Archive [May 1999]

“I think if the American people don’t know anything else about me,” said President Clinton before bombing Kosovo, “they know that I don’t like to use military force, and I do everything I can to avoid it.”

Tell it to the Marines. The fact is, Bill Clinton loves to use military force — despite his declared loathing of the military itself. He has deployed American troops extravagantly — one might say with abandon — indeed, more often than any President in decades. And if you listen carefully to the President and to his esteemed Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, we’re in for more of the same.

In a little-discussed “foreign policy” speech in San Francisco in March, the President laid out what could be called the Clinton Doctrine — “We Are the World”:

“It’s easy … to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names … [W]here our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.”

This is an amazing statement, sweeping in its imperialism. To Bill Clinton, the whole globe is a permissive environment, just waiting for us to “make a difference” — “where we can.” With military force.

What breathtaking arrogance.

At the now-moot Kosovo peace conference in Paris last February, Madeleine Albright blithely dismissed the entire record of human experience: “Great nations who understand the importance of sovereignty at various times cede various portions of it in order to achieve some better good for their country … We are looking at how the nation-state functions in a totally different way than people did at the beginning of this century.” Finally — no more nasty sovereignty! Utopia! (And if you don’t agree, we’ll send missiles.)

Bill Clinton, too, talked about this magical new age he was ushering in: “in which borders are becoming more and more open and less important in a negative sense.”

To enforce Clinton’s vision of a world with unimportant borders, a world where we intervene to “make a difference,” simply because “we can,” Albright sees multiple Kosovos. “There may be more than one ongoing at any given time,” she says. “They may be conducted jointly with partners or other non-allied nations. And, by definition, they will involve operations outside alliance territory, with all the logistical complications that entails.”

Heaven help us.

As it is, Bill Clinton’s incessant adventurism has sapped the greatest fighting force in history. Listen to Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Readiness subcommittee: “This President has just decimated our military. Right now we are robbing assets from the Pacific theater and from the Persian Gulf, so if something should happen in Iraq or in North Korea, we would really have a serious problem. If the American people knew what condition our military was in right now, I can assure you they would not want to get involved in another war.”

As Kenneth Allard, former NATO advisor in Bosnia, told NBC: “We have shortages in cruise missiles, precision guided munitions, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, tankers. But more than anything else we have shortages of personnel. Particularly pilots, particularly ground forces.”

The Army has recruited 10,000 fewer people than the 74,000 it needs this year. Last fall, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified: “I must admit … up front that our forces are showing increasing signs of serious wear. Anecdotal and now measurable evidence indicates that our current readiness is fraying and that the long-term health of the Total Force is in jeopardy.”

Said Dennis J. Reimer, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army: “Frankly, right now we do not have sufficient resources to keep our soldiers trained and ready and maintain the quality of life that they and their families deserve.”

In February, The Washington Post reported that Army Secretary Louis Caldera proposed that the Defense Department allow the Army to recruit more high school dropouts, and those with equivalency diplomas. Be all you can be, even if you can’t graduate. Besides, Caldera says, “The Army is an institution that should not write off young people in America who need a second chance.” Not only is the military sent on humanitarian missions these days; apparently, some people think it is a humanitarian mission.

They’re looking for more than a few good dropouts. Since 1989, the total Army, active and reserve, has fallen by 650,000 people, according to Army Times. The active Army is down to 480,000 — the lowest in 50 years. And, as Caldera notes, “we’re busier than we expected to be.” (Yep. All that “making a difference.”)

The Navy is in the same boat. According to the Center for Military Readiness, the Navy missed its recruiting goal last year by more than 7,000 — and is 22,000 sailors beneath authorized strength. A recent study by the Center for Naval Analysis reported that the “unplanned dropout rate” for women at sea is 2.5 times higher than the rate for men. One-third of these losses are due to — you guessed it — pregnancies.

Since 1992, reports Joe Farah of World Net Daily, the size of the Navy fleet has declined by 31 percent — while its deployments have increased 26 percent. The cost has been immense. “The aircraft mishap rate is nearly double last year’s,” says Former Navy Secretary James Webb, “the highest level in the past five years. Funding for ship and aircraft modernization has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990. Departing servicemen increasingly cite their disappointment in the quality of leadership as their reason for leaving.”

According to The Washington Times, the Army’s first-term attrition rate is now an unsustainable 41 percent, and the force will likely be short 20,000 soldiers by the year 2000. Likewise, the Air Force pilot shortage is expected to increase to 2,000 by 2002. “We are on the verge of a sustained meltdown in our ability to keep our armed forces manned with quality personnel,” warned a confidential Army report obtained by The Washington Times — an impending catastrophe “most observers have failed to even notice.”

Well, not all of us have failed to notice. I have consistently trumpeted the burdens imposed on our fighting forces by this Administration — including the shackles of political correctness and liberal social experimentation.

For instance, this claptrap, as documented in The Washington Times:

The Army is determined to turn the service into one big, happy, diverse family. Further proof came our way from an Army conference … of senior enlisted intelligence officers. Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, spoke at the annual meeting of sergeant majors at Fort Huachucha, AR. The diminutive general is a favorite of the White House and could well be the next Director of Defense Intelligent Agency. “Most of the attendees had at least one combat tour, some had four, most with a career behind them in excess of 25 years of service,” one sergeant told us in an account of the general’s speech to the session. They were squirming in their seats as Gen. Kennedy, for nearly 40 minutes, lectured the soldiers on the Army’s new politeness policy, dubbed “COO.”

“I had to wonder what the hell she meant as there are a virtual plethora of acronyms in the intelligence field,” our correspondent said, “…I learned that she was alluding to Consideration of Others Training. She informed us old timers how we should conduct our COO sensing sessions and how our COO training should be conducted back at our home stations. The general also made it clear to the sergeants that those who did not participate in COO sessions are “resistant and insensitive to others.” Such behavior will not be tolerated, she said. “She giggled, much like a little girl, as she inferred [sic] that they had not been COO-ing at those bases.” our sergeant said. “I was really tempted to ask about training down to the weak link but I could not risk being politically incorrect in the venue present.” The three-star general also addressed “touchy feely” social issues and the need for “equality and understanding of others,” the source said. “I was thrilled to be in the crowd and looked well forward to returning to my home station and COO-ing,” the sergeant deadpanned.

Is this any way to run an army? People who impose this sort of gobbledygook on soldiers do not have even a rudimentary understanding of the purpose of the military — which, as I’ve said over and over, is: to kill people and break things. Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy may not know it, but the soldiers instinctively do. Which is why the American military remains the greatest fighting force the world has ever known, however hampered it may be at the moment by the idiocies of the anti-military crowd. Have no fear: it is not too late to reverse the ill effects of the Clinton Doctrine. Yet.

“We’ve got to stop the hemorrhaging of readiness,” says Sen. Inhofe. According to Air Force magazine, Inhofe has visited Air Force and Navy installations to investigate why so many pilots are leaving. The departing pilots cited “concerns over poor maintenance, lack of spare parts, and excessive cannibalization” of equipment. “We can’t generate enough jets to fly,” Rear Adm. Timothy Beard told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee. “It has a definite effect on morale and retention of our people. They just haven’t got the tools.” The commanders of combat training centers for the Army, Air force and Marines described poor training conditions, outdated equipment held together by junkyard parts and underpaid, overworked service workers.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, says Sen. Inhofe, the pilots are not leaving just because there are a lot of civilian jobs in a booming economy. No, “it’s the loss of mission in this country. That’s what those guys say.”

“We have a great Army filled with terrific soldiers who are suffering from an inability to train at every level with the battle focus and frequency necessary to develop and sustain its full combat potential,” said Col. John Rosenberger, commander of opposing forces at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif. “It is a hard thing to watch my Army, the Army that delivered the outcome of Desert Storm, the Army I and many others sacrificed to create from the ashes of the Vietnam War, slowly deteriorate from the conditions we’ve been compelled to endure the past seven years.”

And it’s completely unnecessary. Look how much of our weaponry we’ve wasted doing absolutely no damage to Saddam Hussein in Iraq since 1993. We’re expending arms uselessly in places like Somalia and Haiti. The Stealth fighter that was shot down last month over Yugoslavia was built in the early 1980s — and that’s among the newest airplanes in our inventory. And we’re running out of cruise missiles!

Stop and think a moment. We’ve got a President who has openly admitted his loathing of the military. He’s got advisers like Strobe Talbott, Sandy Berger, Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton. None of them has any experience in the military. For the first time in our lifetimes, no one on the national security team has any military experience. It’s questionable how many of them have any respect for the military. And they are presiding over the systematic depletion of our forces — while making China a nuclear-missile-armed enemy.

So we’re going to have to rebuild. Now. And don’t pretend we’ve got some kind of $1.8 trillion in budget surplus for Clinton to “save” Social Security! My friends, it’s time to institute the Limbaugh Doctrine: No more social spending until we replenish the United States military. Not a dime more. Not a penny more.