There are ways in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army:…by attempting to govern an army in the same way as he administers a kingdom, being ignorant of the conditions which obtain in an army.
—SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR
MY LAST TRIP AS A member of the Clinton administration was to accompany the president on his nine-day junket to six African nations in March 1998.
While visiting South Africa, I was riding in the “Control” van of the presidential motorcade along with Melanne Verveer, the first lady’s chief of staff, and Bruce Lindsey. The motorcade was weaving its way from Johannesburg to the outlying township of Soweto and the Hector Peterson Memorial. President Clinton was scheduled to address the citizens of Soweto.
From the outskirts of Johannesburg, a clean, cosmopolitan city, we drove through miles and miles of shantytowns. The radio chatter between vehicles that normally occurs during motorcades was reduced to stunned silence by the extent of the poverty.
Ms. Verveer finally asked me, “How big is the South African military?”
“Ma’am, I believe it is the largest standing army on the continent, about ten thousand strong, I think, fairly effective and well equipped.”
She paused and thought for a while. She then became visibly appalled. “Then why aren’t they out here building housing, developing schools, road projects, things like that? They need to be helping these people.” The other passengers in the van echoed her sentiments.
“Ma’am, I don’t think that’s the charter of their military, any military. In spite of the poverty and the obvious problems that we’re seeing, I don’t believe any country’s national self-interests are served by using the military for public works. That’s not why they exist, they’re not trained for that, and they’re certainly not equipped for it.”
“Well, then they’re wasting their money. They need to be doing something!”
And that, in a nutshell, was the Clinton administration attitude.
For the Clintons and their senior staff, the military was a social-service project. It had been transformed in a few short years from an instrument of national defense to an armed social-work agency. It existed for whatever ends this administration might have in mind. Certainly humanitarian relief, peacekeeping operations under the direction of the United Nations, and counternarcotics missions were accepted uses of the military by the Clinton administration. But it went far deeper than that.
A similar revelation had occurred months earlier for another military aide, U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Graham Stowe. Graham was riding in a presidential motorcade in Rio de Janeiro in October 1997. Graham’s van mates included Verveer, Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta, and White House press secretary Joe Lockhart. As they wound through the squalor and poverty of Rio’s slums, Melanne Verveer said that our military and Brazil’s should be doing something about the terrible living conditions in Rio de Janeiro. Podesta and Lockhart agreed. Graham remarked to the Secret Service agent driving the vehicle that the military existed to inflict violence on the enemy—not to improve living conditions in Brazil. The agent laughed and nodded his head. That ended the conversation.
I mention these anecdotes because they reflect more than an antimilitary prejudice; they reflect what was a Clinton administration policy. While President Clinton was slashing the total active-duty force by about a third and increasing deployments by almost 300 percent, he also set out to reengineer the defense culture, which was historically geared toward fighting this nation’s wars.1 Under the Clinton administration, the military was to be refashioned as a tool that could be implemented for political gain, social engineering, and cultural experimentation. Issues such as “gays in the military,” “women in combat,” and the subordination of American troops to foreign commanders under the United Nations banner quickly became benchmark issues for President Clinton and his military.
Robert Bork, in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, calls the social agenda that liberals push at the expense of national security “radical individualism.”2 Liberal thinkers and revisionists like the Clintons are attracted to the military as a foundation for social change precisely because of the military hierarchical command structure. It is the very same reason that liberals are attracted to academia and to “reforming” the nation’s churches. The hierarchy and authority of these institutions make them valuable targets for those who want to effect “social change.” The case of the military is unique, however, because it is the one institution that liberals would like to seize and redirect without actually serving in it.
Lieutenant Commander Stowe told me that when he mentioned to a young lady who worked for the White House Advance Office, responsible for planning and executing presidential trips, that he’d received his undergraduate degree from the United States Coast Guard Academy, her jaw dropped.
“I didn’t know that military officers had their degrees” was her response.
When she told him about her friends currently working on their master’s degrees or going to law school, Graham mentioned that he, too, had a master’s degree. In fact, he noted, all the president’s military aides had advanced degrees. She couldn’t believe it.
In the collective mind of the Clinton administration, a military career was unimaginable. As such, military men and women were of no consequence. More than that, as an institution, the military was putty to be manipulated.
Just one week into his presidency, Clinton tried to lift the fifty-year ban on homosexuals in the military. The original policy had been developed out of necessity during World War II. Congress had reaffirmed the World War II–era policies in 1982 when it declared that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service because it undermines discipline, good order, and morale.”3
But on day three of his infant presidency, Clinton announced that he was ordering Defense Secretary Les Aspin to stop enforcing the ban on recruiting homosexuals and to halt prosecutions of homosexuals and that he would be signing an executive order removing the ban.
At the time, I was attending the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. My class included some of the smartest officers I’d ever met. Our reaction was uniform: There’d been no debate, no discussion, no solicitation of ideas from the military; “Does anyone in Washington care what we think?” There could have been preinauguration meetings in Little Rock with senior military leaders to discuss the ramifications of such a radical change to military life. There could have been lobbying efforts and the soliciting of support from a very popular chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Colin Powell. But there wasn’t.
This policy would be water-cooler talk at every U.S. military facility in the world. Regardless of whether it was an issue of basic human rights or an issue of military readiness, the consensus among my peers was that the military was not, and should not be, the test tube for social change.
Fortunately for U.S. military capabilities and morale, and unfortunately for the political popularity of President Clinton, he didn’t have the power to follow through on his promises. Just as he made a poor decision to pursue this issue so early in his presidency without consulting with senior military leadership, so too he made the mistake of not solidifying a congressional consensus prior to releasing the policy.
In particular, he ran headfirst into Georgia senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Congress generally retains the power to make substantive changes to military policies and regulations. As a result, President Clinton declared that an “honorable compromise” was reached, and the infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was implemented.
On the heels of the gay issue, the administration pursued that of women in combat roles. The 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces recommended by a vote of 10–0 to retain the Pentagon ban on women joining ground combat units, and voted 8–7 against female pilots flying combat missions. The commissioners who voted against women in integrated combat units were concerned about unit cohesion. They also cited studies showing women’s shortcomings in upper-body strength and the natural tendency of men to protect women from physical threats. But the Clinton administration ignored these findings and moved to assign women to combat aircraft. The Navy, reeling from scandals involving sexual harassment in the service, aggressively implemented the new direction as a means to make amends. It also supported the repeal of the law exempting women from service on combatant ships, with the exception of submarines. The Air Force also aggressively implemented personnel policies to place female aviators into combat aircraft.
In 1994, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin opened hundreds of new positions to women in or near combat operations from which they had previously been excluded. The Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, DACOWITS, a tax-funded defense feminist lobby, ignored the advice of experts and combat veterans and lobbied for the inclusion of women in direct combat roles, such as field artillery units and Special Operations helicopters. The irony is that during this same period, a poll of female soldiers found that only 11 percent of enlisted women in the Army would volunteer for combat. That 90 percent of enlisted women were self-described as not warrior material might be considered damning enough. To give women a combat role that neither they nor the military thought appropriate was an example of the administration’s social engineering trumping reality—reality in this case being that the military exists for fighting wars. But combat effectiveness was not only not a priority of the Clinton administration, it did not even register on the administration’s radar screen; and neither did the experience of other nations like Israel, Germany, and Russia, which now have stricter bans on women in combat roles than we do.4
The edicts by Aspin and the lobbying of DACOWITS led to the introduction of coed basic training. The Army introduced coed basic training in 1994 at its training facilities at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The Air Force and Navy quickly followed suit. Within two years, the military was rocked by sexual abuse scandals at basic-training centers at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood, the Navy’s Great Lakes Training Center, and Lackland Air Force Base. The Marine Corps, on the other hand, enjoyed greater success in its training by housing and training male and female recruits separately.
The Marines were also the one service to oppose deploying females in combat roles. Assistant Secretary of the Army Sara Lister, a Clinton appointee, responded to this success by charging that the Marines were “extremists” and “dangerous” for not complying with the newfound need for integration of women into what were historically male roles. She also proceeded to make a joke about the Marine uniform.5 Madeleine Morris, a Pentagon consultant on “gender” integration, suggested that the U.S. military should eliminate “masculinist attitudes,” “assertiveness,” “aggressiveness,” “independence,” “self-sufficiency,” and “willingness to take risks.”6 She was serious!
God bless the Marines for standing by their tradition and not backing down under political and media pressure. America needs soldiers who are “dangerous” to the enemy, and we damn sure need soldiers who are “assertive, aggressive, and willing to take risks” when their lives and the safety of our country are at risk.
I’ve worked with and flown with female pilots and officers over my twenty-year career and can say without a doubt that they are as qualified and as professional as any man I’ve ever flown with. That women can fly as pilots is obvious. That unit cohesion and effectiveness is best served by putting women into combat roles is not so obvious; in fact, the evidence leans heavily in the opposite direction. But military readiness and effectiveness took a backseat in the Clinton administration to forced social engineering. Not a single military officer I’ve talked to doubts that women are every bit as capable as men in many military occupational specialties, but there are also significant costs to women’s integration into many units, combat units in particular. Many officers, indeed, question the necessity of placing women on the front lines. The issues of forced sex integration, coed training, “dual” fitness standards, the need to redesign expensive equipment to make it coed, and the natural tensions and social awkwardness that these things bring with them are serious problems that lessen, rather than improve, the military’s war-fighting ability.
The Navy’s policy of “mixed-gender” crews on surface ships, such as aircraft carriers, has resulted in unexpected crew shortages, which debilitates combat readiness. For example, during 1994–95, on the first major war deployment of women aboard the carrier USS Eisenhower, 39 women did not deploy or were evacuated from the ship because of pregnancy. During the 1999–2000 deployment of the Eisenhower, 60 out of 492 female sailors—more than 10 percent—were nondeployable or evacuated from the ship, again because of pregnancy. On the USS Roosevelt, 45 out of 300 women—15 percent—could not deploy or were unable to complete the mission because of impending childbirth.7 A Navy survey found that the overall evacuation rate for female sailors was at two and a half times the rate of men, primarily because of pregnancies.8
The Clinton administration attempted to cover up rather than deal with the shortcomings of its policy. Assistant Secretary of the Army Sara Lister told the press that the Army was reluctant to discuss physical-strength differences between men and women and pregnancy issues, because these subjects would be ammunition for conservatives seeking “to limit women’s role in combat units.”9 In other words, reality and facts, in the administration’s eyes, were inadmissible because they contradicted the administration’s policy; reality and facts were ideologically biased in favor of conservatives! So it’s no wonder that in the Alice in Wonderland looking-glass world of the Clinton administration, reality and facts were dismissed in order to cater to feminists and gays, other special interest group agendas, and liberal social dogmas.
While women and gays were welcomed into the military, veterans were handed their pink slips. When Vice President Al Gore was given the task of “reinventing government,” he and the White House took credit for removing 305,000 people from the government payroll. What they didn’t tell you was that 286,000 of those cuts—more than 90 percent—came from employees of the Department of Defense.10
During his command, President Clinton reduced the active-duty force by one-third to one-half, eliminating approximately 800,000 personnel. He reduced the Army from eighteen divisions to ten. He cut half of the Air Force combat fighter wings, chopping twelve from the existing twenty-four. He eliminated 232 strategic bombers and 2,000 Air Force and Navy combat aircraft. He reduced the Navy from 567 ships to just over 300. He decommissioned all the Navy’s battleships, a traditional symbol of America’s ability to “show the flag” off the coast of international trouble spots, as well as providing accurate long-range naval artillery fire in support of Marines and soldiers during beach landings and littoral combat operations. He eliminated thirteen ballistic submarines, four aircraft carriers, 121 surface combat ships and submarines, and most of the support bases, shipyards, and logistical assets needed to sustain these forces.11
He gutted military infrastructure and readiness capabilities, causing entire tactical air squadrons to ground half of their flights. He inflicted a dramatic decline in readiness ratings for ships in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. In late 1994, House Armed Services Committee chairman Floyd Spence issued an emergency fact-finding report stating, “Our forces are suffering through the early stages of a long-term systematic readiness problem that is not confined to any one quarter of a fiscal year or portion of the force…. The damaging effects of this readiness problem are being felt all year long, throughout the forces and in every service.”12
The president also gutted morale. He immediately froze military pay at a time when it had already fallen behind the private sector by almost 20 percent. The pay freeze was especially egregious when approximately 80 percent of the force was earning less than $30,000 annually and more than twenty thousand enlisted personnel were eligible for food stamps.13
The Association of the U.S. Army coined a phrase, “the military poor,” to describe the growing numbers of enlisted personnel throughout the Clinton presidency who were reduced to depending on food stamps and other forms of public assistance to support their families. Both the Army and the Marine Corps reported dangerously low reenlistment rates for their enlisted ranks, while overseas deployments were escalating. “Too many good, young Marines are leaving,” said 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Sergeant Major Michael Magraw. “Many lance corporals and corporals are bailing out after their first hitch, because our operational commitments have been burning them out. And the pay they receive isn’t enough to take care of their families.”
A 1994 service-wide state-by-state study by Parade magazine of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental food aid program found the number of enlisted military families living beneath the poverty line and using WIC services averaged between 12 and 20 percent of the total population of major military bases. Out of 5,400 sailors stationed at King’s Bay, Georgia, there were 1,370 WIC families. Some 4,700 families were among 14,000 soldiers and Air Force members in the San Antonio, Texas, area. And out of 35,000 Marines in North Carolina, some 4,500 were WIC recipients.14
The true measure of the Clinton-Gore team and its views toward military men and women can be summed up in its actions during the presidential campaign of 2000. With the race down to the hotly disputed electoral votes in Florida, the Gore campaign attempted to disallow the votes of military personnel stationed overseas who had voted via absentee ballot. While the Democrats screamed disenfranchisement on the part of minority and elderly voters in Palm Beach, they were attempting to disenfranchise the men and women whose lives were on the line serving their country in a combat zone in the Middle East. The Gore campaign’s lawyers asked the court to throw away the service members’ votes, claiming the technicality that the absentee ballots needed postmarks.
That was sordid and unjust. But what was even worse was that President Clinton left his successor with an American foreign policy that was not adequately responding to the world’s hornets’ nests and with a military that was a shadow of the force that had won the Gulf War. And as with so many scandals of the Clinton administration, it wasn’t Clinton, but our nation, that paid the price.