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Insight on the News - Daily Insight
Issue: 06/10/02
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Clinton Undead Haunting Pentagon
By J. Michael Waller
Clinton Undead Haunting Pentagon
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team are pulling their hair out trying to
bring the Pentagon's policy apparatus into line with the president's wishes. At every
turn, it seems, they run into entrenched bureaucrats, Clinton holdovers and others
who not only pursue their own agendas but actively fund outright opponents of the
administration.
The Pentagon's policy shop faces the tremendous challenge of serving as the brain
of an open-ended international war on terror while also providing guidance on
reshaping the nation's defenses to meet new threats and adopt new technologies.
The first of these tasks was thrust upon it Sept. 11, when the Department of Defense
(DoD) senior-management team was only a couple of months into the job; it since
has remained that team's primary focus.
Daily headlines ranging from the shooting wars in the Middle East to a possible war
between India and Pakistan to an escalation in narcoterrorist violence in Colombia
and a host of other crises continue to show that the Pentagon can't pick the time or
the place where its attention will be needed. Added to the mix are the quotidian tasks
of negotiating five-year budget plans through a difficult election-year Congress,
balancing the State Department's college of rationalizers on international arms and
defense agreements with existing allies, new friends and old enemies — and trying
to move ahead on presidential priorities such as defending the nation from missile
attack.
With a clear and urgent set of missions and an experienced leadership, several
observers ask why there isn't a clearer focus with a more purposeful movement on
key policy issues at a time of tremendous popular support for the war, for the
secretary of defense and for the president himself. Part of the answer lies in the
degree to which the message is muddled — not only in the media, in Congress and
within the DoD, but by the scores of Clinton holdovers and countless bureaucrats
whose opposition to presidential initiatives and policies is in fact funded by the
Pentagon itself through internal think tanks and external consultants.
"This cognitive dissonance is to be found in three places: Pentagon and interagency-
loan billets, the defense university system and in grants to contractors, academics
and the 'CINC-tank' system of specialized regional policy shops — a series of self-
styled policy centers created during the Clinton administration to bring what
[conservative public intellectual] David Horowitz labeled 'tenured radicals' into the
DoD ranks," says a Rumsfeld operative who asked to remain anonymous.
"CINC tanks" is shorthand for the five policy groups under the direction of the
regional military commanders-in-chief (CINCs) that frustrated officials say have
become sponsors of sinecures for shelved Clinton/Gore policy operatives. While not
necessarily "radicals" in the political sense, such individuals have used their
Pentagon-funded platforms to attack President George W. Bush's policies. The
Honolulu- based Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, the CINC-tank of the U.S.
Pacific Command, has come under fire during the last year for sponsoring outspoken
opponents of the president's initiatives. When Rumsfeld curtailed Chinese military
access to the United States following Beijing's forced downing of a U.S. Navy
intelligence aircraft last year, the center's director, retired Marine Lt. Gen. H.C.
Stackpole, openly criticized the secretary's move. Stackpole also drew ire for
allegedly undermining the president's missile-defense initiative by criticizing it
publicly
during a visit to Australia — one of the few countries wholeheartedly behind Bush's
early national missile-defense plan.
The DoD's Africa Center for Strategic Studies is a virtual hive of left- wing
activists at
a time when Africa is of increasing importance as a theater of fighting international
terrorism. One of the center's senior academic officials previously was with the
International Human Rights Law Group, and was a World Bank consultant and U.N.
diplomat. The center's academic chair of civil-military relations is listed as "a
development and gender consultant." Its academic coordinator is noted for her
experience in "policy analysis and community activism" with the Washington Office
on Africa, which actively sympathized with Soviet-backed revolutionary movements
during the Cold War.
"The runaway CINC tanks are polluting the military officers they share billets with,
they sow discord against the president's policies and legitimize criticism through
their
supposed representation of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff], and they spin our allies'
rising officers in the wrong direction," says a defense scholar currently trying to
fix the
problem for the Pentagon. "Some of the CINC tanks credentialize leftists and people
with few legitimate credentials even as they deny the same opportunities to our good
junior officers who are needful."
The National Defense University (NDU), in addition to educating U.S. military
officers, plays host to research and advanced-studies institutes that focus on
different defense areas. Adm. Paul Gaffney, the NDU's president, wins high marks
for keeping the university on an even keel. Its Institute for National Strategic
Studies
(INSS) operates as a think tank for the secretary of defense and the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Insiders tell Insight that politicized Clinton appointees are
being
rotated out as soon as their contracts expire. "INSS was a problem area, but it's
come a long way and still needs a little more work," says a longtime veteran of the
Pentagon policy shop. "It needs good people who can follow national-security-related
immigration and energy issues. It needs a Claire Sterling to connect the dots on
terrorism, drugs and proliferation — a big-picture person who is cleared to study
highly classified information and put the pieces together."
The late Claire Sterling was a journalist who defied the U.S. intelligence community's
conventional wisdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s and pieced together a covert
Soviet-sponsored operation in support of international terrorism that she dubbed the
"terror network."
The Pentagon policy veteran adds: "It also needs some good China people. The
China part of INSS is too small and it doesn't have the ability to fight the 'panda
huggers' in every other institution of government. Congress tried to give INSS a
strong China shop but refused funding when a panda hugger was to be appointed to
run it."
It's hard for the defense secretary to promote the president's policies when members
of his own think tank publicly undermine them, insiders tell Insight. Richard Sokolsky,
a visiting INSS senior fellow, blasted Bush's nuclear-posture review in a Washington
Post op-ed last January. Arguing that Bush's proposed unilateral cuts of 6,000
operationally deployed warheads to fewer than 2,200 didn't go far enough, Sokolsky
compared them to President Bill Clinton's "timid" proposals of five years before. The
INSS figure said that "it is hard to imagine a plausible contingency" that would merit
Bush's plan to stockpile nuclear warheads, and said that Bush should make further
radical cuts to help "Russian President Vladimir Putin defend his pro- American
policy from domestic hawks." Sokolsky argued that the Bush plan leaves 10 times as
many operational warheads as the United States ever would need. The United States
should make further unilateral disarmament cuts until it had only "a few hundred"
nuclear warheads, this Pentagon "expert" argued, keeping none in reserve.
"Those types of public articles undermine policy and don't serve the secretary or the
president," says a senior Pentagon official dealing with nuclear-missile issues.
Nobody has produced a dollar figure, but it appears the national- security community
is paying more people to oppose administration policy than to develop it. Some make
a finer point: The money is going to political opponents of the administration to shape
the administration's own policies. A case in point, one critic says, was a May 6-7
National Security Agency-sponsored conference to map out a four-year strategy for
homeland defense. Administered by ANSER, a major defense consulting firm, the
conference recruited a range of policy experts from across the political spectrum.
This created "an opportunity for the field's leading thinkers and practitioners to
examine how the nation can cultivate an effective homeland-security posture for the
long term," according to ANSER. It was "intended to provoke debate, develop new
ideas and offer recommendations for policymakers who must design homeland-
security policies, strategies and institutions."
But the invitation list shows that, apart from a few invited Bush- administration
officials, the participants were weighted against the administration's conservative
approach and included many former Clinton-Gore appointees. Even where a
sponsored policy event was organized by friends of the administration, such as a
November 2001 Rand Corporation conference to develop a new policy toward Cuba,
out-and-out apologists for the Cuban regime such as Wayne S. Smith were included
in the deliberations.
A source close to the Pentagon's policy office laments, "You have no idea how hard it
is to work on the war, find extra hours to develop a forward-looking policy that tracks
with the president's and SECDEF's [secretary of defense's] priorities and then try to
advance it on the Hill or in the [decision-making] process, and find yourself
outmanned by an opposition funded not by the leftist foundations or the
congressional-opposition staff budget, but by your own policy shop's budget."
J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight.
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