10/05/00 1:25 p.m.
It's Defense, Stupid
Time for Bush-Cheney to go onto offense on defense.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department.

onight's debate offers the Bush-Cheney ticket an opportunity to correct what was perhaps the most glaring problem with the Texas governor's first head-to-head encounter with Vice President Gore in Boston: The GOP's failure to hold Al Gore properly accountable for his part in making the world a more dangerous place for America and its interests than it was eight years ago. Worse yet, in so doing, George W. appears to be at considerable risk of repeating one of his father's fatal mistakes — allowing the Democratic nominee to get to his right on national security.

Recall that in 1992, even as the Clinton-Gore ticket insisted that the focus of the election had to be "the economy, stupid," it emphasized its New Democrat credentials on foreign policy by promising to pursue a far more robust approach than George Bush Sr. had done with respect, for example, to Russia, China, Iraq, the Balkans and America's friendship with Israel.

At the time, much ballyhooed endorsements by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Crowe, and a number of other prominent retired military officers (whose endorsement, by the way, generated none of the criticism with which Gov. Bush's former uniformed supporters were recently met) and civilian officials helped imprint on the public mind the sense that these Democrats were genuinely different than were their predecessors from the McGovern-Mondale-Dukakis wing of the party.

Never mind that every one of those promised improvements subsequently failed to materialize. They did the trick (literally) in helping to defeat President Bush and Vice President Quayle.

The debate on Tuesday showed that Gov. Bush is vulnerable to the same sort of bait-and-switch on several points — four of which were explicitly addressed in the course of the candidates' exchanges in Boston:

Relying on Russia
In response to a question from Jim Lehrer about what he would do in the event Slobodan Milosevic refused to abide by election results that would appear to have voted him out of power, Gov. Bush said:

I'm pleased with the results of the election. It's time for the man to go. It means that the United States must have a strong diplomatic hand with our friends in NATO. That's why it's important to make sure our alliances are as strong as they possibly can be to keep the pressure on Mr. Milosevic.

But this will be an interesting moment for the Russians to step up and lead as well. A wonderful time for the Russians to step into the Balkans and convince Mr. Milosevic that it's in his best interest and his country's best interest. We would like to see the Russians use that sway to encourage democracy to take hold.

Regrettably, the idea of encouraging Russia under Vladimir Putin to play a role in the Balkans — or, for that matter, anywhere — is a seriously bad idea. Not surprisingly, Al Gore pounced:

I understand what the governor has said about asking the Russians to be involved and under some circumstances that might be a good idea. But being as they have not yet been willing to recognize the lawful winner of the election, I'm not sure it's right for us to invite the president of Russia to mediate this — this dispute there because we might not like the results that comes out of that. They currently favor going forward with a runoff election. I think that's the wrong thing.

Gov. Bush tried to extricate himself from the trap by saying, "Obviously, we wouldn't use the Russians if they didn't agree with our answer — affording Gore an opportunity to emphasize what Bush should have known to begin with: "Well, they don't."

This exchange was doubly unfortunate because it not only suggested that Governor Bush has illusions about the Kremlin's willingness to be helpful. It also gave Al Gore a chance to portray himself as hard-nosed on Russia, despite the fact that his direct part in squandering one of the most important strategic openings in history — i.e., the chance to help effect a wholesale political and economic transformation of post-Soviet Russia — has just been documented by a House Republican task force led by Rep. Chris Cox of California.

Restoring the Military Messrs. Bush and Cheney have properly taken the Clinton-Gore Administration to task for its hollowing-out of the U.S. armed forces. (See "Gore Defense Triangulation" in NROnline of August 28, 2000). Yet, Gov. Bush seemed to agree with the Vice President when he declared last night, " I want to make it clear, our military is the strongest, best trained, best equipped, best led fighting force in the world and in the history of the world. Nobody should have any doubt about that. Least of all our adversaries or potential adversaries."

The problem with the Vice President's formulation is that if one compares today's military with that bequeathed to the Clinton-Gore by its predecessor, the armed forces the United States had at the time of Operation Desert Storm were indisputably larger, better trained, more fulsomely equipped and enjoying a higher morale than those of today. To be sure, in some areas, the military of 2000 has improved capabilities; overall, however, those of eight years ago were assuredly the strongest, etc. "in the history of the world."

More serious is the opening the Republican ticket is affording for a Democrat end-run on this issue. It arises primarily because of the GOP's failure to date to address the real readiness problem — namely, that of tomorrow's military — in ways that go beyond paying lip service to it, as Gov. Bush did last night.

Specifically, the Bush-Cheney campaign has said that it will add $45 billion to the defense budget over the next 10 years. This sum would go primarily to pay, housing and bonus plans to improve the quality of life for service personnel.

Important as these things are, plussing up those accounts will not address the need to ensure the troops are also, in the Governor's one reference to this part of the problem, "well-equipped." That will take, according to a recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, an additional investment in recapitalization of the military on the order of $50-75 billion annually for the next five years.

Unfortunately, Gov. Bush has been encouraged to believe that this significant expenditure can be avoided by a technique known as "skipping a generation" of military hardware. This concept is predicated on the assumption that the so-called "revolution in military affairs" by which exotic new technologies (many of them being pioneered by the civilian economy) will afford vastly greater combat power at a fraction of the cost.

Accordingly, if we don't buy the planes, ships and armored vehicles intended to replace those now wearing out, we can save all that money and go directly to the new stuff. Best of all, so the logic goes, since the exotic technologies may not be available for another decade, we won't have to make significant expenditures on them for years to come.

Vice President Gore whacked Bush on both scores:

On defense spending: "If you entrust me with the presidency I will do whatever is necessary in order to make sure our forces stay the strongest in the world. In fact, in my ten-year budget proposal, I've set aside more than twice as much for this purpose as Governor Bush has in his proposal."

On deferring investment: "Incidentally I know the value of making sure our troops have the latest technology. The governor has proposed skipping the next generation of weapons. I think that's a big mistake because I think we have to stay at the cutting edge."

Clearly, the GOP cannot allow Vice President Gore to get away with such mendacity. He has been party to starving the military for funds and exhausting its personnel and resources over the past eight years on a host of hare-brained missions and activities around the world irrelevant to the national security. In the process, it has already, as a practical matter, "skipped a generation" of hardware by repeatedly deferring needed modernization programs.

The way for Governor Bush to demonstrate that he grasps the magnitude of the problem Bill Clinton and Al Gore have bequeathed to their successors, while talking about the solution in terms the public can comprehend and support, is to endorse the "Four Percent Solution." This is an idea espoused by courageous leaders like Marine Corps Commandant James Jones and former secretaries of defense James Schlesinger and Harold Brown who believe the nation must make a formal and sustained commitment to invest at least four percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — or four cents on the country's economic dollar — in its national security.

If now, when the Nation anticipates having at least $1.9 trillion surpluses in the years ahead, is not the time to consider "saving" national security — as well as social security, Medicare, the education system and other urgent priorities — when will it be convenient to do so?

Nuclear Disarmament
The morning of the debate, the New York Times ran a full-page ad sponsored by Mikhail Gorbachev's Global Security Institute. In it, a number of former military officers, corporate CEOs, actors and other generally left-wing celebrities issued "an appeal to end the nuclear threat." The signatories called upon "the United States government to commit itself unequivocally to negotiate the worldwide reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, in a series of well-defined stages accompanied by increasing verification and control. As immediate steps along that path, we urge the global de-alerting of nuclear weapons and deep reductions of nuclear stockpiles."

The good news is that most Americans understand the foolishness of such campaigns to ban the bomb. The latest in a series of four exhaustive surveys of public opinion recently released by the University of New Mexico found that:

Comparative measures of the value of nuclear deterrence since 1993 have remained above 7.0 on a scale where zero meant "not at all important" and ten meant "extremely important." Respondents highly valued the past and present role of nuclear deterrence, placed substantial faith in the future role of nuclear deterrence (even if more countries acquire nuclear weapons) and considered U.S. nuclear weapons to be important in preventing attacks with other types of mass casualty weapons.

The truth of the matter is that eliminating all nuclear weapons is not only wholly unachievable; the nuclear genie will not be put back into the bottle. It is far from clear that the world would be better off even if we were able to do so: The percentage of the globe's population killed in conflicts since the introduction of the atomic bomb is a tiny fraction of what it over the preceding centuries. In short, it is not self-evident that making the world safe for conventional war is in our interest.

Here again, the Bush-Cheney campaign is unnecessarily exposing itself to the charge that it is, as the Governor's father might have put it, less prudent or reliable than the Democrats. This is likely to be nonsense, of course, but the fact is the Governor has pretty much endorsed the "immediate steps" advocated by Gorbachev's fellow denuclearizers. On May 23rd, Mr. Bush declared:

America should rethink the requirements for nuclear deterrence in a new security environment. The premises of Cold War nuclear targeting should no longer dictate the size of our arsenal. As president, I will ask the secretary of defense to conduct an assessment of our nuclear force posture and determine how best to meet our security needs. While the exact number of weapons can come only from such an assessment, I will pursue the lowest possible number consistent with our national security.

It should be possible to reduce the number of American nuclear weapons significantly further than what has been already agreed to under Start II without compromising our security in any way. We should not keep weapons that our military planners do not need.

The United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status. I will ask for an assessment of what we can safely do to lower the alert status of our forces.

We can take some comfort from the fact that Mr. Bush wants to have the Pentagon assess the wisdom of these steps before taking them. Still, it is a distinction that may be lost on the American people, for whom his endorsement of the idea of de-alerting and deep reductions may sound a lot like the stuff they expect to hear from the ban-the-bomb crowd, but not the Republican standard-bearer.

It is extremely ill-advisable to allow Al Gore to sound more responsible on nuclear weapons policy, especially since he has been party to the most serious assault on the robustness, safety and reliability of our nuclear forces since the Manhattan Project. (See "Nuclear Insecurity," NROnline, September 18, 2000.)

All is not lost, of course. These are subjects with which Dick Cheney has an intimate familiarity. Indeed, his grasp of the Gore-Lieberman ticket's vulnerabilities in on the national security front and his good sense about Republican priorities should make tomorrow night the opportunity for the GOP to go, as it must, onto the offensive on defense.