Meanwhile, 2002 moved along. In March I convened a 'National Security Summit' at Camp David. In effect, the National Security Council camped out in the wilderness for a few days and talked about keeping the country safe while we roasted marshmallows around the camp fire. Well, maybe not that rustic. For all that they call it a 'camp', Camp David is really an office and cabin complex set in the woods. Every amenity of civilization is there, along with office space and conference rooms, and multiple 'lodges' for residence. If you want to go for walks in the woods, fine. You have about 200 acres to wander around in, surrounded by razor wire, electrified fences, and at least a company of combat equipped Marines.
It's only a little further to travel than from the White House to our house, but we had never been up there before. Marilyn and I stayed in the Presidential cabin, Aspen Lodge, and everybody else used the smaller lodges. We used Laurel Lodge for the meetings. A few people stayed overnight, a few went back and forth to Washington. Marilyn and I spent most of the week up there, without the kids, while some of the people came and went as needed. Evenings we had some nice dinners in Aspen with whoever was staying the evening.
I would go to meetings and Marilyn would kiss me goodbye. "I am going to catch a nap and catch up on my knitting.", she happily told me.
"Knit me up a solution for world peace.", I replied.
"How about some new slippers?"
I had to chuckle at that. "I'll take what I can get."
The subject for the week? Developing some sort of strategy for keeping the country safe, keeping the costs down, and keeping the bad guys somewhere far away. That all sounds wonderful, but how to do it? At one extreme you have the Festung America concept, Fortress America, a neo-isolationist viewpoint. Bring the troops home, shut down overseas bases, stop playing policeman to the world, fence the borders and electrify them, and shut down immigration. At a very simplistic level this sounds wonderfully compelling, but in reality it is impossible.
Take immigration, for example. Americans do not have a high enough birthrate to keep the population from declining. If the replacement birthrate is 2.1 children per family, Americans typically ran 1.9. We need immigrants, at least a million a year, legal or illegal, to keep the population and the economy growing. This gets very complicated by the fact that most of those new immigrants are coming from places the existing residents aren't pleased about. The European immigrants who founded the country and provided most of the population are now being outnumbered by immigrants from Africa, South and Central America, and Asia. The country was going to be a lot tanner in a couple of generations. Furthermore, for all the people who screamed about illegal aliens in the country, the only way to get rid of them would be to adopt the same tactics the Nazis needed to rid Germany of the Jews – house to house searches by jackbooted thugs, and concentration camps – none of which would ever be accepted by Americans.
On the other hand, quite a few people had a viewpoint that might be seen as an American Leadership approach. We needed to stay out front, across the world, leading the way! The world needed a policeman and who better than us? Don't react to the world, but be pro-active. Better to control the environment than be controlled by it. At the most extreme end of this spectrum you had those who thought that if the world didn't embrace our values voluntarily, it would be best if we coerced them to do so. America, and the rest of the world, would be better served if we sent in the troops, replaced the government, and brought peace and goodness to the locals. This had been one of the arguments of Cheney and his crew. Strangely, the locals often had differing views on the wonderfulness of this approach.
I'll be honest. I tended towards the neo-isolationist myself. Why in the world did we need to have troops still based in Germany, for instance? Couldn't we be more sensible? Why did we care when the locals decided to kill each other off? Why try and police these shitholes? I was quickly and convincingly cured of my delusions. Isolationism was not even remotely possible anymore.
There had to be some sort of middle ground, where we didn't bankrupt ourselves, didn't view war as a legitimate foreign policy, and still kept the bad guys away. The summit proved unsettling at best. Certain aspects were accepted, in some cases grudgingly, but I learned a few things, as well. China was becoming increasingly bellicose and assertive, and they were rapidly increasing the size and quality of their armed forces. We would continue to need high end naval forces, and not be able to swap out Aegis destroyers with smaller and less expensive frigates. We would be able to manage a swing from Europe to Asia, but there would be costs. We would need to reactivate some of the Asian military bases we had shuttered, and costs would generally increase.
The generals and admirals were going to have to face some of the facts of life, too. They grumbled, but a lot of what they wanted was simply unsustainable. Invisible airplanes at $100 million a pop? Wait ten years and do what they could do with a drone at pennies on the dollar! I knew what the coming revolution in artificial intelligence and computing power was going to bring to military aircraft. I informed the lot of them that every branch was going to face some cuts in future hardware programs, but that I intended to move those funds into readiness and training and support programs. On the other hand, the Commandant of the Coast Guard was ecstatic that his budget would be increased. Of all the services, they got the most work and the least respect and the tightest budget. Since 9-11, Congress and the public were finally waking up to the fact that they were on the front lines.
One thing I stressed was that I was going to expect accountability! Weapons programs were going to be watched closely, and if they thought I was brutal with the civilian heads of the Cabinet, wait until they saw me working over the admirals and generals running procurement! The best way to stay in my good graces would be to bring programs in on time and under budget. If they needed to change the way they did business, so be it.
I sat down with each of the service chiefs and went over their Christmas wish lists of new weapons. It was not a happy experience for the generals and admirals. I was a veteran myself, with just enough experience to be dangerous, from their point of view. Compared to GWB, I did not hold these guys in awe and believe everything they said. The Army came out of it the best of the services. What they had now was really good stuff, and they weren't going to lose a whole lot when the NLOS cannon got shut down, for instance. Some of their funding got switched from heavy armor, like M-1s and Bradleys, to Strykers and variants. Some of their brigades and divisions would get moved from Europe to Asia.
The Marines used a lot of equipment that the Army used, but the one thing that they had exclusively was amphibious vehicles. They were going to lose their Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle, an amazingly wonderful gizmo that fought like a tank and surfed on the ocean fast enough you could ski behind. It never really worked that well, and at this point, I could kill it off fairly simply. The last time the Marines had actually done a beach assault had been at Inchon – 52 years ago! Now they used helicopters and air cushion landing craft. I did let them keep the V-22 Osprey, though. Sooner or later they would get that to work, and it was too far along to kill it.