside from our increasingly strained relations with our allies, our own security was dangerously weakened by the inept Clinton as our commander in chief. Part of the problem was that President Clinton did not understand the military, and worse, he did not like the military. Moreover, he did not recognize the importance of a strong defense.
Gone was our military strength that won the Cold War. By the late 1990s, we were spending less on new weapons and equipment than at any time in the last forty years. Spending on research and development programs had been cut by nearly 60 percent.
It has been said that we fought and won the Gulf War with Cap Weinberger’s forces. In a 2000 interview with Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney summed up the current regrettable situation well: “We had 6 percent of our GNP going for defense during the Reagan years; [we have] less than 3 percent today. We used to have eighteen Army divisions; today we’re down to ten. We used to have some twenty-four wings in the Air Force; we’re down to thirteen today.”
Each new administration appropriately begins with a reexamination of existing strategic policies. This process is under way with the new Bush administration, and the first result is usually a spate of rumors as to what has been decided, what new policies will be followed, and which existing policies will be changed.
There have already been many and varied reports, including that we are abandoning the “two-war” strategy and that we are offering to take out of service or destroy all of our largest and most accurate MX missiles, which were finally deployed after a major struggle with Congress and others in the 1980s.
Regardless of what our policy is called, we must have armed forces of the strength necessary to deter and conquer any threat. If two attacks, leading to two wars that must necessarily be fought nearly simultaneously, are a possible threat, we must be strong enough to fight and win those two wars.
Such a threat is at least possible. China could decide it would no longer attempt to secure its “one China” goal by treaty or negotiation. Instead it could try to take Taiwan by force. Indeed, the continued increasing deployment along China’s east coast of missiles facing and aimed at Taiwan cannot be ignored.
Should China attack Taiwan, North Korea, despite all of Clinton’s attempts to offer what it wants, is equipped and positioned to launch another attack on South Korea.
The so-called two-war strategy was simply a convenient term for measuring and obtaining the kind and amount of deterrent military capability we might need. So long as giving up the two-war strategy does not mean giving up the military capabilities we may well need or the defense budgets big enough to support those capabilities, we need not worry too much.
But when we look at what has happened to the matchless military strength President Clinton inherited in January 1993, it is doubtful now that we could win one of those hypothetical two wars.
From 1985 to 2000, the total active-duty military personnel in our military went down by 34 percent.II Yet under Clinton, our forces were asked to serve in overseas assignments far more often and for far longer than they should.III Few of these missions improved military training. Most were called “operations other than war,” and our troops were “spending more and more time working on aging equipment at the expense of honing their important war-fighting skills.”IV
All of this was compounded by the Clinton “procurement holiday” and substantial cuts in the research and development work that earlier had produced the weapons with which we won the Gulf War.
Thus, today, our military faces extraordinary operation and maintenance costs for military hardware and weapons systems that it would be cheaper and more effective to replace with new models. New weapons systems not only have all the performance advantages of new technology, but they are increasingly built modularly, which means that they are far cheaper and easier to repair than older weapons systems. While our military’s operations and maintenance costs are skyrocketing because of aging weapons systems and infrastructure, our vital military research and development budgets are suffering. The result is a military whose operational capability is in serious danger of exponential decline. The Clinton administration inexcusably hollowed out our military capability and has left President Bush with the tab for making good Clinton’s deficits on what should have been spent.
Not surprisingly, all of this has contributed to a loss in morale and a most worrisome difficulty in recruitment and retention of troops—something we never experienced during the Reagan buildup in the 1980s.V
We need to return to major increases in defense spending overall, and in particular, we need to rebuild the Reagan-era Navy. Our Navy today is roughly half as large as it was in the Reagan years, and yet the most immediate challenges we will likely face are naval challenges, since our most likely areas of conflict are separated from us by vast oceans. We have to be able to move our armed forces around the map, so we need a drastic upgrading of our air- and sea-lift capabilities. It takes six or seven years to build and fully deploy—with trained crews—aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. We need to be building them now. It takes two or three years to build and deploy combat aircraft. We need to be building them now as well. After the years of Clinton neglect, we are seeing a disastrous de facto build-down—by failing to replace out-of-date ships and aircraft—of major and highly disturbing proportions.
With the election of George W. Bush, things are improving, and I expect that his commitment to our military will alleviate many of these problems. Still, it will take time and continued advocacy and determination to repair the damage wrought by eight years of the Clinton administration.
President Bush has also taken to heart the highest defense priority we should have—building a defense against intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles and missiles with chemical or biological warheads.VI Russia alone has an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 nuclear warheads.VII
The Reagan administration worked for years to build a genuine, nationwide defense against these incoming intercontinental and intermediate-range missiles, but we were continually hampered by demands from Democrats and some Republicans that everything be “ABM Treaty–compliant” (read “totally ineffective”). No one in the Reagan administration was suggesting that we violate our treaty obligations. What was repeatedly urged was that we use the specific provisions of the treaty itself to get us out of it, as legally permitted, so that we can build and deploy effective defenses.
President Clinton and his State Department remained wedded to the flawed 1972 ABM Treaty, despite intelligence reports—and later, Russia’s own admission—that the Soviet Union had violated the treaty almost from the beginning by deploying its giant radar at Krasnoyarsk. In September 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright signed agreements designating Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine as our ABM Treaty partners in place of the collapsed USSR. Strobe Talbott, her Russophile deputy secretary, said as late as May 2000 that we meant to adhere to and strengthen the ABM Treaty. None of these new agreements, however, was ever submitted to the Senate. And now, with President Bush, thankfully they will not be; already in his young administration, it is clear that capable, tough-minded professionals such as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have returned to putting the legitimate interests of the United States and our allies first. I have high hopes for the new administration and see it as a worthy inheritor—after the lamentable Clinton years—of the work I tried to achieve as secretary of defense for Ronald Reagan. This administration knows that peace comes through strength, that America must lead, and that nothing is more important than our national defense.
Two steps are necessary to gain any real security: we must reject any ABM succession agreements and announce that we will no longer be bound by the old ABM Treaty, and we must move ahead with the research and subsequent deployment that will give us and our allies a viable defense against nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The Clinton administration and its faint-hearted supporters stood in the way….
President Clinton, inclined as he was to conduct policy by poll, should have noted that polls showed that a horrified majority of Americans were unaware that we currently have no effective defense against nuclear missile attack. Moreover, nearly 70 percent of respondents considered having a strong military to be very important and said that they were willing to pay the taxes necessary to ensure that the United States remains a global superpower.
The American people understand, if President Clinton did not, that the fact that we won the Cold War has changed—not removed—the various threats we could face.
I Targets could be bombed only after the approval of a large committee was secured.
II See Jack Spencer’s “Building and Maintaining the Strength of America’s Armed Forces,” Chapter 10 of Priorities for the President by Baker Spring and Jack Spencer (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2001).
III Our forces “have been used over thirty times beyond normal training and operations since the end of the Cold War.” This is compared with only ten such deployments in the preceding forty years. See Spring and Spencer, page 214. Dick Cheney also said, in his 2000 Rush Limbaugh interview: “We’ve given the forces a lot of assignments they didn’t used to have, the so-called peacekeeping assignments. What that means is that the guys are away from home all the time. The thing you hear about is ‘the birthday problem.’ A guy will tell you, ‘Look, I missed my kid’s last three birthdays because I was away from home. So I’m leaving. I can’t take it anymore.’ ”
IV General H. H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testimony to U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, September 27, 2000.
V See Spring and Spencer, pages 217–218.
VI For the best description of the nature and size of the ballistic missile threat we face, see The Ballistic Missile Threat Handbook by Jack Spencer (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2000).
VII Military Almanac (Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 1999), 9.