Winning With the Military Clinton Left Behind
The New York Times
January 1, 2002
By MICHAEL O'HANLON
WASHINGTON
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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