MEA CULPA? HOMEY DON'T THINK SO
Gadzooks! Some
think I've been bamboozled by insidious, ultra-leftist
propaganda over at
Salon (although I note that
previous columns by the same columnist haven't also been
denounced as such).
The entry in which I was ostensibly agitpropped immediately
precedes this one.
The upshot is that the Shrub camp was being twitted for prevaricating
about how Clinton has singlehandedly brought the military down from
the most fierce, mean, lean fighting machine ever known to - as it might
have been and indeed was put in the Reagan years - the
status of "pitiful, helpless giant."
The supposedly incorrect contention was that the presently smaller
and supposedly less ready state of the military was the fault of
pre-Clinton era decisions rather than of Kremlin mole Clinton.
Presented as counter-evidence was an
Air Force Magazine editorial which blamed the Clinton peaceniks
for replacing the big, manly chest-thumping "win-hold-win" strategy
with an effeminate "win-lose-lose" or "win-hold-oops" strategy.
Basically, the military decided post-Cold War that its forces should
be sized for a "two-war strategy" wherein two Major Theatre Wars
(MTW) could be sustained at once, with the air campaign in Yugoslavia
being advanced as an example of an MTW. The justification for the
two-war thing is that, for example, while we're incorrectly pissing away time,
lives and money in Yugloslavia, a real crisis might come along for
which we wouldn't be wholly prepared and *BOOM* it's "Red Dawn" for
real. Or, in a slightly more realistic scenario, another CIA-installed
stooge in Central American could go rogue and we'd have to invade his
country to capture him, cause the cocaine trafficking he was overseeing
to be rerouted and delayed for a couple of days, and get the poll numbers
back up.
The presumption is that the two-war strategy, which would keep total
defense spending at levels very near what it was during the Cold War,
is chipped in granite. Indeed, the Air Force Magazine editorial says
that "the only rational argument against the two-war standard is that
we cannot meet it."
That is simply not true. Rational alternatives have been proposed
by, e.g. the National Defense
Panel (NDP) among others (with the
NDP's origins being via an act of Congress in 1997).
There are many technical arguments that one could go through in
excruciating detail, but the simplest counterargument to a strategy
that costs as much in military spending as did most Cold War
years is: Why - if the "focus of evil in the modern world" is but
a memory - do we have to spend almost the same amount of money protecting
ourselves against a world in which evil is apparently unfocused?
(As an aside, an article written recently by an unreconstructed
cold warrior attempted to convince that the sundering of the Soviet
Union into disparate states made the situation there - if anything - even
more dangerous and frightening than before. Gee, I wonder what the
same git would write if the disparate states got back together? Or
became DisneyAsia? Or did the hokey-pokey? These people are really
shameless.)
As to the larger question of how and why the military apparently
isn't what it should be, it might be instructive to peruse a
Cato Institute report from 1988
entitled More Defense
Spending for Smaller Forces: What Hath DOD Wrought?.
(At this point, anyone who attempts to disparage the Cato Institute
as ultraliberal is invited to go outside and bury their head in real
sand and let the rational people continue the discussion.)
The report began by detailing the money spent on the DOD
from 1978 through 1987, i.e. an increase of 64% amounting to
$110 billion. Then they asked an obvious question:
How was the money spent? The simple answer: with great
haste and, apparently, considerable waste.
Getting into the details, they examined the increased outlays by
appropriation:
The combined real outlays for military personnel,
operations, and maintenance increased at a 3 percent annual
rate. The combined real outlays for procurement, research,
development, testing, and evaluation, however, increased at
a 10 percent annual rate. Thus, most of the increase in
real defense spending was in outlays for procurement and
R&D.
Next they asked how the 64% increase in real defense outlays
affected the capability of the military forces.
They broke down changes in the level of active personnel
and forces by service and by type of force, discuss several
obvious patterns, and concluded that:
In no case was the increase in personnel or force units
as large as the increase in real defense spending. With the
exception of naval general-purpose forces, the substantial
increase in real defense spending had very little effect on
the level of U.S. military forces.
Next the changes in the number and quality of weapons was discussed
in regards to their affects on military capability.
A lot of details and numbers were analyzed to reach the following
conclusions:
The available data suggest that the rapid increase in U.S.
real expenditures for weapons procurement and R&D did not
increase the number and quality of U.S. weapons relative to
those of our main potential adversary.
Moreover, the comparative weapons production data should
lead us to inquire whether the United States has made the
correct tradeoff between quantity and quality, whether it
has been producing the right types of weapons, and whether
it has been relatively inefficient at producing weapons (and
if so, why). Before approving a renewed increase in real
defense spending, Congress should ask DoD to address those
questions.
Next they found a bright spot in improvements in the quality of
enlisted personnel. The number of recruits who were high school
graduates increased to 90% from 70-75% during the draft era, and
less than 10% of recruits were drawn from the lowest acceptable
category compared with 50% a decade earlier. Recall that this
was all happening in the 1980s, with the recruits they're examining
all having enlisted in the early 1980s when unemployment reached
nearly 10%. It's not the least bit surprising that higher quality
people chose military service when unemployment was high. Today, for
example, the military is having problems finding good recruits because
unemployment is very low, e.g. even McDonald's and other companies
traditionally offering not much above minimum wage have to offer at
least twice that to satisfy their labor needs.
As to readiness and sustainability, the outlook was less favorable:
There does not appear to have been a substantial in-
crease in the readiness and sustainability of U.S. forces
during the defense buildup.(9) Such indicators as training
days per battalion, flying hours per crew, steaming days per
ship, and years of schooling did not change very much. Equip-
ment and supplies on hand was reported to have increased
for the Navy and Marine Corps air forces, remained fairly
stable for the Marine Corps land forces, and declined for
the Army and the Air Force. DoD reported that the percentage
of "mission capable" equipment was only "steady or slightly
increasing."
Finally, they get to their general evaluation of military capability,
where they offer conclusions as to the actual effectiveness of the
64% increase in defense spending during the Reagan era.
The overall conclusion is:
On the basis of the
available data, one can only conclude, as did the Congres-
sional Budget Office, that "despite widespread improvements,
most of the aggregate indicators have not increased markedly,
with a few exceptions like personnel quality."
They then look at projections over the near-term (i.e. from 1988 to
the early 1990s) and arrive at the sobering:
The administration of the Pentagon has
collapsed. Not only are we cheating the
public by signing them up for things that
we can't afford, but we're hurting the mili-
tary because there's going to be a readiness
bloodbath. We would be worse off in 1992
than in 1979 and still be spending $260
billion a year.
The critical choice will be whether to maintain the weapons
procurement plan or the level and readiness of U.S. forces.
Secretary Carlucci has chosen to maintain most elements of
the procurement plan at the expense of small reductions in
the military forces.
So much for William Jefferson Clinton being personally responsible
for any readiness problems the military might have, and for the
rose-colored glasses view of Clinton dragging the military down
from its true glory days through the 80s and early 90s.
The good old days WEREN'T!
By the way,
for those who haven't been paying attention, these conclusions are
from a 1988 report by one of the most conservative think tanks in
existence.
Another passage Clinton bashers might find especially instructive is:
We have to stop living beyond our means
and playing as if we can be the world's
policeman as we used to do during the
Marshall Plan days.
To put the above in some sort of perspective, I should start with
the observation that the present "readiness crisis" is at most a red herring
used to steer debate away from the real issue as to whether the
"two war" theory is sacred or merely a sacred cow. And at the least
it's just another ephemeral club used to engage in rote Clinton bashing.
To put it very, very, very bluntly, an extremely conservative think tank
looked at whether the huge increases in defense spending during the Reagan
increased readiness and concluded in the negative. Why? Mostly because
the huge wads of cash were being pissed away on weapons R&D and procurement
programs rife with inefficiency, incompetency and corruption - with
the justification for many of the programs also questionable. The kind
thing to say about that group is that they tried to solve the problem
by throwing money at it. If you want to be meaner you could accuse them
of knowing exactly what they were doing, i.e. transferring money from
the middle class to their wealthy constituents.
So where do Shrub's foreign policy and military cadre claim to have
obtained their zen-like wisdom about their fields? In that same Reagan
era. That's right. They claim they're going to cure a very questionable
current, post-Cold War "crisis" in military readiness using the same
wisdom with which they cured the readiness "crisis" of the 80s, i.e. when
evil was still focused. And an ideologically consonant think tank that
had absolutely no disagreements with them as to whether there was a
crisis concluded that they did little or nothing to solve it.
This is the supposedly rational alternative being offered by the GOP
to the ostensibly incompetent and dangerous liberals taking us all to
hell in a handbasket.
Note carefully that not only does recent history show them to
be incompetent to solve a problem they claim exists (with their
announcement that they're going to throw even more money at
the pie-in-the-sky missile defense system showing their
methods are the same as ever), but they also
haven't even established that the problem really exists.
This particular GOP myth would have to gain more weight than 20
Cartmans to reach even the ephemeral category.
posted by Steven Baum
8/8/2000 05:24:56 PM |
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