12/05/00 2:45 p.m.
A Ridge Too Far
A poor choice for Defense.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., formerly of the Reagan defense department.
He currently is the president of the Center for Security Policy

red Barnes sent a chill up a lot of spines last Saturday when he declared on Fox News Channel's "Beltway Boys" program that we're witnessing "a test of Colin Powell's clout with George W. Bush [because] he wants Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to be defense secretary."

Now, Mr. Barnes is a very competent reporter with generally reliable sources. But, for two reasons, the nation can only hope he is wrong.

First, as has been previously noted in NR and on NRO, Gov. Ridge's record suggests he would be a better choice for Al Gore's Pentagon than one in a Republican administration. In fact, during the eleven years Mr. Ridge spent in Congress prior to his stint in Harrisburg, he proved to be among the anti-Reagan Democrats' most reliable GOP allies on many critical defense and foreign policy debates of the Cold War.

The governor's myriad substantive mistakes are not merely of historical interest. They bear directly on policy judgments he would have to make in the immediate future. Consider a few examples:

o On May 4, 1983, Rep. Ridge voted against President Reagan in favor of a "mutual and verifiable nuclear freeze" -- the American Left's Soviet-backed opening bid for the unilateral disarmament of the United States. In subsequent years, he went along with other parts of that agenda, notably bids to slash funding for virtually every aspect of Mr. Reagan's high priority effort to modernize U.S. strategic forces. Specifically, he voted to: cut procurement of MX and Trident ballistic missiles; reduce by some $400 million monies for the B-2 Stealth bomber; and prevent virtually all nuclear testing.

Mr. Ridge's sympathies make him a singularly undesirable choice to conduct the comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear policy that Candidate Bush pledged to undertake in the course of the campaign. This exercise is likely to be extremely controversial and consequential. For example, Mr. Bush says he will seek assessments of how deeply U.S. nuclear weaponry can be unilaterally cut and the extent to which it is possible to de-alert such forces as are retained.

The new president will also have to address what to do about the fact that the nearly-decade-long U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing is creating serious uncertainties about the future safety and reliability of the deterrent arsenal. Were Mr. Bush to entrust these sensitive judgment-calls to someone with Gov. Ridge's proclivities, the president could find himself entangled in a brouhaha every bit as politically costly as — and far more strategically portentous than — Bill Clinton's gays-in-the-military debacle early in his first term.

o Starting in 1985, then-Congressman Ridge joined the Democratic majority repeatedly to deny funds and otherwise slow down the development of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Year after year, he lent critical Republican cover to those like former Democratic representatives Charlie Bennett of Florida, Pat Schroeder of Colorado and Ron Dellums of California who systematically sought to strip hundreds of millions of dollars from this critical effort to protect the American people against ballistic missile attack.

It seems inconceivable that the best man to execute Mr. Bush's oft-repeated, and obviously sincere, campaign commitment to deploy effective anti-missile defenses for the U.S. and her allies as soon as possible is someone who undercut both President Reagan and the president-elect's father as they sought to prepare such a system for deployment long before now.

o Arguably, one of the most important legacies of the next administration will be the steps it takes to prepare the country to exercise space power. If the nation fails to remedy its current inability to have assured, timely and affordable access to and use of space — and the capacity to deny such use to potential adversaries — its security and economy stand to be seriously imperiled.

Unfortunately, during his time in Congress, Rep. Ridge was one of relatively few Republicans who could be counted upon by Democratic opponents of fledgling initiatives aimed at giving the United States the means to control outer space. Starting in 1984, he voted four different times to ban U.S. testing in space of an anti-satellite (ASAT) system.

More often than not, the amendment Mr. Ridge endorsed tied such a prohibition to the Soviet Union's exercise of restraint in ASAT testing. The trouble with such mirror-imaging at the time was that the Kremlin had already tested at least one type of anti-satellite weapon and was, as a result, judged by U.S. intelligence to have operationalized the capability to neutralize our space assets. In the future, the president and the nation require at the helm of the Defense Department someone who will seek advantages for the United States in space so as to safeguard America's national security and commercial interests — not someone who believes that arms control or other international limitations should constrain its space power options.

o On October 22, 1983, Mr. Ridge cast the first of seven votes undermining another top Reagan priority — armed resistance to Communist incursions into Central America. For example, in 1984, at a time when George W. Bush's father was the point-man on support for the Contras, Congressman Ridge voted to bar the CIA from using funding for covert activities in Nicaragua.

Today, threats to democratic prosperity in the Western hemisphere are emerging that could make the challenge facing Messrs. Reagan and Bush two decades ago pale by comparison. From the escalating conflict in Colombia, to economic and political instability in Ecuador and Peru, to Chinese penetration and the infiltration of narco-guerillas into strategic Panama, to the emergence of an ominous new dictator in oil-rich Venezuela, the United States will have to engage much more actively in Latin America, possibly utilizing covert means and supporting indigenous actors with military resources. Tom Ridge's record suggests he would be ill suited to conceptualizing, let alone carrying out, such a program.

This brings us to the second problem with Gov. Ridge's candidacy as secretary of defense. Even if his congressional record on defense matters inspired greater confidence, his lack of personal experience with the Pentagon (aside from serving in combat in Vietnam) means that he would likely be at an extreme disadvantage in the interagency policy-making process.

After all, the state department is expected to be run by Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gen. Powell is not only close to Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's choice for national-security adviser. He also has longstanding ties to Richard Armitage, the man reportedly in line to become the deputy secretary of defense.

In other words, having an individual with Gov. Ridge's limitations — to say nothing of his predilections — would likely mean that the dominance enjoyed by Secretary of State Powell over the security-policy portfolio would be virtually absolute. But, if the appeal of such an arrangement to a would-be co-president for foreign and defense policy is obvious (hence Fred Barnes' report about Gen. Powell's insistence on Ridge for Defense), it is less clear that it would serve either the interests of President George W. Bush or the Nation.

Under the best of circumstances, the urgent need to rebuild the U.S. military and to ensure that it is properly equipped and utilized is a job that will require a knowledgeable, robust and skillful secretary of defense. That need will continue to be sacrificed to other considerations — like placating the Russians, Chinese, and/or allies — if many of the relevant decisions are, as a practical matter, made by the State Department.

A far better model is for there to be a vigorous competition of ideas and policy recommendations the benefits from and reflects the generally divergent institutional perspectives of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom, not an artificial consensus driven by State's untoward dominance of the interagency process.

The good news is that, on November 30, Gov. Ridge's spokesman issued a statement that "Gov. Ridge said very plainly last July that he intends to serve out his term. He didn't say that idly…and he didn't say that he intends to serve out his term unless something better comes along."

President-elect Bush and the country would be well served if he were to respect Gov. Ridge's wish to remain in Pennsylvania. This is especially true since, by so doing, he can establish at the outset of the new administration that Mr. Bush's manifest high regard for the former JCS chairman will not translate into a license for Gen. Powell effectively to run not only the state department, but the U.S. government's entire security-policy portfolio and machinery.