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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (6194)	11/15/2000 3:55:25 PM
From: quasar_1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

Dueling Pundits... This article is from that stronghold of 'leftist' thought, Colorado: rockymountainnews.com I like the line about the US spending more per year on its military budget than the next 10 countries combined. If we're 'collapsing' the other ten countries (including Russia and China) must be comatose... Share of blame equal on military readiness Sept 17, 2000 Holger Jensen Now that military readiness has become a presidential campaign issue, it's time to separate fact from rhetoric. "The next president will inherit a military in decline," says Republican contender George W. Bush. His running mate, Dick Cheney, also his front man on military matters, has been highly critical of the Clinton administration for cutting defense spending too deeply. The cuts, combined with a growing number of overseas deployments such as the air war over Iraq and open-ended peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, are stretching U.S. troops to the point where they are "overextended, taken for granted and neglected," he says. Vice President Al Gore responds that our military is "the strongest and best in the entire world." And few can argue its global dominance. U.S. troops maintain the biggest presence overseas, backed up by 7,000 nuclear warheads. With defense budgets creeping toward $300 billion a year, U.S. military spending exceeds the combined total of the next 10 countries, including two potential adversaries — Russia and China — and our three strongest NATO allies — Germany, France and Britain. In its latest report on military readiness, the Pentagon informed Congress it is still able to meet the national security standard of handling two "major theater wars" simultaneously. That means, for example, fighting at the same time in the Persian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula. But the Pentagon report did express concern about shortages of skilled personnel, spare parts and equipment. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says: "Anyone who dismisses our serious readiness problems, our problems with morale and personnel retention, and our serious deficiencies in everything from spare parts to training as nonexistent or overstated is either willfully uninformed or untruthful." So who is right? Republicans and Democrats are both right, up to a point. And any blame to be handed out it must be equally shared. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a highly respected Washington think tank, points out that a strong case can be made for cutting defense budgets in the 1990s as "an appropriate response to the end of the Cold War and efforts to bring the federal deficit under control." Whatever the merits of these cuts, it says, "one thing is clear: The decision to cut the defense budget, and to do so relatively deeply, was very much a bipartisan decision." The deepest cuts were actually made by the Bush administration before President Clinton ever took office. Defense spending declined by 16.9 percent during the four Bush years, while defense spending under Clinton fell 13.1 percent between 1993 and 1998, when it bottomed out, and has since risen by 6 percent or 7 percent. The CSBA also sees little difference between Bush's last five-year defense plan for 1994-99 and the way Clinton carried it out. "A year-by-year comparison of projected funding under the Bush plan and actual funding levels confirms that the United States ended up spending almost exactly the same amount under Clinton as recommended by Bush — a total of $1.72 trillion," it said. As for Republican criticism that Clinton is sapping the military by sending it on too many missions abroad, the cost of peacekeeping and other contingency operations represents only about 1 percent of the Pentagon's budget — roughly the same amount as was squandered by other federal agencies on such things as duplicate payments to contractors and Medicare benefits to dead people. The bottom line: "The effectiveness with which DoD (Department of Defense) addresses the most pressing U.S. security challenges in the future is likely to rest much more on how wisely rather than how much it spends," says the CSBA. "Indeed, at least until the U.S. military begins to transform itself so that it is better able to meet the very different, and far more serious, challenges likely to emerge over the long term, the value of a substantial boost in defense funding may be questionable." CSBA Director Andrew Krepinevich elaborated on this theme in an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal recently, aptly titled, "Ready for the Wrong War." By employing Cold War measures to determine force readiness, he wrote, the Defense Department is ignoring new realities and creating a force that is "organized, trained, equipped and prepared to fight yesterday's battles."