Money for Nothing: A Penny Saved, Not a Penny Earned, in the U.S. Military

Yes, defense spending declined during the Bush years in accordance with major reductions in American military personnel at the end of the Cold War. During such a big demobilization, 18 percent was not outrageous. It has been forgotten that the Democratic Congress thought the cuts not deep enough. The first Clinton budget was, by the way, nine percent below the Bush projections. What has happened since then? The cannibalization of equipment, pay scales inadequate to retain personnel, substandard housing, strained training budgets, and low morale are not imaginary. Read the congressional testimony of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the administration's testimony last year. Did the military's troubles occur overnight?

Indeed, the most irrelevant "fact" presented by Korb is the comparison of Bush's long-term projections with Clinton's actual budgets. Would Bush have increased the operations tempo of the military to the degree Clinton has? Would Bush then have carried through with projected cuts in defense spending and allowed the armed forces to reach the state they are now in? I rather doubt it.

But this is a moot point. Long-term projections are just that: projections. The defense budget is put together annually. George Bush has not been the commander-in-chief for seven years. So there are only two possible conclusions. Either Clinton's defense budgets have been inadequate or the Pentagon during his administration has been incompetent in managing resources. Both are probably true. If the Pentagon has not divided money properly, where has the secretary of defense been? In case Korb does not remember, the management of the Pentagon is also the administration's responsibility.

As to the low percentage of GDP spent on defense, this is simply a measure of the nation's priorities. It is not meant to be more. But Korb's analysis begs the question, Why in such good times was the military permitted to fall into this state?

Korb is also selective in the data he chooses. Operations and maintenance accounts are indeed nearly 13 percent higher now than in Bush's administration. Why? Largely because they have been funding the multiplying missions -- from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo -- this administration has assigned its military. These operations have been at the expense of procurement and research and development (R&D). Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee recently sent a letter to the administration complaining about the lack of investment in defense R&D, which has stayed flat for several years. The operations and maintenance number exposes the shortsighted strategy that the administration's own undersecretary has called a "death spiral" -- robbing the future to pay for the present.

The Clinton administration has had seven years to build a military more robust and better suited to face post-Cold War challenges. It inherited a strong hand -- a military that won the Gulf War. Now, under congressional and electoral pressures, the president is sprinting to undo the damage he has inflicted on the armed forces. A two-term administration is responsible for what has happened on its watch. That is a fact no analysis can erase.

Condoleezza Rice is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is also foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.

ZOELLICK REPLIES

Why defenders of the Clinton administration, after its more than seven years in office, still try to blame the administration's problems on a predecessor continues to baffle me. As Lawrence Korb writes, President Bush did indeed reduce the size of America's military after the Cold War ended. The question that Korb sidesteps is why President Clinton and Vice President Gore would continue the cuts, year after year, in the face of numerous military problems: a hectic tempo of operations around the world, shortfalls in maintenance, the slippage in readiness, declines in relative pay, gaps in recruitment, housing problems, troubles in retention, increased threats from states with missiles, and the failure to procure new equipment to replace the depreciating investments made 20 years ago.

Korb's devotion to facts also wanes when he selectively cites other works on the subject. If he respects the authority of Jim Schlesinger or Dan Goure, he might have pointed out that Goure's new book, with a supportive forward by Schlesinger, documents that the Clinton administration's defense budget is nearly $100 billion short each year in funding its own force plan for the next five years. This mismatch underscores my larger policy points. The administration's foreign and defense policies have been greatly weakened by its failure to match means and ends, connect strategies with operations, and back up rhetoric with actions. Korb's comments reveal that he, like Clinton, is strategically challenged. Whereas Korb maintains that the test of U.S. defense spending should be a comparison with the expenditures of other nations, a strategist would compare resources to U.S. objectives.

Unfortunately, Korb's accounting also misses the key point that leading Republican presidential candidates are making about defense policy. The strategic challenge is how the country's money should be spent transforming the military to meet new threats and to take advantage of America's existing strengths -- especially its educated people and technology. Presidential leadership is needed to press the U.S. military to maintain its superiority under new circumstances. The Clinton administration's uncomfortable relationship with the military and its failure to understand these challenges has led it to abdicate its responsibility for designing the American military of the future.