Guns or Budget? Clinton’s Options
The myopia of conventional wisdom is ever enduring. With some backhanded encouragement from Clinton insiders, the Washington press pumped up the always-present deficit monster into the new administration’s first crisis. The story line was tired and familiar – Surprise! The deficit is bigger than predicted – but the newsies still attempted an air of suspense. Must the young president abandon his promise to cut the deficit in half by 1996? And if not, whose taxes would he hike? And whose programs would he whack?
Various fiscal experts and elite opinion mongers promptly came forward to offer their standard solutions – a gasoline tax or Social Security cut or one of numerous other proposals injurious to the broad ranks of citizens. Yet none of them even mentioned the biggest spending monster in the federal labyrinth: the military.
As Bill Clinton wrestles with his hard budget choices, maybe he will notice that the Pentagon is still there, still gobbling up an incredible amount of money. In the next five years, according to current plans, the Defense Department will consume nearly $1.5 trillion. The lately departed George Bush proposed cutting only $43 billion from that total. Clinton topped that easily as a candidate, though he advocated only a “moderate reduction” of $100 billion, a cumulative saving of a mere seven percent. Peace, it seems, is going to be almost as expensive as war.
The collapse of the Soviet Union provides Clinton with a historic opening to demobilize and to build a new international system for peacekeeping that depends upon collaborative diplomacy, not a bloated U.S. arsenal. After all, the permanently out-of-control deficit originated in Ronald Reagan’s commitment to doubling the Pentagon’s budget while simultaneously cutting taxes. If military spending were shrunk back to 1980 levels – $134 billion a year, as opposed to the $274 billion budgeted for this year – the long struggle to restore fiscal order would be more than halfway done.
Unfortunately, Clinton is not as yet inclined in that direction. For one thing, as a candidate he promised a long list of expensive goodies to defense workers and weapons manufacturers. Among other projects, he made commitments to build 120 McDonnell Douglas C-17 transport planes to enhance “mobile projection forces” ($35 billion); to go forward with General Dynamics’ Seawolf submarines ($4 billion or $5 billion more), even though these nuke-armed subs are now utterly redundant; and to develop Bell-Boeing’s vertical liftoff V-22 ($2 billion).
As expensive as these promises are, defense spending will be driven even more by Clinton’s own rhetoric. On the campaign trail Clinton declared that since the United States is no longer preoccupied with defending Western Europe against Soviet invasion, it should now prepare “to project power whenever and wherever our national interests are threatened.” That will require, he added, more hardware for “rapid deployment forces.”
Clinton went on to describe “our national interest” in such fuzzy terms that it could be invoked for almost any local or regional conflict, from Somalia to Bosnia, Cuba to China. Beyond self-defense, he said, U.S. force should be applied to “promoting democracy,” to discipline other governments that mistreat their own citizens or abet “illegal conduct beyond their borders.”
Even more comforting to the military-industrial complex than Clinton’s rhetoric and weapon commitments are his two key defense appointments – Congressman Les Aspin to run the Pentagon and lawyer-lobbyist R. James Woolsey to run the CIA.
Woolsey is a neoconservative defense expert who served ambidextrously in both the Carter and Reagan administrations. He sits on the board of Martin-Marietta, a defense manufacturer that recently acquired General Electric’s defense-aerospace division and hopes to become one of the surviving giants in the shrinking arms industry. Aspin, as House Armed Services chairman, argued for Cold War strategies slightly more moderate than Reagan’s – a slimmed-down Star Wars, a midget-sized MX missile – but he still led the cheers for the massive buildup.
Both Aspin and Woolsey possess serious, supple intellects (and nimble political instincts), and both excel at war-game policy debates, the bread and butter of the national-security state. Though these elite exercises are conducted in bloodless hyper-rationality, they yield an aura of constant danger as well as imaginative reasons to build more weapons.
Aspin’s brisk talk about post-Cold War national security is eerily reminiscent of the inflated presumptions that governed military thinking in the Sixties. Aspin was, in fact, a whiz kid in the Pentagon then, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara enshrined zero-based budgeting and supposedly disinterested policy analysis in an effort to make defense policy “rational.” The ethos of hardheaded management led instead to the bloody mire of Vietnam.
Woolsey and Aspin’s first task is to find an enemy, now that the commies are gone. The two speak of the former Soviet Union with a rueful nostalgia that would have been seen as dangerously softheaded during the Cold War. Moscow, it turns out, was an enemy you could count on.
The Soviets were “predictable” militarily, Aspin explains. “They wanted to win without war,” says Woolsey. As a result, U.S. planning was a relatively straightforward exercise of matching the red pieces on the global chessboard – alliance for alliance, division for division, nuke for nuke. Now the enemy could be, well, almost anywhere – “murkier, more ambiguous and more fluid,” Aspin observes. “The threats will be harder to characterize and pin down than during the Cold War.”
“We may well find – and I’m sorry to close on a somber note – that the last 45 years have been easy,” said Woolsey, ending an address to the World Affairs Council last December. In his speech he drew a scary picture of “very virulent” nationalism stirring on many continents, aided by the spread of high-tech missiles and weapons of mass destruction. These movements, he explained, are uninhibited by the basic Western values that even Marxist rulers in the Kremlin shared with their adversaries.
“Although we have slain the single dragon of Soviet imperialism,” Woolsey said, “there are still lots of very large poisonous snakes. And as they say in Hollywood, it’s a jungle out there. Further, some of these snakes will soon be able to strike from a distance.”
Guns or Budget? Clinton’s Options, Page 1 of 3