WALTER Lippmann once correctly defined the critical task of the strategist as keeping America’s “means equal to her purposes and her purposes equal to her means.” This dictum necessitates the identification of an American role in the world and the generation and maintenance of the military means required to undertake that role. In the Executive Branch, the duty for making these formulations falls chiefly to the President and his Secretaries of State and Defense. However, neither Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, nor William Cohen exercises the influence in this area enjoyed by America’s principal strategist: Franklin Raines, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
In the recent Quadrennial Defense Review just released by the Pentagon, it was clear that the engineers driving the train were of the green-eyeshade sort. While the public was told repeatedly by the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that “everything was on the table,” very little was not predetermined. The unchangeable assumptions were, on the one hand, that the United States would continue to be militarily engaged in a wide and taxing set of deployments and, on the other hand, that the defense budget would be capped at $250 billion or lower for the foreseeable future. Thus presented with a set of purposes and a ceiling on means that were determined in total exclusion from each other, the Pentagon was given that classic military order for a hopeless mission: “Make it work.”
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