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| April 30,1998 |
| April 30,1998 |
Increased Pentagon Funding Unlikely, Despite Congressional Pressure
by Chris Hellman, Senior Research Analyst, Center for Defense Information
chellman@cdi.org
Senior members of the House National Security Committee are urging congressional leaders and the Clinton Administration to boost Pentagon spending above the limits set in last year's balanced budget agreement.
In letters dated April 22, committee Chairman Floyd Spence (R-SC) and Ranking Democrat Ike Skelton (D-MO) were joined by all but one subcommittee chairs and all the ranking subcommittee Democrats in expressing support for increased military spending. Only Rep. Stephen Buyer (R-IN), Chairman of the Personnel Subcommittee, did not sign, saying that while he supports additional Pentagon funding he opposed renegotiating the Balanced Budget Act.
The letters state: "In the context of the first federal budget surplus in three decades and today's strong economy, we call on you, the nation's bipartisan political leadership, to reopen negotiations on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 in order to provide for a sustained period of real growth in defense spending."
The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 planned to balance the federal budget by Fiscal Year 2002. A January report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stated that under current spending policies the U.S. will achieve a modest surplus by FY2001 and that the annual surplus would continue to grow through 2008, reaching nearly $140 billion. However, continued strong performance by the U.S. economy has led some to believe that a surplus will be achieved as early as this year.
Over the last three years Congress has added over $21 billion to the Pentagon's budget above the Administration's requests. This year's request for the Pentagon, the first made under the new Balanced Budget Act, is $271 billion, roughly the amount specified by the spending caps set under the budget law. This leaves Congress with virtually no "wiggle room" within which to find additional funding for the Pentagon. However, the prospect of budget surpluses, coupled with concerns that the Administration's Fiscal Year 1999-2003 Future Years' Defense Plan (FYDP) is underfunded, has allowed Congressional hawks to push for additional Pentagon funding.
Congressional concern about the Administration's FY1999 request was heightened earlier this year when CBO announced that according to its analysis of the Pentagon's budget, the current request was underfunded by nearly $4 billion dollars. CBO stated that the Office of Management and Budget's estimated $266.5 billion for FY1999 was $3.7 billion below what was needed to fund existing and proposed Pentagon spending commitments. However, since OMB's figures, which form the basis of the Administration's official request, are virtually the same as the caps contained in the Balanced Budget Act, making up the shortfall without reductions elsewhere would violate the agreement.
House committee members concerns were further raised when they received reports they had requested from the heads of the military services about any funding shortfalls the service chiefs felt might result from the current budget. In letters to the Committee, the service chiefs identified $58.3 billion in unfunded requirements between now and FY2003.
Despite the support of the House National Security Committee, increases in Pentagon funding are unlikely. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted a lack of Senate support for such increases when he announced that he would not seek a plus-up for the Pentagon during the FY1999 budget cycle. The budget resolution adopted by the Senate on April 2 contains no such increase, and Senator Pete Demenici (R-NM), Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, refused to include any additional funds for the military. His counterpart in the House, Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), has stated that his highest priority is funding the GOP's proposed $100 billion tax cut package. Further, neither congressional leaders nor the Administration seem inclined to renegotiate the Balanced Budget Agreement in what would surely be a highly charged political debate during the middle of a critical election year.
Paying Our WayAnd Paying, and Paying...
by Colonel Daniel M. Smith, USA (Ret.), Associate Director,
Center for Defense Information
dsmith@cdi.org
"It was always during the Cold War not just a military bloc; it was a bloc in defense of the principle of freedom...."
So said Senator Joseph Lieberman on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in late April.
None of the other NewsHour interviewees, and certainly none who oppose NATO expansion, argued against Senator Lieberman's "principle of freedom." But in the context of the Cold War and the origins of NATO, the Alliance was, first and foremost, about military power capable of "keeping the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down" in western Europe.
"Keeping Russia out," however, no longer applies anymore than does "keeping Germany down." In fact, many recent unilateral and U.S. led actions by NATO have been aimed at keeping a democratic Russia in: the Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative (Nunn-Lugar), START II nuclear weapons reduction treaty, Partnership for Peace, and the NATO-Russia Founding Act. On these points, the judgment of the current and past Administrations has been that engaging Russia is better than ignoring or provoking her.
That fact makes it hard to understand why the Administration and Congress are so intent on pushing NATO expansion with so little real debate. The problems with NATO expansion, as currently conceived, start with the real potential for creating a "new threat" by driving Russia back into a xenophobic nationalism from which she will regard the rest of Europe with hostility.
But this is just the first consideration. Even the proponents of expansion, for all their confidence in the process, have no idea where they are going. On what basis does NATO include some countries such as Poland, The Czech Republic, and Hungary that are candidates for admission and refuse others that are struggling just as hard to institute (or re-institute) democracy? What will NATO do when Ukraine and the Baltics press to join, let alone the other former Soviet republics that lie in the Caucasus and along the southern flank of Russia? If the answer is that they lie too close to Russia to be included, it would seem that the "principle of freedom" has its limitations. That indeed would be an incalculable cost to America's moral position.
More concrete and incalculable "costs" are involved in expanding NATO. It is true that the Pentagon has made a financial estimate and then revised it to accord with the much lower NATO estimate. But what was not included in either calculation are all the low cost loans for and the outright "gifts" of weapons already made or contemplated for the new members. Nor do the official numbers cover the hidden subsidies charged to the U.S. taxpayer and paid to arms manufacturers who are trying to sell more weapons. On top of this, the Senate rejected an amendment to the NATO expansion agreement that would have capped at 25 percent the U.S. share of the costs of the process.
The irony of this particular Senate vote is twofold. First, the U.S. now limits its contributions to NATO's "common costs" (such as roads, ports, and airfields) to 25 percent. Some estimates put U.S. expenditures associated with the admission of the first three new members at $1 billion (even though the official cost for all members is "set" at $1.5 billion). Now, in rejecting the 25 percent cap, the Senate is offering up a "blank check" (Senator Harkin's phrase) that will drive up U.S. costs even further because there is no agreement on how to allocate common costs among the current and new members. Given that the other NATO countries (and the three new ones) have been cutting their defense budgets, Americans can almost surely count on additional costs.
The other irony is that many of the same Senators who refused to cap U.S. costs related to NATO expansion are the same ones who object to the U.S. paying 25 percent of the costs associated with that other multinational institution created largely because of U.S. foresight and drive the United Nations. With equally short-sighted House colleagues, they have complicated the U.S. position vis-a-vis the UN by attaching an unrelated amendment to legislation authorizing payment of most of the funds the U.S. still owes the UN. Yet outside of Cold War Europe, it is the UN that has been the chief multinational instrument supporting the march of the "principle of freedom" mentioned by Senator Lieberman.
Why the difference? NATO has grown only by four nation-states since its inception, allowing the U.S. to continue to dominate the organization by the sheer weight of our military power. On the other hand, the UN, where military might is not the only and definitely not the first choice in dealing with problems, has grown four times over (quadrupled) since its inception at the end of World War II. In such a large body, the U.S. does not always have its way even among the other democracies.
NATO worked for the U.S. and for freedom by holding the Soviet threat at bay. But that problem is gone assuming NATO does not rekindle it. There are, however, still enough other problems in the world, problems that NATO cannot or will not address Iraq, Asia's financial crisis, natural and manmade disasters and environmental degradations, even the $50 billion "2000" computer crash still to be fixed. These should be seen for what they are: challenges to the political, social, environmental, and economic freedoms of the whole world.
Chinese Defense Spending: A Great Increase, But to Where?
by Andy Sywak, Research Associate, Center for Defense Information
With China sure to emerge as a major East Asian power in the twenty-first century, wide concern and debate has been generated over whether or not China is heading towards a cooperative or conflicting relationship with the West. In contrast to the general worldwide trend of downsizing government defense spending, Chinese defense spending has been increasing by more than 10% per annum in recent years.
Chinese defense spending is very difficult to tally accurately. Unlike many of its neighbors, China does not provide any official "transparency" such as an annual Defense White Paper detailing its military expenditures. The official defense budget figure released by the Chinese in 1996 was $8.6 billion dollars (71.5 billion yuan). This does not include other budget allocations the military uses and the 20,000 business ventures by which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) generates much of its operating revenue. Even the most thrifty of generals would encounter difficulty in adequately maintaining a total armed force of 2.8 million with 1.2 million reserves on this sum.
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, actual Chinese defense expenditures for 1996 amounted to $38 billion dollars. In 1995, this number was $33 billion and $19 billion in 1991. Nominally, the Chinese budget looks to be increasing at an alarming rate. However, when this spending is compared to the tremendously high inflation rates occurring as a result of China’s double-digit economic growth, the threat implied in these numbers deflates. For example, the $5 billion rise in expenditure from 1995 to 1996 was accompanied by an inflation rate of 16.9% in 1995. What appears as a 159% nominal increase between 1986 through 1994 is really a rise of only 4% in real terms.
Regardless, the numbers do show a high increase in defense spending relative to China’s neighbors. Even in the aftermath of the 1996 Taiwan Straits incident, Taiwan’s military spending has climbed only slightly in recent years, totaling $13.6 billion dollars in that same year. Though Japanese defense spending ranks third in the world with a whopping $44.5 billion in 1996, this is $5 billion less than the 1995 figure. In comparison to the vast PLA, Taiwan and Japan make up for a lack of personnel by utilizing superior technology. Japanese military technology rivals only that of America, and the 1992 acquisition of 150 American F-16s by Taiwan greatly bolstered that nation’s air force.
So what are the intentions and goals of this Chinese build-up in a time of relative world peace?
Much of the rise in Chinese spending can be related to overall strong economic performance. As David Shambaugh writes, "Given the rapidly growing Chinese economy, why should increased funds not be made available to modernize the backward PLA?" Very simply put, China is modernizing its military because it can afford to do so.
In the Cold War past, China’s military was geared towards continental defense from the Soviet threat. With the official new doctrine of "limited war under high-technology conditions," Chinese defense planning has switched its focus to confronting conflicts on its eastern periphery, notably the most likely conflicts over Taiwan and the Spratly Islands.
This focus has prompted the PLA’s desire to modernize its military into a smaller and more mobile force capable of quick response utilizing modern information and surveillance technology. Extending power-projection through building up a blue-water navy and obtaining modern aircraft fighters is of paramount importance to the current modernization. The robust Chinese economy of the earlier 1990s, though poised to slow down due to recent economic setbacks, can provide the financial resources to achieve this modernization.
Western fears that this increase in defense spending is being used to realize long dormant expansionist tendencies should be downplayed but not ignored. This increase is not a gigantic buildup by a hostile nation so much as a long overdue overhaul and modernization of the world’s most populous nation’s armed forces.
Arming the "Bad Guys": Preventing the Re-export of Weapons
by Rachel Stohl, Research Analyst, Center for Defense Information,
jfeinber@cdi.org
Recently, the United States announced that all pending export licenses for American firearms to British companies involving some 14,000 guns have been revoked. This action is the first step in the Clinton Administration’s longer term plan to halt the sale of American firearms to all fifteen members of the European Union. The United States has stated the licenses will not be issued to EU countries until EU governments adopt laws which guarantee that the weapons will not be re-exported to "the bad guys" as one Washington official put it.
Halting sales to Britain was a deliberately easy first action because of the strict handgun-control law that went into effect March 1 in the UK. Given the law’s parameters, the large number of American weapons could not have legally remained in the UK and would obviously have had to be re-exported. The potential end-users for such re-exported weapons caused a great deal of anxiety among many Washington insiders and Administration officials and rightfully so.
In the recent past, British companies and the British government have supplied weapons to Rwanda, Kenya, and Turkey. Moreover, American firearms have ended up in the hands of terrorists, organized crime networks, and in war zones like the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Central Africa. There are questions surrounding the somewhat unscrupulous practices of several arms companies in many countries.
The U.S. initiative is in part a reaction to measures being undertaken by the international community to curb illicit weapons trafficking and to prevent licit exports from being diverted to unintended users. The UN Commission on Crime Prevention, which met in Vienna earlier this month, has called upon states to address the consequences of the often unimpeded flow of weapons associated with illicit trafficking. The United States has led recent UN deliberations concerning anti-crime resolutions, and with Britain, Japan, Russia, and others is calling for both effective methods for firearms identification and tracing and the establishment of an import/export and in-transit licensing regime for the international commercial transfer of firearms. The resolution draws upon the Mexican-led Organization of American States Convention on Illicit Firearms Trafficking that was signed in November.
As a follow-on to the actions taken within the UN forum, the Group of 7 Industrialized States plus Russia (the G8) will meet in May to finalize a resolution that harmonizes weapons import and export policies of the member states. The G8 initiative is significant because the five largest weapons exporting countries are G8 members and these eight countries together account for 90% of the world’s arms exports. Reportedly, restrictions on weapons transfers already have been agreed, which improves the probability that at the May summit the world leaders will endorse controls.
But the need to reexamine and harmonize re-export laws goes beyond the obvious requirement to prevent weapons from unknowingly falling into the hands of outlaw groups or states. Transparency in arms transfers and the re-export of weapons also would help dispel questions about the motives for weapons build-ups in a particular region or country and highlight areas with a heavy surplus of light weapons.
The instability already caused by the vast number of weapons in circulation should serve as a warning to policymakers of the pressing nature of the problems caused by continued arms transfers to countries with histories of re-exporting weapons to a third party. The U.S. decision to halt firearms transfers to the UK is, in this regard, a welcome sign to those concerned with the proliferation of small arms and light weapons.
Turkmenistan President’s Visit Leaves Sour Taste
by Jared Feinberg, Scoville Fellow, Center for Defense Information
jfeinber@cdi.org
During April 21-23, the President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, was in Washington to discuss the issue of oil and gas pipelines with the U.S. government and various private companies. President Clinton and the rest of official Washington turned a blind eye to the repressive nature of the Turkmenistan regime just long enough to sign several agreements with Niyazov, whose country contains the world’s fourth largest gas reserves and large oil deposits.
The crown jewel of these agreements was a $750,000 grant from the United States Trade and Development Agency for Turkmenistan to conduct a feasibility study on a trans-Caspian pipeline project that would run from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, bypassing Russian transport routes. The United States has been quite candid about its desire to see oil and gas from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia transported by alternative routes other than through Iran, which is excluded by legislation to Western markets. The United States, together with Turkmenistan's neighbors in the Caspian region, also want to prevent Russia from controlling the oil and gas flow to bolster the independence of these countries.
But in seeking geopolitically acceptable transport routes that minimize Russia’s influence, the U.S. government finds itself partners with and aiding repressive states like Turkmenistan. Of all the former Soviet states, Turkmenistan most closely resembles the old Soviet system of one-party and cult of personality rule. President Niyazov, a former Communist leader elected President in 1991, is referred to as the "Turkmenbashi" or head of all Turkmens. A 1994 national referendum placed him in power until 2002 when presidential elections are to occur. Just as in Soviet times, the Turkmenistan state reported that 99.9% of the voters supported the referendum. Today, there are no recognized opposition parties in Turkmenistan: critics have been arrested or declared insane and institutionalized. Niyazov constantly stresses, correctly, that his country is in "transition," but then draws the unwarranted conclusion that there is no room for an "artificial opposition" that offers no specific programs and only criticism.
Speaking at Johns Hopkins University on April 21, Niyazov boldly told the audience that it was not his fault there were no opposition parties since they were allowed "within the law." This comment, in conjunction with other negative human-rights documentation, clearly illustrates that Niyazov knows that his government allows neither dissent nor protest and that he does not care about the West’s reaction. This attitude also suggests that the "transition period" may last indefinitely, perhaps even for his remaining lifetime (he is 58).
By the end of his two day visit, President Niyazov had signed: a bilateral energy dialogue with the Department of Energy, a scientific and technical Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Agriculture, a joint statement on security relations with the Department of Defense, a financing framework agreement with the EXIM Bank, a joint technical exploration study with Exxon, a production and sharing agreement with Mobil and Monument Oil, and a cooperative agreement on oil field services with Halli Burton. He had also met privately with President Clinton, Vice-President Gore, Secretary of State Albright, Director of Central Intelligence Tenet, and Secretary of Energy Pena, among others.
Despite its rush to sign trade deals, the Clinton Administration at least moderated its welcome of the Turkmen President. There was no joint press conference with Clinton and Niyazov, always a high honor for visiting heads of states. The United States also has pledged to help create an OSCE office in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan to monitor the human rights situation there. Also during Niyazov’s visit, eight political prisoners, whose freedom was requested by the OSCE, were released. (Niyazov, however, denied the charge that these were political prisoners, saying they had been arrested for drug offenses and that there were no political prisoners in Turkmenistan.)
Once again, as happened in Latin America, Africa, and Asia during the Cold War, the United States finds itself supporting a repressive dictatorial regime in order to blunt Russian influence in a region where the United States finds it has a "national interest." If Niyazov remains firmly in control and Turkmenistan continues on its path of repressive "transition," some future U.S. president will find him/herself apologizing to the people of Turkmenistan for supporting their former dictatorial leader in the name of opposing Russian "hegemony."
Missile Defense Debate Heats Up
by Andrew Koch, Senior Research Analyst, Center for Defense Information,
akoch@cdi.org
On April 21, 1998 the Senate Armed Services Committee marked-up and passed, along party lines, a bill that would force a change in U.S. missile defense policy. The bill [S. 1873], introduced by Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and co-sponsored by an additional 49 Senators, calls for deploying "as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense System capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack."
The bill represents yet another attempt by congressional hawks to force the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system. Two years ago, the "Defend America Act" was defeated in Congress, partially because of its high price tag and because no ballistic missile threat currently exists to the U.S. heartland. Both these bills have faced steep opposition because they are based on the supposition that technical feasibility alone should determine when and whether to deploy a national missile defense system (NMD), irrespective of cost, usefulness, or its effects on other U.S. security concerns. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the price-tag for such a system could run as high as $60 billion.
The Cochran bill argues that "the long-range ballistic missile threat to the United States is increasing" from potential adversaries in the developing world. Confusing desire with capability, it cites threats from the likes of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein because they "have stated their intention to acquire intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of attacking the United States." It also notes North Korean and Iranian advances in developing medium-range missiles which, it suggests, will allow their possessors to develop ICBMs.
Such an assessment, however, is wrought with technical flaws. There is a vast difference between building primitive, short-range systems like the Scud missiles Saddam Hussein used in the Gulf War, and being able to produce long-range weapons. Ballistic missiles with ranges of greater than approximately 1,500 km must travel through space, a fact that requires the mastery of sophisticated re-entry, staging, materials, and advanced guidance technologies in order for such missiles to be accurate enough to strike their targets. Would-be proliferators must also develop a much more powerful engine to carry the missile on its long journey. Mastering these technologies has proved exceptionally difficult, especially since a proliferator is likely to have little indigenous experience with them. That is why a 1995 national intelligence estimate [NIE 95-19] found that no new country will develop or otherwise acquire a long-range ballistic missile in the next 15 years that could threaten the continental United States.
It took the United States eight years to overcome these challenges. Why should we believe that less capable states could do so sooner?