A Defense agenda for sec. cohen
COHEN, ELIOT A. & Bacevich, Andrew J.
A Defense Agenda for William Cohen By Eliot A. Cohen & A.J. Bacevich The appointment of former senator William S. Cohen as secretary of defense has come at a crucial moment for the American...
...Rather, the purpose of such missions is to maintain order and uphold acceptable standards of international behavior...
...War against "rogue states" like Iraq is only one of several overlapping challenges facing the United States...
...Two broad areas require bold and creative leadership in the Pentagon and should head Cohen's agenda as defense secretary...
...The vague form of democratic messianism the Clinton administration preferred in its first four years—"enlargement" was its ungainly term of choice—will not suffice...
...First, Cohen must reestablish proper standards of accountability...
...No defense secretary can remove himself from the battle of the budget...
...They have Provided Comfort, Restored Hope, Upheld Democracy, Denied Flight, and employed Deliberate Force, to recall only a few of the high points...
...In this regard, Cohen's recent decision directing the Air Force to reexamine its exoneration of the general officer in charge of Khobar Towers may be a hopeful sign...
...This was absurd...
...And so he has shied away from the unpleasant decisions needed to resolve the mismatch between the amount of money the military needs to maintain its qualitative advantage and the amount it receives from federal coffers...
...Neither can a great military power whimsically expect its soldiers to march to the cadence of every politically fashionable tune...
...The administration has been content to paper over the problem by promising a fix somewhere on the far side of the bridge to the 21st century...
...But of all the areas in the federal government, the Pentagon seems the one that makes Bill Clinton the most uncomfortable...
...As long as the Bottom-Up Review remains nominally in place, debate within the Pentagon confines itself to questions such as whether the United States should be prepared to fight one-and-a-half or two Desert Storm conflicts simultaneously...
...As a result, the Joint Staff has acquired unprecedented clout and bureaucratic muscle...
...after winning the most lopsided battlefield victory in history...
...At times openly bitter during the first Clinton administration, civil-military relations have been unhealthy and ignored for decades...
...The pressure to find money that will balance the federal budget by 2002 is intensifying...
...A preferable response might have been: "This particular remnant of military ritual is unacceptable...
...It may be awkward or disconcerting to admit as much to ourselves, let alone to others, but to pretend otherwise will serve in the long run only to confuse citizens and soldiers alike...
...And although the overall defense budget remains just slightly below $250 billion per year, the Pentagon is coming up short in its efforts to scrape together resources for the ongoing modernization of American weaponry necessary to guarantee this country a continuing qualitative edge...
...And the impulse to look to the defense budget as a source of savings is a bipartisan one: Newt Gingrich told the 105th Congress that he wanted to cut the Pentagon down into a triangle...
...Without a lexicon that enables Americans to acknowledge that grand strategic project, meaningful debate becomes impossible...
...The same will be true of inciting candid discussion of first-order questions of national strategy...
...Unfortunately, in matters related to strategy, the Clinton administration has thus far shown a singular lack of imagination...
...When car-bombers struck the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen, Secretary of Defense William Perry—and Perry alone—took responsibility in place of the commanders in the field...
...Absent such a mechanism, the United States opens itself to strategic surprise...
...Ademocracy cannot tolerate a military that is alienated from the larger culture...
...The first minor flap of Cohen's tenure—the "blood wings" incident involving the hazing of U.S...
...Given his personal history, the president is fearful of accusations that he may be shortchanging defense...
...American forces will often have to operate in ambiguous circumstances in which the good guys and bad guys may differ only marginally, and in which neither friend nor foe will have read the Federalist Papers...
...Therefore, I look forward to a dialogue with the senior leadership of the Marine Corps—and of all the services—aimed at insuring that we do not permit isolated instances of brutality to undermine a culture that affirms and sustains the warrior spirit...
...military strategy have now outlived their usefulness...
...Without debate, there can be no genuine strategic consensus...
...By contrast, the Office of the Secretary of Defense must rely on military officers who are working there reluctantly, on civil servants who are products of a system that rewards caution rather than originality, and on political appointees able to meet the exacting tests of American public life and patient enough to endure the excruciating appointments process...
...Here, three tasks loom...
...From time to time in recent years, civilian defense chiefs have sacked senior officers for diplomatic missteps or for violating the changing norms of American society...
...Terms like "containment," "extended deterrence," and "flexible response" that once framed the debate over U.S...
...Indeed, the success of William Cohen's tenure will hinge on his willingness to tackle them...
...The secretary's office is staffed by many able officials, but as an organization it is lamentably weak...
...It is no less unacceptable to tolerate any slackening in the standards of toughness, discipline, and esprit for which American Marines are noted...
...This landmark piece of legislation succeeded in its aim of enhancing the power and prestige of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the people who work for him...
...But even as the range of military activities has increased drastically, the number of people in the American military has contracted severely from its Cold War level of 2.1 million to 1.4 million today...
...Cohen should resist the temptation offered him by the Bottom-Up Review to strip the strategic future of its complexity...
...This is necessary because of the unintended consequences that flowed from the 1986 Gold-water-Nichols Act...
...No less demanding, but currently treated as an afterthought, is the issue of homeland defense...
...Matters as important as these are usually the province of the president, charged with ultimate responsibility for the defense of the United States...
...It involves protecting the continental United States from threats that range from terror to nuclear attack...
...In fact, a ready-made device for a serious reexami-nation of strategy already exists...
...Although current expectations are that it will only prove an exercise in ratifying the status quo set by the Bottom-Up Review in 1993, it still represents an opportunity for Cohen to chart a new course at the Pentagon...
...Marines accused of raping a young Okinawan would have been better advised to hire a prostitute...
...Bacevich is executive director of the school's Foreign Policy Institute...
...Finally, there is the challenge of assuring conventional American superiority over emerging powers or coalitions in the more distant future...
...It most definitely is the secretary's job to hold to account those field commanders charged with that responsibility...
...They also compete with one another...
...Fostered by the success of American arms in the Gulf War, the misguided reluctance to subject military performance to critical scrutiny is profoundly at odds with genuine military professionalism and serves to undermine civilian control...
...The very idea of "major regional contingencies" is itself an arbitrary construct of limited relevance to the actual geopolitical landscape...
...Certainly, President Clinton himself will not take the lead on such matters, which are fraught with political risk and remote from his interests...
...The second broad area requiring Cohen's strong leadership is civil-military relations...
...Marines who had just completed paratroop training—provided yet another reminder that this clash of cultural norms will not resolve itself any time soon...
...Indeed, it will pose a proper test of political fortitude...
...For example, the resources spent to occupy Bosnia become unavailable for spending on homeland defense...
...But if brokering a new budget deal becomes the chief objective of Cohen's tenure as secretary of defense, if that task consumes his energies and political capital, he will serve as an administrator rather than an agent of change, a dealmaker rather than a leader...
...Since Desert Storm and the end of the Cold War, American soldiers have been engaged in frenetic activity all over the world...
...Such practices will cease...
...Cohen's response was immediate: "I intend to enforce a strict policy of zero tolerance of hazing, of sexual harassment, and of racism...
...That enterprise goes beyond fostering American values and defending vital interests...
...It is as if every future war the United States might find itself involved in will adhere to the singular set of circumstances that led to the Persian Gulf War...
...Comparable standards of accountability should apply in instances of operational failure...
...The Bottom-Up Review directs Pentagon planners to view the world in terms of "major regional contingen-cies"—large conventional wars with the likes of North Korea and Iraq...
...Bacevich The appointment of former senator William S. Cohen as secretary of defense has come at a crucial moment for the American military, which confronts perplexing dilemmas only six years Eliot A. Cohen is professor and director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies...
...Even though John Shali-kashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the Pentagon should be investing $60 billion per year on new equipment, actual spending is less than $40 billion—and many experts think Shalikashvili's own $60 billion estimate is too conservative...
...Each of these strategic challenges calls for a distinct response...
...The final civil-military task may be especially daunting: addressing the conflict between the traditional ethos of military professionalism and the forces of cultural change at work in American society, a problem embodied in the Tailhook scandal and its lingering aftermath...
...When U.S...
...forces in the Pacific, for suggesting that U.S...
...And assuring American superiority over new military powers requires capabilities dissimilar to those needed to protect the United States from terrorism...
...To do so, however, he must create some mechanism that forces Pentagon planners to enunciate the requirements of these strategic challenges and make the necessary tradeoffs between them...
...As a result, the nation is sorely in need of a new public discourse appropriate to the grand strategic enterprise to which the United States has tacitly committed itself...
...Attracting able and ambitious officers who report to a single, extremely powerful four-star general or admiral, it holds a near-monopoly on authoritative advice on defense matters...
...Cohen was right to condemn the incident, but he might have done so in a way that signaled his appreciation for the larger military ethos...
...forces steam into the Taiwan straits, hurl missiles at Iraq, or occupy Bosnia, they are neither "enlarging democracy" nor protecting interests that conform to traditional notions of being "vital...
...The first area is strategy...
...Given the imperative of thinking about American security well into the future, that century has effectively arrived at the Pentagon...
...But for a defense secretary aspiring to assure American military dominance well into the 21st century, the principal challenges lurking ahead derive from a deficit not of dollars but of statesmanship...
...Therefore, it hasn't been up to the demands of providing effective civilian oversight and offering an informed alternative perspective on defense policy...
...It is by no means the most dangerous and may well be the least likely...
...Next, Cohen must revitalize the Office of the Secretary of Defense as one step towards restoring meaningful debate over controversial defense issues inside the Pentagon...
...Without consensus, policies will lack coherence and consistency...
...Yet it was of a piece with the blurring of command responsibility following the 1993 incident during which 18 American soldiers were killed in an urban firefight in Somalia, as well as the accidental 1994 shoot-down of Blackhawk helicopters in northern Iraq...
...Negotiating a new civil-military compact that preserves traditional military culture while updating it may appear to be a thankless task, but it is one that cries out for the attention of politically shrewd and forceful civilian leaders...
...This was made manifest four years ago by the Bottom-Up Review, a narrow and unaffordable strategy devised at the behest of the late Les Aspin, Clinton's first secretary of defense...
...The Bottom-Up Review ignores this competition in favor of a simplified geopolitics derived from Desert Storm...
...The uncomfortable fact is that the United States has become a global hegemon, its soldiers members of a constabulary enforcing a Pax Americana...
...He might have distinguished between the relatively innocuous rite of passage (routine in many army airborne units until recently) to which that ethos gave birth and the perversion of that rite into deplorable physical abuse in this case...
...So, too, with the challenge of sustaining the Pax Americana as a whole, a task that may include more Haitis and more Bosnias...
...It is not the job of a civilian political appointee to ensure the perimeter security of American installations overseas...
...Devising replacements that will both encompass and legitimize the protracted, costly, frequently thankless project of serving as global hegemon has become imperative...
...Insisting that long-ignored issues of civil-military relations be brought to the fore is not likely to win many plaudits...
...Nor will the Pentagon bureaucracy, military or civilian, which will view action along these lines as threats to old prerogatives and arrangements...
...But if the spirit of bipartisanship has any serious meaning, an independent-minded Republican welcomed into the uppermost echelon of a Democratic administration may be in a unique position to draw attention to such problems...
...Rather, he should expose, encourage, and preside over the collision of contending priorities...
...It is called the Quadrennial Defense Review, mandated by Congress in the hope of shaking up post-Cold War defense thinking...
...Recall the swiftness with which the administration dispatched Admiral Richard C. Macke, commanding all U.S...
Vol. 2 • March 1997 • No. 24
