The President and the Use of
Force After the Cold War
by Edwin Dorn
Panel Comments at the Dedication Conference of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service
Texas A&M University
September 10, 1997
Introduction
I am honored to be here at the formal opening of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, and especially to participate in the dedication conference. Former President Bush is one of the most admirable men in public life. A school named after him sends an important message about the value of public service.
The title of this conference captures two important points. First, it captures President Bush's deep interest in international affairs. Of all the noble and important things he accomplished during many years of public service, I suspect he will be remembered most for his role as Commander-in-Chief during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
Perhaps inadvertently, the title also suggests something else: we continue to struggle to define this nation's role in international affairs. Notice the phrase "after the cold war." That phrase says that we do not yet have a name for the age in which we live. We know what it isn't: it isn't the cold war any more. But we don't know what it is.
This nation is spending $250 billion dollars a year on defense. We have the finest force in the world by far--the best people, the best equipment, the best training. And, DoD has spent much of the past year refining its military strategy. What's lacking is the larger context--a paradigm of international affairs which tells us when to use our military. This conference can be a huge contribution to our search for a paradigm.
A Busy Force
Paradigm or no, we've used our military force quite a lot since the end of the Cold War. Everyone remembers Desert Shield/Desert Storm, when we sent more than 600,000 military personnel to the Persian Gulf region. In addition to that, we have used the military in more than two dozen smaller operations. We call them "contingency operations" or "operations other than war." They include humanitarian operations in Somalia, Panama and Rwanda; peacekeeping operations in Haiti and Bosnia; a rescue operation in Liberia; and enforcing the no-fly zone over Southern Iraq. In addition, we have used our forces for several domestic emergencies--hurricanes, earthquakes, and the 1992 LA riots.
By some measures, the force is actually busier today than it was during the Cold War. The conventional measures of busy-ness--Operating Tempo and Personnel Tempo, have increased greatly, especially for the Army and the Air Force. The Army has troops deployed to more countries today than was true during the Cold War.
I joined the Defense Department in the summer of 1993. I spent much of the next four years dealing with three issues that arose from the new ways our force was being used: readiness, quality of life, and money.
Readiness
A major military drawdown was under way when the Clinton administration entered office. Historically, readiness has suffered during such drawdowns. We were determined to maintain readiness and to avoid a "hollow force." One key was to establish a focal point for readiness within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I was the first Presidential appointee ever in OSD to have readiness as a part of his title. Once we established a readiness office, we did five things:
- First, we established an outside advisory group, chaired by former Army Chief of Staff "Shy" Meyer, to assess the current state of force readiness and to advise us on how to monitor and maintain readiness.
- Second, we followed one key piece of advice from that panel: we got the CINCs involved in the readiness business. Traditionally, readiness had been the purview of the Services. We found that the interaction between the Services (force providers) and the CINCs (force users) gave us a much richer perspective than had been available solely from the Services.
- Third, we made readiness our highest priority. That was explicit in the Defense Planning Guidance. The Secretary of Defense met with the Service Chiefs for the express purpose of getting their personal assurance that they had met the guidance.
- Fourth, we improved the timeliness, the comprehensiveness and the overall quality of the inputs.
- Fifth, we established a forum, the Senior Readiness Oversight Councils at which the Service's inputs and the CINCs' inputs were brought together for the benefit of the Department's most senior civilian and military leaders. This forum, co-chaired by the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Vice-Chairman of the JCS, enabled everyone to stay informed and, where necessary, to consider the kinds of actions needed to maintain force readiness.
Quality of Life
The downsizing, combined with the changing missions of the force, had placed a great deal of stress on military personnel and their families. To deal with this, we came up with a major quality of life initiative which had several major components:
- Pay increases as high as the law would permit. Congress had stipulated that military pay had to lag inflation by one-half percent. So in the mid-1990, we were able to provide annual raises on the order of 2.5 to 3 percent.
- Housing improvements. Our barracks and family housing had been neglected for years. We had troops living in places that, quite frankly, were just not commensurate with the quality and the dedication of our men and women in uniform. But there wasn't enough money in the Defense budget to correct for those years of neglect. So, we got Congress to approve some innovative public-private partnerships.
- Family support. We also put a lot more money into family support programs--day care, family counseling, etc.
- Personnel tempo. Time away from home base and away from family obviously affect quality of life. A couple of years ago, however, we didn't even have a systematic way of counting how much time military personnel were away. We do today, and all of the Services are now monitoring this closely.
Funding
When I spoke with Colin Powell soon after I arrived at the Pentagon, he gave me the following advice: "You guys in the Clinton administration", Colin said, "are inheriting the finest military force ever assembled. My advice to you is, 'Don't screw it up.'" I think we have done a good job of maintaining readiness, and of providing military personnel and their families with a quality of life commensurate with the sacrifices they make.
However, we haven't made as much progress with the funding issue. Paying for contingency operations remains a huge problem. Every so often, news stories will describe the symptoms of the problem. A couple of years ago, for example, some of our Navy wings stopped flying because they ran out of money. And almost every spring, the Army begins making plans to curtail training in the fourth quarter because it is short of money.
Let me explain the structure of this problem. During the mid-1990s, contingency operations have cost an average of $2.5 billion dollars a year. (In FY '97, they were $3.2 billion, mostly for Bosnia.) On average, then, contingencies cost only about 1 percent of the total Defense budget. But the cost of contingency operations has to be paid out of a specific part of the Defense budget--the operations and maintenance (O&M) accounts. That $2.5 billion would be about 3% of DoD's total O&M budget. But much of O&M is already committed, pay for things such as water and electricity at military bases. DoD civilians also are paid out of O&M. When you deduct these "must pay" bills, the contingency operations eat up about 10% of the "discretionary" O&M money. If those bills come due in the fourth quarter, they'd be about 40% of the discretionary O&M money left at the end of the year. The effects don't fall equally on all the Services. The Army tends to be most affected.
So, whenever DoD launches a contingency operation, it has to go to Congress and ask for supplemental funds to pay for it. Congress usually responds favorably, but there are always two problems. First, Congress doesn't pay the whole bill with new money; it doesn't increase the total Defense Budget. Rather, Congress authorizes the Department to reprogram other monies (from the R&D budget, for example) into O&M. Second, the response often comes very late in the year.
The Department tried several ways around this problem, but ultimately, what it ran into is a fundamental Constitutional bind: the President has the authority to commit our forces, but only Congress has the authority to pay the bills. Inevitably, the time pressures on the President are much greater than the time pressures on the Congress.
Conclusion
We don't know what to call this period following the end of the cold war. However, we do know this: we have exchanged a cold war for a fitful peace. We have exchanged one monolithic danger for several diverse dangers--regional dangers of the kind exemplified by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and humanitarian disasters such Rwanda.
Further, the US, if it is to continue to exert influence on the world stage, will remain engaged in contingency operations. Our force is likely to stay busy helping to sort out some of the world's messiness.
If that is so, then we must figure out a better way to pay. In recent years, our practice has been to borrow from readiness accounts to pay for contingency operations, then hope that Congress will come up with the money before we have to shut down training. The military cannot continue to bet that way.
