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observers scoffed not too long ago when Bill Clinton convened members
of the Clinton alumni to give them marching orders for burnishing
his "legacy." The obstacles seemed insurmountable. After
all, aside from making the discussion of "oral sex" a
topic of polite conversation, what was the Clinton legacy?
But never underestimate
the power of a spin-meister, and Bill Clinton and his team are perhaps
the greatest spin-meisters in American history. The latest version
of this spin campaign is that it is Bill Clinton who deserves the
credit for the rapid success of the campaign in Afghanistan.
The first volley
was fired by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in an
op-ed for the New York Times on New Year's Day. Recalling
that during the 2000 presidential race, George Bush and Dick Cheney
campaigned "hard on the theme that Bill Clinton and Al Gore
had run down the United States military," O'Hanlon countered
that President Bush was "on the verge of winning a war with
the military that Bill Clinton bequeathed him."
Then on Feb.
4, the usually sober Morton Kondracke wrote:
arguably,
even Bush's ability to fight a robust war on terrorism is an outgrowth
of actions taken by the Clinton administration. The high-tech
weaponry used so effectively in Afghanistan was developed and
acquired on Mr. Clinton's watch. Five of the six members of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff were appointed by Mr. Clinton [this is incorrect.
President Bush nominated three of the six: the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, the Vice-Chairman, and the Air Force Chief of Staff.
Mr. Kondracke needs to chastise his fact checker], as was the
war's regional commander, Gen. Tommy Franks.
It is true
of course that the Bush administration has not been able to exert
much direct influence on U.S. military doctrine and force structure
since the president was sworn into office in Jan 2001. While Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was able to effect some marginal changes
to the congressionally mandated 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review
(QRD), the QDR process began long before the 2000 election. Additionally,
the Bush administration submitted its first defense budget only
two weeks ago.
These facts
are manifestations of the reality that force planning, the art of
creating a future military force of the right size and composition,
is an intertemporal art. Planners must make choices now about an
uncertain future while still maintaining the capability to carry
out current responsibilities. So just as the military that prevailed
during Desert Storm was designed two decades earlier to fight the
Warsaw Pact, the military that is operating successfully today is
the result of decisions made in the past. And since there is no
question that the U.S. military has undergone significant change
since the Gulf War of 1991, aren't O'Hanlon and Kondracke right
to suggest that Clinton deserves some of the credit?
To discover
the real military legacy of Bill Clinton, it is necessary to look
beyond the obvious timeline. Focusing "like a laser" on
"the economy, stupid," Clinton deployed one of the weakest
foreign-policy teams — it has been described as the "Carter
third team" — in recent history. A major failure of this
crowd was an apparent inability to establish priorities when it
came to foreign affairs. Thus while reducing the level of defense
spending and the size of the force, Clinton then employed the smaller
force far more frequently than his predecessors. Although it is
possible to make the case that America's role in the world required
that the U.S. military be employed as it was during the Clinton
years, the fact that this force was severely under-funded caused
widespread problems for the military in terms of readiness, personnel,
and modernization.
The first of
these was that increased but under-funded operational tempo simply
beat the military to death. This high "optempo" wore out
equipment but more importantly it wore out people. During the 1990s,
the U.S. military "was ridden hard and put away wet."
This affected morale, recruitment, and retention. The overall result
was a decline in the military's operational readiness.
The second
effect was what has been called the "defense-budget death spiral."
By definition, contingencies are not budgeted beforehand. As contingencies
proliferated during the Clinton years without a corresponding increase
in the defense budget, they were funded by regular appropriations.
Although the operators eventually went to Congress to request a
supplementary appropriation for the contingency, but in the meantime,
funding had to come "out of hide" a practice that led
to a very disruptive "recurring migration of funds."
For instance,
to carry out the mission required by the contingency, funds might
be shifted from a maintenance account to an operating account. Now
maintenance was under-funded. To rectify this shortfall money might
be shifted to maintenance from modernization or from research and
development (R&D). The recurring migration of funds had a particularly
adverse impact on modernization and experimentation, the very cornerstones
of military transformation.
Finally, the
policy of the Clinton administration created the perception abroad
that the United States did not possess the will to fight a war.
The preferred response of the Clinton administration to an attack
on U.S. interests was indignant rhetoric about "justice"
backed up by at most a cruise missile drive-by shooting. When he
did make a military commitment beyond cruise missiles, as in Somalia
and Haiti, President Clinton was predisposed to cut bait at the
first sign of trouble.
To make matters
worse, while the Clinton administration refused to wage real war
against our adversaries abroad, it relentlessly waged war against
the culture of the United States military. This culture is necessary
if the military is to meet the hard requirements of the battlefield,
which it must do in order to fulfill its functional imperative —
success in war. To do so, the military has adopted practices that
constitute an evolutionary response to the unchanging nature of
war. Military organizations must overcome the paralyzing effects
of fear on the individual soldier. Accordingly, military culture
places a premium on such factors as unit cohesion and morale. It
stresses such martial virtues as courage, both physical and moral,
a sense of honor and duty, discipline, a professional code of conduct,
and loyalty.
But all too
often, the Clinton administration treated military culture not as
something that contributes to military effectiveness, but as a problem
to be eradicated in the name of multiculturalism, sexual politics,
and the politics of "sexual orientation." At a minimum,
this meant that the Clinton functionaries expected the military
to adapt to contemporary liberal values, patterns of behavior, and
social mores no matter how adversely they might have affected the
military's ability to carry out its functional imperative. This
hostility to military culture was epitomized during the Democratic
primaries when then-Vice President Al Gore stated unequivocally
that if elected president, he would impose a social "litmus
test" on senior officers: "I would insist before appointing
anybody to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the individual fully support
my policy (on homosexuals in the military), and yes, I would make
that a requirement." The new weapons and new concepts that
both O'Hanlon and Kondracke attribute to the Clinton era were actually
created by the same military culture that the Clinton administration
besieged.
Ironically,
O'Hanlon acknowledges much of this in his piece. He writes:
the Clinton
administration misused military power during its first year in
office in Somalia and then in Haiti....Morale was low, and recruitment
and retention posed problems. Cuts in defense spending to help
balance the federal budget went too far in some cases — until
the Republican Congress stepped in an insisted on adding money
for the Pentagon.
So that's the
real Clinton legacy — low morale, recruitment and retention
problems, cuts in defense spending while increasing the demands
on the force. Success in Afghanistan has obscured the fact that
Clinton left the U.S. military hollow. This means that while certain
parts of the force — like the special-operations forces (SOF)
— may be in good shape, others face readiness and sustainability
challenges that could create severe problems down the road.
The U.S. military
generally is a resourceful and innovative organization. Throughout
history, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have improvised
their way through problems created by hollowness. That is what they
have done to date in Afghanistan. The U.S. military has prevailed
there not because of Bill Clinton, but despite him.
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