| 摘要 | This week Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made the obligatory campaign stop to address the American Legion. Despite the rhetoric, which at times made both candidates sound like Reagan defense hawks, the reality is that the two presidential campaigns offer conflicting narratives over the state of our military, neither of which is accurate or will advance our nation’s security.
Hillary Clinton and her supporters embrace the past eight years of Barack Obama’s policies, telling voters that our military remains strong and is capable of defeating our immediate threats, such as ISIS. The Clinton camp tends to downplay areas where our national defense is vulnerable. Mindful of Obama’s legacy and burned from an intense primary fight, the Clinton campaign embraces the status quo.
On the other end of the spectrum, we find the Republican standardbearer, Donald Trump, arguing that our military is a “disaster”, which “no longer wins.” While the candidate has never explained the scope or scale of the military’s problem, Mr. Trump believes, like most things, he alone can make our military great again.
These dueling views and visions, consistent with many of the debate fault lines of this election, are a caricature of the real problems facing our national security and fail to absorb the critical challenges confronting our military.
Contrary to Trump’s assessment, the disaster doesn’t reside within our military but instead with the political leadership surrounding it. White House micromanagement of military strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan in the form of arbitrary deadlines, irrational troop caps, and restrictive rules of engagement—combined with a specious call for balance between defense and domestic spending—has resulted in a weary military. Weary, that is, of politically hollow mandates to defeat an enemy with resources tailored for a strategy “not to lose.”
Unable to convince the party leadership or nominees to invest in the military strength needed to prevail against our adversaries (rather than simply pay lip service to it), defense leaders in Congress and at the Defense Department have distracted themselves with an effort to “reform” the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, the Clinton campaign embraced the reform agenda, too.
Reforming the Defense Department is a perennial affair that has repeatedly eluded the best and brightest of both parties. Reform, the theory goes, is the only way to discipline the bureaucracy, realize financial efficiencies, and improve the military’s readiness and operational effectiveness. While these goals are admirable, they are wholly inadequate to address the major structural challenges facing the military today.
Those challenges can be broken down into three areas: modernizing and growing our military capability to deter revisionist powers like China and Russia; rebuilding and restoring the readiness of our forces to sustain operations in a low-end terrorism fight as well as high-end warfare; and resourcing a strategy to truly defeat ISIS. In other words, we lack a military capable of deterring adversaries and assuring allies in three key regions of the world. Despite a public record chock full of testimony from military leaders pleading for relief and warning of dire consequences if unaddressed, the administration response to all three challenges has been anemic. It ranges from outright denial, in the case of the readiness crisis, to inadequate, in the case of military modernization.
And there isn’t much reason to expect a change in this approach after the election. The Clinton status quo camp dismiss calls for a military rebuild and argue such dire warnings overstate the urgency of the threats and understate the capability of the military. Instead, Clinton believes “predictable funding” is the key to maintaining our military edge. A necessary condition, to be sure, but wholly insufficient.
A common refrain is that our military budget is three times larger than our nearest competitor, China, and that no radical changes are needed. No matter that our interests span multiple regions in addition to China’s neighborhood, or that a hollow pivot to Asia has proven insufficient to stem the tide of China’s island building in the South China Sea. Or, that nearly eight years after Clinton’s reset policy, Russia is now our nation’s number threat according to the Department of Defense. And those countries make up only the high-end threats—Iran, North Korea and the fight against terrorism from Libya to Afghanistan continue demand the Pentagon’s attention and resources.
Trump, on the other hand, discerns that the world is indeed on fire, but has no grasp as to how the United States might put out those flames. He speaks of making the military strong without a plan to address its weaknesses. When pressed for a strategy he seems to double down on the elements of the Obama administration policies that have fueled the flames of global instability—alienating allies and embracing adversaries. And when he does utter policy, as in the case of nuclear weapons, he reveals he lacks the temperament, judgment or understanding to be commander-in-chief.
Whether out of political convenience or blinded by ideology, neither candidate seems prepared to make the necessary investment and policy adjustments to ensure our military is postured to deter and defeat the growing array of threats facing our nation. With fewer than seventy days until Election Day, our nation seems destined to elect a candidate unwilling or unable to make a course correction. To be sure, this is not the only example of how this election disappoints, yet in the case of our military, the stakes couldn’t be more consequential for our nation.
Roger Zakheim is a former general counsel on House armed services committee, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and of counsel at Covington & Burling LLP. Follow him on Twitter@Rogerreuv. |
