F**K OFF......
get back to reality mr taliban
you think it was W's military?
you're dreaming....and delusional
Winning With the Military Clinton Left
Behind
By MICHAEL O'HANLON
ASHINGTON
Just over a year ago, George Bush and Dick Cheney were campaigning hard
on the theme that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had run down the United States
military. Picking up a traditional Republican refrain, they claimed that defense
cuts under President Clinton had gone too far, that the armed forces had
been overused badly, that readiness was poor.
But now President Bush stands on the verge of winning a war with the
military that Bill Clinton bequeathed him. Just as in NATO's 1999 war
against Serbia, the United States military has led coalition forces to a decisive
victory while suffering very few casualties in the process.
Some might wish to give the young Bush administration and its impressive
secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, primary credit for the performance
of American forces in Afghanistan. The administration developed an effective
war plan that defeated the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and it has a sound broader
strategy in the struggle against terrorism.
But it is still Bill Clinton's military that has actually been winning this war. The
Bush administration had barely started to make its mark on defense policy
before hostilities in Afghanistan began. Last spring, it provided a $5 billion
supplemental appropriation for the 2001 defense budget, but that constituted
less than 2 percent of defense spending for the year and had hardly begun to
be noticed before the war began.
The Bush administration also announced the results of a new strategic review
on Sept. 30. But such a review cannot affect military operations that begin
within days of its release. Moreover, the review did not reverse any of Bill
Clinton's military force cuts, despite the claims of the Bush campaign last
year that those reductions had gone too far. In most respects, the review
looked very much like what one might have expected a Clinton or Gore
administration to produce.
Some would prefer to credit Ronald Reagan or President Bush's father with
the fine military this country now possesses. They rescued the armed forces
from a post-Vietnam malaise and made the overwhelming victory in Desert
Storm possible. They were also much more popular among America's
military personnel than Bill Clinton ever was.
But Bill Clinton did not squander their legacy. The performance of American
forces in the Balkans in the late 1990's and in Afghanistan in 2001 has been
outstanding. And the military has wielded new weapons and new concepts in
these recent campaigns that it did not possess during Desert Storm: several
types of guided weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles, near-real-time
communications systems.
There were some setbacks. The Clinton administration misused military
power during its first year in office in Somalia and then in Haiti; the results
were needless American deaths in the first instance and a poorly planned,
aborted mission in the second. 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 and insisted on adding money for the Pentagon. And the Clinton
administration and the uniformed military struggled with how to sustain
numerous small missions overseas without overusing certain parts of the
armed forces.
Despite these problems, which put a drag on military readiness, statistical
measures of combat preparedness — the condition of equipment, training
standards met by pilots and troops, aptitude scores and experience levels of
personnel — compared relatively favorably with those in the Reagan years.
And by the end of Mr. Clinton's second term, increases in pay and
innovations in the force structure helped to resolve some of the morale,
recruiting and retention problems that had been serious in the mid-90's.
Of course, the main credit for the quality of America's military must go to its
own personnel. But the victory in Afghanistan, coming on the heels of the
successful action against Serbia in 1999, shows that the Clinton
administration maintained a strong and focused military able to carry out a
post-cold war mission.
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
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