Clinton's Military Legacy
President Bush owes a major debt of gratitude to his predecessor.
by Steven J. Nider
The United States has had two big demonstrations of American military power
on George W. Bush's watch that have been spectacularly successful. The irony
here is that Bush fought these wars with the military Bill Clinton
bequeathed to him.
"A commander-in-chief leads the military built by those who came before
him," then-vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney said during the 2000
campaign. "There is little that he or his defense secretary can do to
improve the force they have to deploy. It is all the work of previous
administrations. Decisions made today shape the force of tomorrow."
On this point he was certainly correct. Despite frequent Republican
criticism during the 2000 presidential campaign of Clinton-era military
deterioration, the force that was so successful in Afghanistan and
Iraq—while continuing to perform a myriad of tasks around the world on a
daily basis—was clearly quite capable. Republican assertions that the
military was underfunded and overstretched and that readiness was poor were
contradicted by those performances in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, by
Vice President Cheney's own standard, this force did not result from
anything done by the current administration. The first Bush defense budget
went into effect on Oct. 1, 2002, and none of the funds in that budget has
yet had an impact on the quality of the men and women in the armed services,
their readiness for combat, or the weapons they used to destroy Taliban or
Iraqi forces.
As a presidential candidate, then-Gov. George W. Bush routinely declared
that he wanted a new military shaped for a new world. In his frequently
cited speech at the Citadel military academy in September 1999, he said:
As president, I will begin an immediate, comprehensive review of our
military—the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy, the
priorities of its procurement—conducted by a leadership team under the
secretary of Defense. I will give the secretary a broad mandate—to challenge
the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for
decades to come. We will modernize some existing weapons and equipment,
necessary for current tasks. But our relative peace allows us to do this
selectively. The real goal is to move beyond marginal improvements—to
replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies. To use this
window of opportunity to skip a generation of technology. This will require
spending more—and spending more wisely.
This was a bold vision of the military that accurately expressed the need
for major, ongoing change. Unfortunately, it has not been matched with
sufficient vision and programmatic commitment by the Bush administration.
The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, the comprehensive review promised by
candidate Bush, fell substantially short of its stated objective. It did not
articulate a sweeping new strategy, it did not call for any change in
existing force structure, and it did not suggest any major redirection of
investment in future systems. Moreover, until the events of Sept. 11, 2001,
the Bush administration had not suggested any major increase in defense
spending. In most respects, the review looked very much like what one might
have expected from the Clinton administration. Essentially, the only major
change was the increased emphasis on missile defense.
The Bush administration had barely started to make its mark on defense
policy before hostilities in Afghanistan began. In the spring of 2001, it
requested and received a $5 billion supplemental appropriation for the 2001
defense budget, but that constituted less than 2 percent of defense spending
for the year—mostly for pay raises—and went largely unnoticed before the war
began. The most recent defense budget submitted to Congress by the Bush
administration would increase defense spending significantly, but it fails
once again to make tough choices and provide a necessary vision of
leadership. While U.S. forces in Iraq were a model of what a transformed
U.S. military should be, the Pentagon continues to invest in Cold War
military hardware—fighter aircraft, destroyers, and other weapons designed
to fight advanced Soviet military capabilities.
In fact, the Clinton administration actually spent more money on defense
than the previous administration of President George H.W. Bush. The smaller
outlays during the first Bush administration were developed and approved by
then-Defense Secretary Cheney and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Colin Powell. The Clinton administration did not coast on Reagan-era
procurement funding. During the 1990s, the Pentagon invested more than $1
trillion in developing and procuring new weapons and information technology
that gave U.S. forces such an unprecedented advantage in the last two U.S.
military campaigns. But more significant than the budget increases was the
shift that occurred in the mid-1990s. That shift involved much greater
emphasis on precision weapons, sensors, robotics, advanced communications,
training, readiness, and orienting the intelligence community toward direct
support of military operations. It was that shift that produced the superb
military that not only swept through Iraq at a rate that defied historical
precedent, but used its awesome force with unprecedented precision and
effect, unprecedented low collateral damage, and unprecedented low casualty
rates. It was the American Revolution in Military Affairs begun in the
Clinton administration that was unveiled in Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The combination of Joint Defense Attack Munitions (JDAMs) and unmanned
aerial drones—both products of that shift—made it possible to find and
destroy targets, including mobile targets, more precisely and quickly during
Operation Enduring Freedom, the response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and in
Operation Iraqi Freedom than in any previous war. As many as 70 percent of
all munitions dropped on Iraq were the precision-guided munitions developed
and built during the Clinton administration. Funding for the JDAM program
began in 1993, Clinton's first year in office. The advanced, GPS-guided
Tomahawk cruise missile, which proved far more accurate and reliable than
the earlier cruise missiles used in Desert Storm under the first President
Bush, was funded in 1999. Unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator and
Global Hawk, which enabled U.S. forces to use combat aircraft in close air
support in unprecedented ways, also originated in the Clinton years.
The Clinton administration also tried to maintain the quality of military
personnel by increasing their pay, and it improved retirement and health
benefits for military retirees. During his presidential campaign Bush
charged that the Clinton administration had overburdened the U.S. military
with too many deployments overseas, and he promised to pare those military
obligations. "Resources are overstretched," he said. "Frustration is up, as
families are separated and strained. Morale is down. Recruitment is more
difficult. And many of our best people in the military are headed for
civilian life."
Yet in the name of fighting terrorism, Bush is expanding the U.S. military
presence overseas faster than Clinton ever dreamed of doing. U.S. forces are
not only deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Bush administration has
sent advisers and support to the Philippines, Indonesia, Kuwait, Djibouti,
Qatar, Yemen, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. The extra $70 billion a year that the
administration has pumped into the Pentagon has bought more smart bombs and
bigger paychecks, but it has not brought about a significantly larger force.
Despite our expanded global war on terrorism, only about 27,000 troops have
been added to our 1.4 million active-duty force.
Even with these troop additions, the military is more overstretched now than
it was when Bush took office. During the first three months of 2003, the
United States had more than twice as many troops on overseas missions at any
given time as it did in 2000. This has made it harder to recruit and keep
the soldiers, sailors, and airmen we already have. Bush did not create
military overstretch, but he did campaign on fixing it. Instead, it has
gotten worse.
Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deserve enormous credit for the
military victory over Iraq. Clinton deserves to share in that credit.
Despite Republican cries of a "hollow military," the Clinton administration
left behind a highly capable force that served the nation well when an
unpredicted threat emerged. How do we know? Cheney said so.
Steven J. Nider is director of foreign and security studies at the
Progressive Policy Institute.
