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Foreign Affairs
Clinton’s Strong Defense Legacy
By Michael O’Hanlon
Michael O’Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has written several books on U.S. foreign policy, including Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration and Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal with a Nuclear North Korea, which he co-authored with Mike Mochizuki.
Major Misunderstanding
The notion that President Bill Clinton was a poor steward of the armed forces has become so commonly accepted that it is now often taken for granted — among moderates and independents as well as Republicans such as George W. Bush, who made the charge in the first place. The Clinton administration, so the thinking goes, presided over an excessive downsizing of the U.S. military, seriously weakening the magnificent fighting machine built by Ronald Reagan and honed by George H.W. Bush. It frittered away American power and left the country an object of derision to its enemies, tempting them to misbehave.
This assessment, however, is wrong. The Clinton administration’s use of force (or lack thereof) may be controversial, but the Clinton Pentagon oversaw the most successful defense drawdown in U.S. history — cutting military personnel by 15 percent more than the previous administration had planned while retaining a high state of readiness and a strong global deterrence posture. It enacted a prescient modernization program. And the military it helped produce achieved impressive successes in Bosnia and Kosovo and, more significant, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although these victories were primarily due to the remarkable dedication and skill of U.S. troops, credit is also owed to Clinton’s defense policy.
The Clinton defense team did not, however, do a good job of managing military morale, taking too long to figure out how to distribute a demanding workload fairly and sustainably across a smaller force. As a consequence, U.S. troops became overworked and demoralized, and many left the military or considered doing so. Although many of these problems were largely repaired by the end of the decade, they undoubtedly detract from Clinton’s military achievements. But they do not justify the overwhelmingly negative assessment of his defense record.
Equipped For a New Enemy
Advocates of military transformation, the current rage in defense policy circles, do not think that the Clinton administration went far enough in modernizing and reshaping the military. But this assessment is unfair. Although Clinton spent only half of what Reagan did on procurement, this was partly because much of the military’s antiquated weaponry had already been replaced during the Reagan buildup. Moreover, the Clinton Pentagon made good use of the scarce funds it had, purchasing key battlefield technologies and improving behind-the-scenes preparedness.
The technological superstars of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns included not only F-16 fighter jets, Abrams tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles — built largely under Reagan — but unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), missile defense systems, satellite-guided weapons, and improved rapid-targeting and radar technology, developed chiefly during the Clinton years. The Predator UAV, for example, which was used to monitor key targets in Afghanistan and to attack fleeing terrorists, began as an experimental program in 1994. Global Hawk, a larger and higher-altitude UAV, was developed around the same time.
The Clinton years also saw the development of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile defense system, a huge improvement over the primitive Patriot system that performed so poorly in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Initial variants of . . .