But never underestimate the power of a spin-meister, and Bill Clinton and his team are perhaps the greatest spin-meisters in American history. The latest version of this spin campaign is that it is Bill Clinton who deserves the credit for the rapid success of the campaign in Afghanistan.
The first volley was fired by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in an op-ed for the New York Times on New Year's Day. Recalling that during the 2000 presidential race, George Bush and Dick Cheney campaigned "hard on the theme that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had run down the United States military," O'Hanlon countered that President Bush was "on the verge of winning a war with the military that Bill Clinton bequeathed him."
Then on Feb. 4, the usually sober Morton Kondracke wrote:
arguably, even Bush's ability to fight a robust war on terrorism is an outgrowth of actions taken by the Clinton administration. The high-tech weaponry used so effectively in Afghanistan was developed and acquired on Mr. Clinton's watch. Five of the six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were appointed by Mr. Clinton [this is incorrect. President Bush nominated three of the six: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice-Chairman, and the Air Force Chief of Staff. Mr. Kondracke needs to chastise his fact checker], as was the war's regional commander, Gen. Tommy Franks.
It is true of course that the Bush administration has not been able to exert much direct influence on U.S. military doctrine and force structure since the president was sworn into office in Jan 2001. While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was able to effect some marginal changes to the congressionally mandated 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QRD), the QDR process began long before the 2000 election. Additionally, the Bush administration submitted its first defense budget only two weeks ago.
These facts are manifestations of the reality that force planning, the art of creating a future military force of the right size and composition, is an intertemporal art. Planners must make choices now about an uncertain future while still maintaining the capability to carry out current responsibilities. So just as the military that prevailed during Desert Storm was designed two decades earlier to fight the Warsaw Pact, the military that is operating successfully today is the result of decisions made in the past. And since there is no question that the U.S. military has undergone significant change since the Gulf War of 1991, aren't O'Hanlon and Kondracke right to suggest that Clinton deserves some of the credit?
To discover the real military legacy of Bill Clinton, it is necessary to look beyond the obvious timeline. Focusing "like a laser" on "the economy, stupid," Clinton deployed one of the weakest foreign-policy teams — it has been described as the "Carter third team" — in recent history. A major failure of this crowd was an apparent inability to establish priorities when it came to foreign affairs. Thus while reducing the level of defense spending and the size of the force, Clinton then employed the smaller force far more frequently than his predecessors. Although it is possible to make the case that America's role in the world required that the U.S. military be employed as it was during the Clinton years, the fact that this force was severely under-funded caused widespread problems for the military in terms of readiness, personnel, and modernization.
The first of these was that increased but under-funded operational tempo simply beat the military to death. This high "optempo" wore out equipment but more importantly it wore out people. During the 1990s, the U.S. military "was ridden hard and put away wet." This affected morale, recruitment, and retention. The overall result was a decline in the military's operational readiness.
The second effect was what has been called the "defense-budget death spiral." By definition, contingencies are not budgeted beforehand. As contingencies proliferated during the Clinton years without a corresponding increase in the defense budget, they were funded by regular appropriations. Although the operators eventually went to Congress to request a supplementary appropriation for the contingency, but in the meantime, funding had to come "out of hide" a practice that led to a very disruptive "recurring migration of funds."
For instance, to carry out the mission required by the contingency, funds might be shifted from a maintenance account to an operating account. Now maintenance was under-funded. To rectify this shortfall money might be shifted to maintenance from modernization or from research and development (R&D). The recurring migration of funds had a particularly adverse impact on modernization and experimentation, the very cornerstones of military transformation.
Finally, the policy of the Clinton administration created the perception abroad that the United States did not possess the will to fight a war. The preferred response of the Clinton administration to an attack on U.S. interests was indignant rhetoric about "justice" backed up by at most a cruise missile drive-by shooting. When he did make a military commitment beyond cruise missiles, as in Somalia and Haiti, President Clinton was predisposed to cut bait at the first sign of trouble.
To make matters worse, while the Clinton administration refused to wage real war against our adversaries abroad, it relentlessly waged war against the culture of the United States military. This culture is necessary if the military is to meet the hard requirements of the battlefield, which it must do in order to fulfill its functional imperative — success in war. To do so, the military has adopted practices that constitute an evolutionary response to the unchanging nature of war. Military organizations must overcome the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier. Accordingly, military culture places a premium on such factors as unit cohesion and morale. It stresses such martial virtues as courage, both physical and moral, a sense of honor and duty, discipline, a professional code of conduct, and loyalty.
But all too often, the Clinton administration treated military culture not as something that contributes to military effectiveness, but as a problem to be eradicated in the name of multiculturalism, sexual politics, and the politics of "sexual orientation." At a minimum, this meant that the Clinton functionaries expected the military to adapt to contemporary liberal values, patterns of behavior, and social mores no matter how adversely they might have affected the military's ability to carry out its functional imperative. This hostility to military culture was epitomized during the Democratic primaries when then-Vice President Al Gore stated unequivocally that if elected president, he would impose a social "litmus test" on senior officers: "I would insist before appointing anybody to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the individual fully support my policy (on homosexuals in the military), and yes, I would make that a requirement." The new weapons and new concepts that both O'Hanlon and Kondracke attribute to the Clinton era were actually created by the same military culture that the Clinton administration besieged.
Ironically, O'Hanlon acknowledges much of this in his piece. He writes:
the Clinton administration misused military power during its first year in office in Somalia and then in Haiti....Morale was low, and recruitment and retention posed problems. Cuts in defense spending to help balance the federal budget went too far in some cases — until the Republican Congress stepped in an insisted on adding money for the Pentagon.
So that's the real Clinton legacy — low morale, recruitment and retention problems, cuts in defense spending while increasing the demands on the force. Success in Afghanistan has obscured the fact that Clinton left the U.S. military hollow. This means that while certain parts of the force — like the special-operations forces (SOF) — may be in good shape, others face readiness and sustainability challenges that could create severe problems down the road.
The U.S. military generally is a resourceful and innovative organization. Throughout history, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have improvised their way through problems created by hollowness. That is what they have done to date in Afghanistan. The U.S. military has prevailed there not because of Bill Clinton, but despite him.
