After one veto, President Clinton signed the 1996 defense bill — while complaining about the constitutionality of a provision forcing HIV-positive personnel out of the armed services. Clinton didn’t complain about much else in the Republican legislation because he had little to complain about once Congress agreed to drop its insistence on a national ballistic-missile defense by the year 2003. Instead, Clinton found himself with a bill that does little to challenge his defense program.
To understand how this unexpected consensus between the administration and Republicans has come about, and what’s wrong with it, one has to begin with the Clinton administration’s 1993 review of military strategy, known as the Bottom-Up Review. A watered-down version of the Bush administration’s strategy, the Bottom-Up Review calls for an active-duty force of nearly 1.5 million and a 900,000-strong reserve, with 10 active army divisions, 5 Marine corps brigades, 11 aircraft carriers, and 13 active air wings.
All in all, a slimmed-down version of the Cold War military establishment, though hardly a return to America’s lean military condition between the First and Second World Wars. The United States is still spending at least four times what any other nation spends on defense.
But it’s not enough. In an effort to solve the budget deficit, Clinton and the Republicans are together creating a “defense deficit,” with long-range consequences as significant as the effects of the national debt. There exists a substantial mismatch between the size and composition of the armed forces Clinton is planning for and the funding he has requested to support them. And certainly nothing in the administration’s 1997 Defense Authorization submitted to Congress last week even hints at an attempt to tackle this problem.
To modernize and keep the planned forces combat-ready, 4.25 percent of the gross domestic product will have to be spent for defense every year for the foreseeable future. Yet by the turn of the century, Clinton’s plans call for military spending to drop to 2.9 percent a year.
Though the depth of the chasm between Clinton’s strategy and Clinton’s spending is a matter of debate — depending mostly on how much it will cost to develop, build, and maintain new weapons systems — its gravity is not in dispute. And the severity of the problem is likely to grow in the years ahead as the need to replace aging military equipment becomes more urgent. Right now we are living off the weapons and equipment bought during the Reagan buildup of the 1980s (when defense spending made up 6.5 percent of our gross domestic product). But this “procurement holiday” will end soon enough, as these systems begin to break down through normal use.
The necessity of replacing those systems will hit in 2000, 2001, and 2002. And these will be precisely the years in which Washington will be making the most severe spending cuts in our national history. The seven-year GOP plan to balance the budget actually calls for lower defense spending over this period than the administration’s seven-year plan. Adding a few billion to the defense budget in the near term, as Republicans have done, just lessens the immediate strain. Over the long haul, however, such increases are mere palliatives.
The central flaw in Clinton’s defense strategy is the classic one of setting ends beyond the means available to obtain them. And if Congress is ever to get on top of this problem, its first step has to be an examination of two key requirements set out by the Bottom-Up Review. The first is the need to maintain a global military presence with troops or carrier task forces. The second, and more significant, requirement is having the capability to wage and win two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously. The Bottom-Up Review calls for an American military that can win another war with Iraq while defeating a North Korean invasion of the South.
Now, obviously no serious person wants the milltary to be unprepared for two wars at once. And admittedly, if the United States were engaged in one regional war, it would be tempting for a second adversary to take advantage of that circumstance. Yet the fact is that North Korea did not go on the offensive when we were tied up in Kuwait in 1990-1991, and it seems unlikely that Iraq or Iran will soon risk the kind of hammering Iraq has already received. In short, the likelihood that we will have to fight two such wars at the same time and with the same intensity is extremely low.
Yet the Bottom-Up Review has the U.S. military preparing to fight the last war, twice over — and without allied support. But it seems unlikely that an adversary would ignore the lessons of Iraq’s defeat by engaging the United States in a World War II-style conventional conflict. It’s far more likely that the military will continue to find itself involved in what it calls ” operations-other-than-war” (Sorealia, Haiti, and Bosnia), with an outside chance of a war with a country that believes it has solved the problem of American military superiority with a strategy of unconventional measures — nuclear weapons, biological warfare, terrorist actions.
There is no question that, by challenging the Clinton assumptions, we risk leaving the country unprepared for waging two wars simultaneously. But that risk has to be measured against the more likely prospect that, if current defense plans are not scaled back to fit fiscal realities, the country’s armed forces will become increasingly “hollow” in capabilities.
Given the Republican party’s well-deserved reputation in recent years as the party of national defense, one might have expected this prospect to generate more criticism inside its ranks. But with the exception of the dispute over ballistic-missile defense, the only complaint that has consistently been sounded in Republican circles about the Clinton defense strategy has to do with the administration’s problems in maintaining a high level of combat-readiness.
Concern about readiness is understandable, especially for those worried about the health and safety of American troops. And doubtless, making an issue about combat-readiness may help remind the public of the sad state of the military the last time a Democrat was commander in chief. Yet the focus on current readiness has the unintended effect of pushing aside the more fundamental question of whether our armed forces are the right size in the first place.
Congress has also largely bought into the administration’s decisions on weapons systems and the development of the next generation of fighters, submarines, and the like. The changes Republicans have pushed in Congress mainly involve adding funds here and there to speed up the purchase of new weapons or continue existing programs.
Now, an argument can be made in support of nearly every one of the administration’s development and acquisition decisions — whether it be a stealth fighter, a new attack submarine, an advanced communications satellite. What can’t be reasonably defended, in a time of tight budgets, is the case for all of them. Yet this is precisely what the Republicans in Congress have accepted. If anything, they have made matters worse from the perspective of the budget by pushing two additional programs — the B-2 stealth bomber and national ballistic-missile defense.
And that has given the administration an unfair, but politically shrewd, opening. Having created the funding crisis in the first place, the administration is now (in the person of Defense Secretary William J. Perry) willing to use Republican support for the B-2 and ballistic-missile defenses to start blaming the coming “defense deficit” on the GOE And because there is a grain of truth in the accusation, the GOP might well find itself on the losing side of this issue — politically as well as substantively.
What, then, should the Republican Congress do? It can start by cutting the planned number of forces, both active-duty and reserve (especially reserve). There should also be a reduction in the use of carrier task forces to maintain a forward military presence. Although carriers are not “the dinosaurs of the sea,” as some analysts suggest, they are not the only means the United States has to project power on a global scale.
Next, Congress should pull the Pentagon back from its plans to replace a number of weapons with a new generation of systems. Absent a superpower competitor, the military can afford to skip a generation of modernization in many big-ticket items and restock its inventory with upgraded but existing systems.
For example, consider the Air Force’s F-22, in the planning since 1981. No doubt the stealthy jet fighter would provide the Air Force with unmatched capability. But the fighter is no longer the necessity it seemed when we thought it would be needed to counter a Soviet Union filling the skies of Europe and Asia with advanced jets. In truth, enhanced F-15s in suffcient numbers will remain more than capable of dominating Iraq’s (or Korea’s, or Iran’s, or China’s) air space for years to come.
But these proposed cuts in planned forces and systems are not solely designed to meet budget constraints; they are also required if the American military is to retain its global superiority over the longer term. As we saw with U.S. forces in the Gulf War, modern armies are entering a period of transition in which changes of technology — stealth, sensors, computers — could result in a profound increase in conventional military capability. But this revolution will not happen on its own. The military will have to experiment with these new technologies, and explore the most effective organizational and operational arrangements for employing them.
The Pentagon will also have to do more testing of weapon prototypes (many of which may never see full production). There will have to be healthy competition within and between the services, and a good deal of flexibility and redundancy in Pentagon programs in order to shake out viable alternatives from dead ends. Such efforts are impossible if the administration’s strategy remains unchanged. A Pentagon stretched to maintain the military in its current form will hardly tolerate the use of scarce resources to fund competition and new ideas when many of them will not pan out.
Reordering the country’s defense program does have its risks. Yet perhaps the greatest risk is not found abroad but here at home. Cutting force structure and procurement can become a bad habit, especially if it is licensed by an undercurrent of isolationism. A large, hollow force is a problem; a small, unprepared force, a disaster.
To prevent a military free-fall, Congress should set for itself some percentage of the gross domestic product as a floor below which defense spending must not go. It’s conceivable that such a spending floor could be sold to the public as a kind of insurance against the unknown but inevitable rise of more serious security threats in the future. So far, though, the Republican majority in Congress has shown little interest in challenging Clinton’s defense program over basics. Senior Republicans, in general, have focused their attention on keeping today’s military prepared, fed, and paid.
As for the newer Republican members, two problems present themselves. The first arises from the party’s animus against “big government” and bureaucracy. Should the newcomers” attention turn to defense, it is almost inevitable that the Pentagon — a very big and very bureaucratic part of government — will become a target. And, frankly, hardly anybody could argue that the Pentagon doesn’t need some reform.
But what will those reforms be? If reformers focus only on saving money, not on enhancing the military’s ability to do its job, then the Pentagon will become paradoxically even more tightly centralized, hierarchical, and homogeneous in its thinking and management. More bureaucratic, in sum.
This is precisely the wrong approach in an era of technological and international uncertainty. To get the job done, defense offcials and defense contractors must be given suffcient discretion and incentives to pursue new approaches to old issues. When it comes to innovation, “waste” is simply inevitable.
The second and more pressing problem is that Republicans elected in 1992 and 1994 see themselves as having been sent to Congress with a mandate to reform the federal government’s fiscal and domestic policies. Having fulfilled the minimal requirements concerned with national security under the Contract with America, most have shown little interest in expanding their agenda to defense. Since they see themselves as “outsiders,” with a passion for term limits, it is extremely diffcult for most new Republicans to throw themselves into a policy area that takes time to address and a more old- fashioned congressional ambition to master.
The irony is that even as Republicans may be on the verge, this year or next, of a genuine solution to the budget deficit, they are consenting to the creation of the new “defense deficit.” And as with all deficits, the price the country will eventually have to pay to close it will be high — higher than it would have been had we avoided incurring that deficit in the first place.
