U.S. Defense

Apparently, the senior brass of the US military are unsure of Obama’s “leadership” qualities to be commander in chief. However, what is their definition of leadership? What qualities make a good commander in chief? Does previous military experience matter for this position?

Personal military experience doesn’t help unless the person was of flag rank and was in command of vast amounts of men and material. Otherwise, what difference does it make what someone did when they were in their early 20s? The only president I can think of whose military experience had a direct bearing on his role as commander in chief is Eisenhower. As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe he managed an international coalition and oversaw the strategy of an entire theater of war. This knowledge could have definitely been helpful had Eisenhower decided to go to war. However, he never involved the military in anything more serious than a show of force, perhaps because he had seen war and knew how terrible it was firsthand.

Which presidents have had similar experiences? George W. Bush was a fighter pilot in the National Guard. This means he flew planes over Texas one weekend a month. How did this experience qualify him to wage counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq? The president before him, Bill Clinton, never served in the military. George H. W. Bush flew a dive bomber against Japanese aircraft carriers in the Pacific Campaign of WWII. 45 years later, how did this experience help him wage a mechanized desert campaign in Iraq? Ronald Reagan served as a public relations officer in California during WWII. Gerald Ford served aboard a carrier in the Pacific. What action he saw was meaningless to the Vietnam War. I could go through the careers of Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy, but none of their personal experiences in the military helped them to make decisions as commander in chief during the Vietnam War.

I spent three years in the infantry, deployed to two combat zones and if I was elected president in November, I would have no more knowledge of being commander in chief than someone like Obama who never spent a day in the military. What does my experience occupying Somalia in 1993 have to do with the current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq? Do I have some sort of esoteric knowledge that would allow me to make the right decisions that someone who never heard a shot fired in anger might not be able to make? The only thing I might know is how much it truly sucks to be there and how badly the troops want to come home. I may feel for the plight of the grunts but I would have larger considerations, such as the national security of the United States of America.

What experience do the three leading candidates have? Obama and Clinton never served in the military at all. McCain’s experience consists of flying bombing missions over Vietnam, eventually being shot down and made a prisoner for over five years. He courageously defied his captors and returned with honor, but how does this give him commander in chief experience? Unless he is going to help teach SERE school, McCain’s military experience has not given him any more qualifications than the average man on the street.

In an article in the Washington Times, General John Keane, an architect of the Iraq War said, “Anyone who is advocating a precipitous pullout of U.S. forces, believing this will be a catalyst for political progress, does not understand the realities of Iraq and the minds of the key political leaders.” Does Keane have the right to talk about the “realities of Iraq?” This is a man who admitted he “never saw the insurgency coming.” I was able to figure out that there would be an Iraqi national resistance long before we attacked and I left the army as a Specialist.  

However, the military’s real problem with Obama becoming commander in chief is not where he stands on Iraq or his lack of experience, it is his possible willingness to curb our record breaking military spending, which is more than the rest of the world combined. “Defense industry executives worry that Mr. Obama will end six years of defense budget increases and, as he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail and in debates, tap into war and military funds to support his plan for universal health care.”

According to the military brass, this is the real qualification for being a good commander in chief: whether the candidate will support a “strong” military or not. In this case, “strong” does not mean effective or even able to win wars. It means an ever increasing budget for them to play with.

The US military has geographically divided up the world into six regional “commands.” Northern Command, which was created in the wake of the September 11 attacks, is based in NORAD in Colorado. European Command is based in Stuttgart, Germany, so it is right in the middle of its area of responsibility (AOR). Pacific Command has as its AOR, the Pacific Ocean, Australia, and Southeast Asia, so it is well placed in Hawaii. Southern Command is in charge of controlling Latin America. Until 1997, it was located in Panama, but since the Panama Canal Treaty, SOUTHCOM was forced to relocate to Miami, Florida, because no country in the region would host it. However, it is at least still close to the region it is responsible for. That leaves Central Command and Africa Command. 

CENTCOM has been the busiest command since 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. At the time, many observers thought CENTCOM would take the opportunity to relocate itself to Kuwait, but it stayed in its home base in Tampa, Florida. Basing an entire command in its AOR may not be necessary nor even productive anymore. The new paradigm seems to be instead of one major headquarters, having many smaller ones dotted around the AOR. This is a new concept that the CENTCOM is trying out in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. The commander, General Lovelace said, the war on terror and a need to be more operationally focused compelled the Army to alter its approach. “You don’t have the element of time on your side anymore, like we did in the Cold War. We’ve got to be ready tonight. That’s why now you have that broader commitment. This is a big, dynamic theater. We track little hot spots in a time that’s exceedingly important to our nation.” George Bush’s current trip to Africa is being seen by some as laying the groundwork for the same diversified command structure for AFRICACOM, which is currently located in Germany. Bush has denied this even though every country he has visited has expressed interest in having AFRICACOM set up its base there. However, Bush did clarify that “that doesn’t mean we won’t develop some kind of office somewhere in Africa.”

From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet Army attempted to occupy Afghanistan and defeat an insurgency of Afghan rebels. They failed and two years later found their own country falling to pieces and with it, the Soviet Bloc’s collective security alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Although, the Russian Afghan War was not the main reason the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, it definitely played a role. Now with the US Army mired in an Afghan insurgency of its own, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been trying to push America’s NATO allies to help out. Although Gates is right to seek more allies and  troops for Afghanistan, he is conveniently forgetting why they are needed in the first place. After the US military invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, it should have devoted the vast resources that were necessary to winning the peace afterwards because a scattered Taliban does not mean a defeated Taliban. Instead, those resources were sent to fight a war in Iraq, which was being effectively contained and wasn’t an imminent threat to the stability of the Middle East, or America. Now, bogged down in two quagmires, the US has to go begging with bowl in hand to allies it has denigrated in the past. Gates has to even resort to empty threats saying, “NATO is a collective security agreement, a military alliance. The members have signed up with certain obligations in this regard. But if it were to become the case that some allies are not prepared to fulfill their military obligations, while others continue to do so, I think that that is a very dangerous situation for the future of the alliance.”

Afghanistan indirectly caused the end of the Warsaw Pact. It would be ironic if it did the same to NATO.

The Department of Defense released its figure for the 2009 budget: $518.3 billion. As this article points out, that number is only the military portion of the budget. There are other expenditures that could be easily classified as funding national security also. First, the $70 billion the DOD requested to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Secondly, the requested $17.1 billion the Department of Energy needs to maintain our country’s nuclear weapons. Then there is Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the State Department, and many other departments and agencies that relieve the DOD of some of the debt burden. The grand total of our national security state comes to well over $600 billion.

America’s national security budget is only 4-5% of its GDP, which ranks it 28th in the world on military expenditures as a  percentage of GDP. However, the US ranks #1 on total expenditure and in fact, spends more on defense than every other country in the world combined.