18 January 1999. Thanks to Anonymous.
We'd appreciate the e-mail address of Franklin Spinney. Send to: <jy@jya.com>.
++ Within the Pentagon, a Rare Dissenting Opinion on Budget Increases ++ More Realistic Defense Budgeting ++ Experts Say U.S. Needs 'Bad Guy' ++ U.S. Officials Claim Reports Show Weakened Saddam ++ Pentagon Backs Off on Arms Inspector's Book - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/military-spending.html The New York Times, 18 January 1999 Within the Pentagon, a Rare Dissenting Opinion on Budget Increases By Steven Lee Myers WASHINGTON -- Not much has changed in the small office in the Pentagon where Franklin C. Spinney has worked ever since he gained a bit of notoriety in the 1980s with this jolting argument: All the money President Ronald Reagan was pouring into defense would not make the military any stronger. Congress held hearings. His bosses made him a celebrity by trying to quash his views. Time magazine called him a "Pentagon Maverick" on a cover in 1983. Still, Reagan's military spending spree went on. Now, nearly two decades later, President Clinton has proposed the first increase in the Pentagon's budget since 1991 and the largest since those heady days: $12 billion in new spending in 2000, and $110 billion over the next six years. Spinney, still a mid-grade analyst in the Pentagon's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, is once again raising an alarm. "This is a horrible thing that's going on," Spinney said in an interview in his cramped, cluttered office deep inside the Pentagon. "All it's going to do is reward the pathological behavior that's creating the problem." In the weeks since Clinton announced his plan to raise the Pentagon's budget, criticisms like Spinney's have been rare -- within the government exceedingly so. At a recent hearing before the Senate's Committee on Armed Services, no senator spoke out against the increase. In fact, the loudest criticism of Clinton's proposal on Capitol Hill has come from Republicans who have argued that the President needs to pledge more to defense. Before the administration and Congress open the defense spending spigot, though, Spinney and a diverse group of advocates and analysts have begun to make a case against an increase. Some of them argue that boosting defense is unnecessary since no new threat like the Soviet Union has emerged. Others say new spending will ease pressure to cut the Pentagon's inefficiencies and waste. Still others say that in a time of relative peace, the nation should devote its resources to education or other social causes. A group called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities began broadcasting a 30-second television commercial calling for just that. The first advertisements appeared on Friday and more are scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday, coinciding with Clinton's State of the Union message to be delivered Tuesday evening. Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., a longtime critic of large defense budgets and one of the leaders of the group, said the White House, the Pentagon and the Congress were spending money as if the Cold War had never ended. "The United States is now, literally, in an arms race with itself," Cohen said. Clinton's proposal, which will be outlined in detail when he submits a budget proposal to Congress early next month, would increase the Department of Defense's budget to about $268 billion in 2000. That is only $4 billion more than the currently projected level of $264 billion, but Clinton also has agreed to let the department keep another $8 billion in savings freed up as a result of lower-than-expected inflation and fuel savings. Clinton, a Democrat who has had an uneasy relationship with the military, agreed to an increase after Defense Secretary William Cohen and the nation's military commanders warned that dwindling resources since the collapse of the Soviet Union had strained the military's "readiness." Andrew F. Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research organization in Washington, said the Pentagon's budget reflects a military preparing for major regional conflicts with the most advanced jets, tanks and ships. Future enemies, he argues, will confront American forces with cheaper weapons, like missiles or mines, that are harder to counter. "To me, the greatest challenge isn't a budgetary one," Krepinevich said. "It's a strategic one." What makes Spinney's criticism unusual is that it comes from inside the Pentagon, where politics, bureaucracy and military obedience discourage most public dissent. Spinney's argument is that the Pentagon plans to spend billions of dollars to build new weapons that have become so complicated and costly that it cannot buy enough of them to replace today's arsenal. That means tomorrow's military will have to get by with fewer new weapons, while relying on older weapons to last longer. Meanwhile, the cost of operating the advanced new weapons keeps rising. He calls this the "defense death spiral." Spinney does not dispute reports that the armed services face readiness problems caused by backlogged repairs, shortages of parts and growing wear and tear. "Spending more money the same way isn't going to fix anything," Spinney said. Spinney, 53, has broken with orthodoxy almost from the day in 1977 that he arrived at the Pentagon's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, an office first conceived by Robert S. McNamara in 1961 to provide (relatively) independent assessments. His own career began in the military, making him an unlikely firebrand. He spent eight years in the Air Force after graduating from Lehigh University in 1967 with a degree in engineering. He fell in with a band of like-minded reformers, who became well-known on Capitol Hill and in the media for challenging conventional wisdom at what Spinney calls "Versailles on the Potomac." At the peak of Reagan's buildup, he argued that the Pentagon underestimated the future costs of weapons, thus saddling the nation with ever-growing defense budgets. After appearing before the House and Senate, he lost his parking permit and, for a time, access to budget figures, but his notoriety and civil-service rules protected his job. The end of the Cold War allowed the Pentagon to reduce the size of the military and its budgets. Spinney, like others, believes the Pentagon did not take full advantage of the opportunity to reconsider plans to modernize its arsenal with weapons originally conceived to fight a superpower like the Soviet Union. The Air Force, he says by way of example, now plans to spend $35 billion to build 339 F-22 fighter jets, even though there is no real challenger to America's best jets today. By comparison, the force spent only $45 billion to build 1,094 F-15 fighters, which are considered to be among the best jets in the air. Likewise, he argues that the Navy has retired aging, though still usable attack submarines to make room for fewer, more expensive versions. Within the Pentagon, Spinney has little official influence. "They basically ignore me," Spinney said. Still, he gets his views out -- by e-mail. Christopher Helman, senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, another research group that has opposed the spending increase, said Spinney's critiques have a purpose nonetheless. "He serves to generate some critical dialogue that would not otherwise occur," Helman said. Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/18mon2.html The New York Times, January 18, 1999 Editorial More Realistic Defense BudgetingPresident Clinton wants to increase military spending by $110 billion over the next six years, the first significant increase in the defense budget since Ronald Reagan's cold-war buildup of the mid-1980's. Congressional Republicans want to spend even more. But soaring spending is unnecessary to assure that America's armed forces remain strong, decently paid and appropriately equipped for the battlefields of the 21st century. Most of what the Pentagon legitimately needs can be paid for by trimming pork from acquisition programs, closing unneeded bases and reducing America's nuclear arsenal from excessive cold-war levels. For next year, Mr. Clinton will request $269 billion. That is $4 billion more than he originally planned to seek. But he will also let the Pentagon retain and spend an additional $8 billion in savings from lower than expected inflation. Although a detailed breakdown is not yet available, the White House has already indicated that $2.5 billion will go for well-deserved pay and pension increases, an additional $2 billion will support peacekeeping in Bosnia and most of the remainder will be used for spare parts and recruiting. In the five following years, most of the new spending will be for new weapons programs, including $7 billion to be set aside for possible later construction of a limited missile defense system. In the future smart weapons will shape the battlefield and defense priorities will include shielding vulnerable computer and telecommunications networks and protecting civilians from biological and chemical attack. Unfortunately, much of the new money Mr. Clinton seeks will go to advanced fighter aircraft and nuclear attack submarines, areas where the United States is already far ahead of any prospective foe. Under the 1997 balanced-budget agreement, any increase in defense spending must be paid for by tax increases or reductions in domestic programs. The White House hopes to get some defense money from a new cigarette tax. But if the Republicans approve such a tax, the money should be used for health programs. Meanwhile, the Administration has failed to identify any domestic programs it would cut. Some compensating savings will have to be found, and the first place to look should be elsewhere in the defense budget. New weapons spending should be cut back. America does not need three separate advanced fighter plane programs. Two would be more than enough. The production of additional attack submarines, which serve no current military need, could be slowed. Congress has blocked two more rounds of base closings proposed by the Pentagon that could save as much as $2 billion a year. Legislators also shamelessly fatten defense budgets to benefit home districts, last year adding $5 billion for weapons, research and military construction the Pentagon had not requested. Further savings can be achieved by reducing America's nuclear arsenal to the target level of 2,500 warheads Washington seeks in the next arms reduction agreement with Russia. Even without a treaty, financial pressures will lead Russia to match America's cuts. Together, these savings could finance more than half of the increased spending President Clinton is proposing. The post-cold-war world has not turned out to be as peaceful as Americans originally hoped and the United States needs to maintain a strong and ready military. But it should do so by reallocating existing defense spending, not by raiding already threadbare domestic spending programs.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990116/V000146-011699-idx.html Associated Press, 16 January 1999, 11:11 EST Experts Say U.S. Needs 'Bad Guy By Laura Myers Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States needs Iraq's Saddam Hussein -- or a "bad guy" nemesis like him -- to rally support for U.S. foreign policy and defense spending, world affairs experts say. Think of the recent past. The U.S. enemies list has included Manuel Noriega and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Today, in addition to Saddam, there are Moammar Gadhafi, Slobodan Milosevic and Fidel Castro, although the aging Cuban leader has lost a good deal of his evil persona of late. Iraqi President Saddam emerged as a top U.S. threat when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The move angered his Persian Gulf neighbors and more importantly endangered the smooth functioning of the world's oil supplies. The strike prompted President Bush to compare Saddam to Hitler and organize an international force to expel Saddam's forces from the neighboring emirate. When President Clinton ordered airstrikes against Iraqi targets over four days in December, he, like Bush, had overwhelming public support. Robert Gates, former CIA director and deputy national security adviser during the Gulf War, said Americans have been "conditioned" to see Saddam as a threat. "The heart of it, I think, is against America's favorite bad guy," Gates said, speaking of the Dec. 16-19 U.S.-British assault on Saddam's forces. A tangible enemy helps unite the nation and justify a massive military -- 1.4 million strong and costing about $280 billion a year -- equipped and trained to fight two regional wars at once if necessary, analysts say. The end of the Cold War officially put Moscow in the U.S. friend column, shifting the focus to new foes. "When the Soviet Union was the 'Evil Empire,' other leaders around the world could have attracted our attention but mostly didn't because we were so focused on the Soviet threat," said Robert Ebel, a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Now these other people have popped up in their place -- the rogue of the week -- whomever we are confronting now," he added. The administration targeted Iraq last month after Saddam refused to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, required as part of the Gulf War cease-fire to ensure he didn't rebuild his chemical and biological weapons to threaten his neighbors again. Since late December, Iraq has challenged U.S. and British aircraft enforcing flight-interdiction rules over northern and southern swaths of Iraq. Iraqi pilots are flying into the off-limits airspace as Iraqi air defense sites launch missiles at the enforcers. No Western planes have been hit. Retired Army Col. Harry Summers said the United States has a long history of demonizing enemies, sometimes an entire population like the Japanese during World War II, but more often individual leaders. "It helps explain things to the American people," Summers said. "It always makes it easier to fight a war if you demonize people so that you're not killing human beings, you're killing the devil." In the case of Iraq, the Clinton administration is focusing its ire on Saddam partly because U.S. officials believe the Iraqi president's policies are harming his own poverty-stricken people, said Ebel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's very easy for us to personalize the matter in Iraq. We have nothing against the people, just Saddam Hussein," Ebel said. It's a similar situation in Cuba, where Castro has ruled with a communist iron hand for four decades. Clinton eased a U.S. embargo against Cuba this month to allow Americans to send more money to needy Cubans while increasing people-to-people exchanges between the countries, direct mail service and the sale of food and agricultural goods to nongovernment entities. "The steps are designed to help the Cuban people without strengthening the Cuban government," Clinton said in a statement. Most foreign policy analysts say the U.S. administration should have eased or lifted the embargo against Cuba long ago but is reluctant to do so because Castro has been demonized by every president since John Kennedy and because of strong opposition by Cuban exiles in this country. "I think this is really a bankrupt policy in Cuba and has been for decades," said Robert Beisner, professor emeritus at American University, who is writing a book about U.S. foreign policy. "Demonizing Fidel for so many years makes it harder to reverse course now." Copyright 1999 The Associated Press - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/iraq2.htm The Washington Post, 18 January 1999, Page A6 U.S. Officials Claim Reports Show Weakened Saddam By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer In their campaign to portray Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as weakened in the aftermath of American-led airstrikes, senior U.S. officials have relied on opposition accounts of executions within the Iraqi military that U.S. intelligence officials say they have been unable to confirm. As recounted by officials at the Pentagon and State Department, the opposition accounts suggest that Operation Desert Fox triggered uprisings within Iraqi military units in Basra and Baghdad. Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, assessing the overall effectiveness of the four-day bombing campaign, told reporters that former Iraqi defense minister Ali Hassan Majid ordered executions in the 3rd Corps in southern Iraq after a division commander and other officers refused an order to move against the local Shiite population. Expanding on Zinni's remarks, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin briefed reporters last Monday on the executions in the south and three other incidents between Dec. 13 and 19 in which 25 Iraqi officers were reportedly executed, including two generals at the Al-Rashid military base in Baghdad on Dec. 18. While Zinni did not specify the source of his information, the incident he described was first reported Dec. 21 in almost identical detail by an Iranian-backed opposition group, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In his account, Rubin cited "opposition sources." Each of the four incidents he alluded to had first been reported by either SCIRI or another opposition group not normally cited by U.S. policymakers, the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Rubin later explained in an interview that State Department officials consider the reports credible "because they fit a pattern of similar past practices by the regime" of heinous human rights crimes and military executions to maintain order in times of crisis. But senior U.S. officials said they had no independent intelligence to confirm the opposition accounts. "We do not have independent confirmation of the Iraqi military executions," one senior U.S. official said. A source with access to classified U.S. intelligence called the opposition reports outlined by Zinni and Rubin "good ol' Shakespearean sound and fury signifying nothing." "I have seen no available intelligence to support the scope of these things," he said. "The intelligence community would laugh them out of a room trying to cite this as evidence of anything. All you have is fragmentary and suspect sources." To some extent, officials said, the paucity of hard U.S. intelligence coming out of Iraq is understandable. Saddam Hussein relies on clan members for security, and his regime is efficient at executing suspected or presumed spies. "There are only a few people who count, 10, 20, 25, no more than that," the intelligence source said. "These are the people who know what's going on. Frankly, breaking into that is very difficult. You can have a corps commander on your payroll – and he wouldn't know what's going on in Baghdad." Given the virtually impenetrable inner circle, Iraq experts inside and outside the U.S. government say that, even if the opposition reports are true, it would be next to impossible to understand why Saddam Hussein was executing officers during the recent bombing campaign. "We don't know if there was a coup attempt in the 3rd Corps," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the National Defense University. "We don't know at all what happened down there. Saddam is so good at internal security. If there was a coup, he knew about it, and he rolled it up." Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at Haifa University in Israel and author of a recent book on Saddam Hussein, said the executions could have been a preemptive move to keep suspected opponents off-balance. "It does mean that he has a problem," Baram said. "It doesn't mean Saddam is losing control." The most detailed opposition account cited by Rubin in his State Department briefing came from the ICP, which issued a report Jan. 7 that 81 individuals, including 18 military officers, had been executed at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad on Dec. 13, three days before the start of Desert Fox. The party, which operates out of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and London, included in its report a list of names, home towns, birth dates and offenses of each of the 81 people reportedly killed. Joe Stork, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch in Washington, said he found it "fairly unusual" for Rubin to be citing reports from the Iraqi opposition to highlight human rights abuses in Iraq. But while it is impossible to verify such opposition reports, Stork said, "we have to take them all seriously." "This is a regime that has proven itself quite capable of these atrocities," he said. Rashid Kawa, a spokesman for the ICP's Center for Human Rights in London, said in an interview that the list of 81 names had been obtained from sources inside the Iraqi government and translated into English. Kawa said the first four names on the list -- a major, a captain and two lieutenants from Iraq's elite special forces -- were executed for violating Article 223, a provision requiring the death penalty for anyone conspiring to assassinate the president. Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/ritter-book.html The New York Times, 18 January 1999 Pentagon Backs Off on Arms Inspector's Book By Philip Shenon WASHINGTON -- The Defense Department announced Sunday that it was dropping its demand that Scott Ritter, a former United Nations arms inspector in Iraq, provide the Pentagon with advance copies of a book in which he is expected to step up his criticism of the Clinton administration. The Department said that a Pentagon letter to Ritter last month demanding that his book be submitted for a prepublication security review had been sent in error and that there had been no attempt to intimidate him. David J. Rigby, a spokesman for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon unit that prepared the letter, said it was written by a middle manager in the agency's contracting office and "does not accurately reflect the agency's position." "I can assure you that there was no senior-level involvement in this from within the Department of Defense," he said of the preparation of the Dec. 23 letter. "There was no intention of trying to intimidate Ritter." A lawyer for Ritter, Matthew Lifflander, said he welcomed the Pentagon's announcement Sunday but was still concerned that Ritter was the target of efforts by the Clinton administration to intimidate him into silence. "I'm very happy that the Defense Department has come to its senses," he said. "I think they were very embarrassed at being caught at this. But I think some very powerful forces out there are still very upset with Scott." Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer, resigned last summer from the U.N. Special Commission, the agency that oversaw the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. He has since accused the United States of having undermined the inspections because of a vacillating policy on Iraq. Last month, Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish a book by Ritter, tentatively titled "Endgame," in which he would detail some of his work for the United Nations and offer proposals to the United States and other nations about how to contain Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Ritter had been under contract to the Defense Department while working on loan from the U.S. government to the United Nations. In its letter last month, the department demanded that Ritter provide it with copies of the book at least 60 days before publication and reminded him of his "contractual obligations" not to divulge any information, classified or unclassified, that he obtained while working at the United Nations. Although their constitutionality is questioned by lawyers, Pentagon contracts routinely require contractors to submit to a prepublication security review of books and other materials that touch on their work for the government. Rigby, the spokesman for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said he did not know why the agency had decided not to demand that Ritter comply with the requirement. But he said that the agency was "concerned by the tone" of the letter and that "it may not reflect our current position on the issue of security reviews." The agency would still welcome an advance copy of Ritter's book "to assist him in insuring that no classified information is disclosed," he said. "But that is not a demand." Rigby said the agency decided to reverse itself on the demand after inquiries last week from The New York Times, which had been provided with a copy of the Dec. 23 letter by Ritter's lawyer. Lifflander, the lawyer, said Sunday that he was "confident that there's no classified information in the book" and that Ritter would now consider submitting the book for a security review "so long as it doesn't delay the publication date." Simon & Schuster has said it expects to release the book in late March. Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -