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Sunday Jan. 20, 2002; 1:10 p.m. EST
Rumsfeld Slams Clinton Military Cutbacks
While noting that U.S. armed forces remain the most
powerful in the world, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blasted the Clinton
administration Sunday for defense cutbacks he said left the military in such a
"run down" condition that rebuilding could take up to a decade.
"The infrastructure had decayed and it is still
decayed and it will take now probably six, eight, ten years to get it back to
the place that it ought to be," Rumsfeld told NBC "Meet the Press" host Tim
Russert.
The Bush Defense Secretary then added, "It takes
time to run down a great military and it takes time to build one back up."
He suggested that the full dimension of the Clinton
cutbacks were only now being felt. "During a president's term of office, what he
does with the military has very little effect during that period of time. Each
president inherits what was done in preceding periods."
Rumsfeld was responding to Democratic Party and
media arguments that the U.S.'s success in the Afghanistan war shows that
criticism of Clinton's military cutbacks is unjustified.
Separately, the New York Post reported Sunday that
a full 89 percent of Clinton budget cuts under the president's "Reinventing
Government" initiative came at the expense of the armed forces.
In his recent book "In the Arena," former Reagan
administration Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger contends that President
Clinton had reduced U.S. military forces by approximately 50 percent during his
eight years in office.
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