A....,
Re: "Kerry's defense record"
"Senator John Kerry has asked that we examine his defense record.
When Georgia Democrat Senator Zell Miller laid out Mr. Kerry's repeated votes
against specific major U.S. military weapons systems, the response from the
chattering classes was fascinating. First we have CNN's Wolf Blitzer claiming
that the Kerry votes were the same as former Secretary of Defense Cheney's proposed
cuts in the defense budget following the end of the Cold War. This was repeated
by PBS's Jim Lehrer following Sen. Miller's address to the Republican National Committee.
Let's go back and look at the record. Mr. Kerry first ran for national office
in 1984 when he sought the Senate seat held by Democrat Tsongas. In that campaign
he proposed that the United States cancel or cut back the F-15, F-14, tactical
fighter planes; the B1 and B2 bombers; the Peacekeeper missile; the
Trident submarine; the Aegis cruiser; the Abrams tank, the Apache helicopter,
and the Tomahawk cruise missile. All these weapons systems either are the
backbone of U.S. defenses today or were critical to winning the Cold War.
Now, this was at the height of the Cold War. Mr. Kerry coupled his proposed
cuts with support for the "nuclear freeze," which would have terminated
the entire U.S. strategic nuclear modernization effort, including the B2 and B52
bomber programs, the Trident submarine and related D-5 ballistic missiles,
and the Peacekeeper and Small ICBM. Given that the U.S. strategic nuclear
deterrent was in desperate need of improvement, the proposed nuclear freeze
would have frozen the United States into a position of nuclear inferiority,
given the comparative modernized state of the nuclear forces of the USSR.
At the time, the United States and NATO were also outnumbered by the USSR and the
Warsaw Pact in conventional weapons. This conventional imbalance on the European
continent was only redressed by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, an umbrella that
Mr. Kerry would have left in tatters.
Now, friendly pundits have claimed Kerry's later proposed cuts in defense and
intelligence were made after the end of the Cold War and thus simply comparable
to defense budgets submitted to Congress by the Bush-Qualye administration
in 1991 and 1992, budgets drawn up after the end of the Cold War as well.
But this is not true. The proposed Kerry cuts in 1994, for example, would have
cut tens of billions from the U.S. defense budget, including satellites giving
warning of attacks to our troops. Senator Inouye, the senior Democrat member
of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee warned: "Is this the time to
cut satellite programs that give our forces warning of attack? It would blind
our pilots." The amendment was soundly defeated by a vote of 75-20, even
with Senator Kennedy voting against Kerry.
But these are not isolated examples of Mr. Kerry's long-term opposition to
providing the United States the intelligence and defense resources needed.
Since 1990, Kerry voted 34 times against higher defense spending; proposed
cutting $6.5 billion from defense in 1996 even as U.S. commitments and troops
deployments under the then Clinton administration were increasing; the year
before, Mr. Kerry supported cutting some $34 billion from defense that year
while calling for a freeze for the next seven years, which would have slashed
defense by an additional $60 billion.
But there is even more. In 1990 alone, there were three specific votes on many
of the specific weapons systems Mr. Kerry had first sought to eliminate back
in 1994. On the B1, B2, F-14, F-15, F-16, AVHB Harrier, AH-64 Apache, Aegis,
Trident, M1 Tank, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Tomahawk cruise missiles,
Kerry voted against these weapons even though they were part of an already
reduced defense posture. The votes ranged from 59-39 to 80-16 in favor of these
critical elements of our national security, with Mr. Kerry in the minority each time.
But even if one believes these weapons platforms — now in use around the
globe — are immaterial to U.S. defenses, it would be hard to conclude that
even after the end of the Cold War our need for good intelligence was somehow diminished.
In 1994, Kerry called the Clinton proposed intelligence budget "madness," and
proposed $6 billion in cuts, a proposal that his fellow Democrat Senators Byrd,
Inouye and DeConcini described as "dangerous," even though the Senate Intelligence
committee had already approved a $1.2 billion cut in intelligence during mark-up.
The proposed additional cuts were turned down by a vote of 75-20. Undeterred,
Mr. Kerry proposed $1.5 billion in additional intelligence budget cuts the
next year, but could not find any supporters and thus the proposals never were voted on.
The Kerry campaign has said the intelligence cuts were targeted at wasteful
spending on the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), but the amendments were
simply across the board cuts, which never even mentioned specific intelligence
programs. An additional amendment, offered by Kerry, Specter and Coats,
did address itself to the NRO. Others have claimed that the proposed Kerry cuts
were simply a reduction in the proposed growth in the intelligence budgets,
when in fact as the Congressional Quarterly Almanac of 1996 explains the Kerry
amendments would have reduced intelligence spending by fully 5% in real terms."
Make It So,
Yousef |
