I had seen this up close and personal on my first go. When Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome was put on the list in 1993, the uproar had been deafening, and the locals all screamed that their base was a critical part of the nation’s defense. Instead, they argued, shutter that wasteful and duplicative base north of us, Plattsburgh Air Force Base! Well, the Commission promised they would look at Plattsburgh and the people in Utica and Rome went away happy. Nobody was happy when a few months later the Commission recommended both bases be closed!
Closing bases is a very painful thing. In addition to whatever soldiers or airmen or sailors or Marines are stationed there, you usually have lots of locals working at a base, as well as businesses who sell stuff to the base. It is a major source of income. On the other hand, military spending by its very nature is inherently wasteful. If you want to do well spending government money, a better investment is infrastructure or research or something. You’ll waste less and hire more. I remember that when Griffiss shut down it was very painful for a few years. Lefleur Homes wasn’t selling very many homes in the Rome area when you could buy an existing structure for fifty cents on the dollar. Still, the area came back even stronger.
Anyway, the latest round of BRAC was ongoing, and looked to be as contentious as the earlier ones. We still had too much military for the budget and the threat. The Soviet Union was no more. They hadn’t been able to control Afghanistan, which was a major reason they had collapsed in 1989, and now the U.S. was the undisputed and sole superpower left. Furthermore, the military we had was the finest in the world. Just a fraction of our force had been enough to whip Saddam Hussein in a matter of days.
It was too big and too expensive to maintain an army and a navy at the levels we had built up to during the Cold War. The process had started under George Bush and accelerated under Bill Clinton. Congress and the Pentagon hated it, but it needed to be done. By the time the Republicans took back control of Congress in 1994, the Army had shrunk from 18 divisions down to 12, and the National Guard had from 10 down to 8. The Navy was equally shrunk, from almost 600 ships at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall down to about 400 at the time the Republicans took control. The Air Force and Marines were equally slimmed down.
Now, with the Republicans firmly in control of Congress, the call was out to stop this ‘erosion’ of American strength and rebuild our forces to their former glory. Of course we would do this in a prudent and reasoned fashion, avoiding the ‘bloat’ and ‘excess’ found in previous Democratic Congresses and administrations. It was assumed by one and all that as a former soldier I would see the wisdom of rebuilding the Army again. I suppose if I had gone into the Navy I would be expected to shortchange the Army and build some extra ships.
I kept my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself. Even at half our size, the national security of the country was assured. Our Navy had more ships than at least the next dozen nations on the list, and they were almost all our allies. The same could be said of our Air Force. As for the Army, well, unless the bad guys started human wave attacks we could eat anybody else on the planet alive. The only problem that I could see was the overwhelming need to make the services even smaller! Nobody who I met who wanted to build up our forces could come up with a single plausible opponent who could possibly harm us.
Russia? They lost half their empire in the breakup and were gone as a military force. Their Navy was rusting at the piers and their Army was rusting in the fields. They would be hard pressed to protect their borders from the Islamic nut jobs. The Chinese? They didn’t want to attack us! They wanted to buy us! The same went for any number of other former Communist dictatorships around the planet. The same could be said for the former client states who had professed their hatred of us and caused trouble. Now that the Soviet Union wasn’t paying the bills, they were jumping all over each other proclaiming how much they loved us and wanted our assistance.
Only the Islamics were dangerous, and they only had two ways to cause trouble. First was through terrorism, both here in the U.S. and abroad. That was a job for police and Special Forces types. You can’t fight terrorists with armored divisions and aircraft carriers.
The second, more difficult, way they could create trouble was by weapons of mass destruction. Pakistan was already a nuclear power and had spread that joy to all sorts of wonderful people, like the North Koreans and Iran. It would only get worse, along with other cut rate weapons like gas and biologicals. By the time I recycled all three types of weapon had been used. Biologicals never really worked too well, despite all the hype and fear. Gas was easier and cheaper and was handed out by several countries, including Syria, who managed to let it get into the hands of some rebels who promptly turned around and gassed Damascus. After that, nerve gas was kept under a little better control. Nukes did get loose, and the mullahs in Iran gave one to Hezbollah, who detonated it in Haifa. Israel wasn’t amused, and promptly proceeded to kill 8 million Iranians when they retaliated by nuking the ten largest cities in Iran into rubble and glass. That made a lot of the Arab world sit up and take notice, and a lot of terrorists got caught and killed in the resulting uproar.
My problem in the here and now was to allow the process of downsizing the Army and Navy and Air Force to continue, while not appearing to be soft on defense. The easiest way I could do this, it seemed to me, was to be very tough on new program ideas. The services were always on the lookout for the latest whiz-bang gadgetry, and were constantly being bombarded by the defense contractors with proposals for new equipment.
For instance, the M109 Paladin self propelled howitzer has been in service with the Army since 1963. It works, it’s relatively cheap, and it is very accurate. It has been upgraded at least a half dozen times over the last 30 years. Still, we can always do better, so United Defense and General Dynamics came up with the M2001 Crusader, a replacement that was both heavier and less accurate. That was going to be coming before Congress for approval at some point in the next few years. Ultimately it would be found to be a disaster and get cancelled. Not to worry, a replacement for the replacement was in the works, the M1203 Non Line Of Sight Cannon, which was also cancelled. Meanwhile the Paladins soldiered on, and were still in front line service when I recycled.
The paramount military threat of the 21st century, of course, turned out to be terrorism. Terrorists don’t own howitzers.
Some of what I saw I knew wouldn’t work out so well. There had been a vote in Congress in 1992 to show approval to President Bush to ‘do something’ to help in Somalia. I had voted against it, which didn’t make me any friends. Everybody wanted to ‘do something’ but as soon as anything bad happened (think Black Hawk Down) they conveniently forget. Some places are so fucked up you just can’t fix them. This year I knew Bill Clinton was going to want to get involved in the Balkans, so we could ‘do something’ to help. That was because he didn’t get involved in Rwanda last year (another place you can’t fix) and now needed to show he ‘cared.’ If Otto von Bismarck thought “the Balkans aren’t worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier” what made Bill Clinton think he was smarter? It was just one more damn place that can’t be fixed. If I got a reputation as an isolationist, I wouldn’t be unhappy. (I had already voted against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Act. I remembered that ‘sucking sound’ of jobs leaving the country. This was just the start.)