FOR 20 YEARS NOW, REP. IKE SKELTON of Missouri has been a solidly conservative, even hawkish, voice on military and security affairs. He has supported aid to the contras, the Gulf War resolution, and the B-2 bomber. He has opposed cuts in defense spending, quotas aimed at increasing the number of women in combat, and President Clinton’s move to open the military to homosexuals. Among Republicans, of course, these views are practically de rigueur. But Skelton is a Democrat. And with Rep. Ron Dellums’s announcement last month that he will leave the House in February, Skelton is slated to become the top Democrat on the influential House National Security Committee.
The difference between Skelton and Dellums could not be more stark. Since entering Congress in 1971, Dellums has regularly been to the left of every other House member on nationalsecurity issues. During the Cold War, he sought massive cutbacks in defense spending and stood against just about every new weapons program, including the MX, the Pershing II, the Midgetman, the B4, and the B-2. The best that Republicans can say of Dellums is that he has been an outspoken critic of the Clinton administration’s deregulation of export controls and that, during his two years as committee chairman and three years as ranking minority member, he has not resorted to obstructionist tactics.
Skelton’s outlook, by contrast, is captured in one of his favorite quotations from Harry Truman: “We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we will pay the price of war.” From this flows Skelton’s belief that the United States should take an active role in promoting peace and security around the world. “No one else,” he said in a speech earlier this year, “is capable either of preventing conflict from arising in the first place, or of responding decisively if a major threat to peace does occur.”
Skelton, unsurprisingly, is a vigorous proponent of greater defense spending. In February 1995, he introduced an alternative budget that called for spending $ 45 billion more on defense than the Clinton administration was recommending over a five-year period. “We have reduced our military too far and too fast,” he remarked at the time. “If we continue, by the end of the decade we won’t have the military power to shape a peaceful and prosperous world.”
While many Democrats worry that a beefed-up military will produce more Vietnams, Skelton worries that a reduced U.S. capacity will be unable to deter such wars. He cites history in support of his argument, saying he can’t decide whether the current era is more like 1903, following the Spanish- American War, or 1923, following World War I. In each case, notes Skelton, Congress thought it safe to slash defense spending, and war ensued about 15 years later. He warns that “we are well on our way to repeating the same mistake.”
Skelton doesn’t shrink from supporting the deployment of American troops if he feels there’s a just cause, as in the Gulf War, but he’s bitterly opposed to having them engage in peacekeeping. Two years ago, when Congress was debating whether to deploy American troops to Bosnia, Skelton said, “I think it is insanity to simultaneously try to keep the peace and arm the Muslims.” He was also critical of the Clinton administration’s 1993 decision to place American soldiers under a U.N. peacekeeping command in Macedonia. There’s a contradiction, he says, between being a soldier and being a peacekeeper, and asking troops to act as both guarantees that they will do neither task effectively.
Skelton’s conservatism, along with his institutional memory, should serve him well on a committee now controlled by hawks of both parties. (He enjoys particularly close relations with the Republican chairman, Floyd Spence of South Carolina.) But his real influence stems from his encyclopedic knowledge of defense issues and military personnel. He has overseen a significant upgrade in the quality of education at war colleges, and he drafted much of a landmark 1986 law reorganizing the senior Pentagon staff.
As a result of all this, Skelton commands greater respect from military officials than just about anyone else in Congress. A former Skelton staffer notes that when the congressman travels overseas, he’s given redcarpet treatment at U.S. military bases. Charles Boyd, a retired four-star general in the Air Force, says Skelton is “one of the few people in Congress who thinks in a long-term strategic way about uses of American military power.” Boyd adds that Skelton’s interest in military issues is underscored by his penchant for bringing military officials together for informal gatherings, often for the sole purpose of introducing people he thinks should know one another.
Most important about Skelton’s ascendancy may be the standing he will have with the Clinton administration. As the National Security Committee’s senior Democrat, he will be hard for Clinton officials to ignore. And his influence will be bolstered by his relationship with defense secretary William Cohen, with whom he worked to pass the 1986 defense reorganigation.
Skelton, though, has repeatedly shown he won’t support the administration simply out of party loyalty. Indeed, he likes to tell a story about Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who while army chief of staff in the late 1930s pressed Franklin Roosevelt for increased defense spending. FDR responded with disdain, prompting MacArthur to tell the president — according to the general’s memoirs — “When we lose the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spits out his last curse, I want the name not to be MacArthur but Roosevelt.”
MacArthur caught hell from the president for this impertinence, but Skelton takes the lesson to heart: “I hope that this Congress will not require an appeal like MacArthur’s to remember the lessons of the past — that the price of unpreparedness is paid in war. The price of peace is much less.”
Matthew Rees is a staffwriter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
