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| April 6, 2000 |
| April 6, 2000 |
Congress Scuttles Kosovo Funding Package
Christopher Hellman, Senior Analyst, chellman@cdi.org
After more than doubling the Clinton Administration's funding request for U.S. military operations in Kosovo, assisting the drug war in Colombia, and providing hurricane disaster relief, the House saw its version of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2000 blocked in the Senate, where Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) this week declared the $13 billion spending package "dead on arrival."
The Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997 sets specific caps on federal spending. However, because unexpected federal expenditures often do arise, the federal budget process allows for the enactment of special supplemental appropriations which are used to pay for unanticipated federal initiatives such as disaster relief. Supplementals are generally funded by making cuts -- referred to as offsets -- in other areas of the federal budget. Thus, supplementals normally represent a reallocation of assets and not new federal obligations. If, however, a supplemental is deemed by Congress and the Administration to be an emergency, then offsets are not necessary and the cost of the supplemental can be added to the federal budget without violating the BBA spending caps. The funding is added to the federal deficit, or, as has been the case in the last two years, paid for out of the federal budget surplus.
The Administration's original $5.6 billion request included $2.8 billion for Kosovo, $1.3 billion in assistance to Colombia to cover counternarcotics activities in FY'00 and FY'01, and $1.0 billion for disaster assistance due to hurricanes Dennis, Floyd, and Irene. All of the funding was declared to be emergency spending, and thus not subject to the BBA spending caps.
Intent on boosting Pentagon spending, and with a projected FY'00 surplus of $26 billion, members of the House Appropriations Committee increased the Administration's request by $3.5 billion. This included $2.2 billion for the military, of which $1.6 billion is needed to cover rising fuel costs, $430 million more for counternarcotics, and $1.2 billion for "other emergencies."
Meanwhile, red flags were going up in the Senate. Majority Leader Lott and other fiscal conservatives warned that too large a spending package which ate too deeply into the surplus would receive a chilly reception. These sentiments were echoed by other Senate Republicans who are anxious to pass a tax cut in an election year. Meanwhile, in an effort to head off a collision between the two GOP-controlled chambers, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that he would begin work on a scaled-back spending bill in the $6 billion to $8 billion range.
House Republicans failed to heed the warnings. Additional military spending was added to the legislation on the House floor. An amendment offered by Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and accepted by the full House gave a further $4 billion to the Pentagon for such things as maintenance ($1.2 billion); recruiting, advertising and personnel retention ($600 million); healthcare ($750 million); and "support for deployed forces" ($1.2 billion). The House also adopted an amendment offered by Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) which applied $4 billion of the expected surplus towards paying off the federal debt. Given that the debt as of February 29 was $5.735 trillion, this represented a reduction of less that 0.1%. Although not included in the $13 billion price tag of the Supplemental, the $17 billion total would reduce the projected surplus by 65%, to roughly $9 billion.
Majority Leader Lott proved to be as good as his word, refusing to allow work on the Supplemental to proceed, saying that it would divert the Senate from its other work. As it now stands, the emergency FY'00 funding will be considered as part of the annual FY'01 appropriations cycle, with funding for the emergency provisions still coming from the FY'00 surplus. According to Senator Stevens, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee's markup of the emergency spending bill "is sort of postponed for a while."
While the Senate GOP leadership stopped their House colleagues from loading up the Supplemental with unrequested spending unrelated to the Administration's original package, the method they selected to eventually fund these initiatives will likely result in an even higher level of unrequested spending being passed. One only has to look back as recently as last October when $21 billion in "emergency" funding -- $8 billion of which went to the Pentagon -- got tucked into a massive omnibus spending bill that was pushed through Congress at the eleventh hour. In an election year, with a shortened Congressional schedule, and the likelihood of a similar "catch-all"spending package being passed growing, it is hard to imagine that members of Congress will be able to resist the temptation to repeat last year's last minute budget games.
See details of the Clinton Administration's supplemental spending package or CDI's Highlights of the spending provisions of the House package.
Lasers for Defense
Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.), Chief of Research, dsmith@cdi.org
Terrestrial or space based, tactical or strategic, lasers are back in the news.
We are all familiar with the nuclear triad -- land based missiles, sea-based missiles, and intercontinental range bombers. They formed, in various combinations, a credible deterrent during the Cold War. But today the bombers are off alert, the Navy is considering converting four of its remaining eighteen ballistic missiles submarines to cruise missile carriers, and we are down to 500 Minuteman III and 50 Peacekeeper land based missiles.
Fear not: A new triad is emerging, this time within the rubric of National Missile Defense. Most advanced, as detailed three weeks ago (CDI's Weekly Defense Monitor, March 23, 2000), is the land based part of the triad which the Pentagon hopes to field in 2005 with 20 interceptors and building to 100 by 2007. This month, Lt.Gen. Ronald Kadish, Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), lent his support to a Navy drive to contribute a sea-based component to NMD -- perhaps in the 2010-2015 time frame. This sentiment was echoed by Secretary of Defense William Cohen in an interview appearing in the April issues of Sea Power Magazine.
But it is the third element of the new triad that is most troublesome, for it envisages placing laser weapons in space. In March testimony before the Senate Armed Services Strategic Subcommittee, General Ralph Eberhart, Commander in Chief of U.S. Space Command, said that "Another advancement that will contribute to battlespace dominance and enhance a fielded missile defense system is the Space-Based Laser....The Air Force and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization are working together to produce an Integrated Flight Experiment for SBL in the 2021 time frame." In fact, in February of this year a defense team of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and TRW was awarded an initial contract to build a test facility, and in late March BMDO chief Gen. Kadish visited three southeastern states to look at possible sites for the facility.
An integral part of Ronald Reagan's original Stars Wars concept, SBL languished in large part because the technology wasn't good enough. In 1992 a chemical laser was fired for 6.2 seconds against a mirror whose role is to focus and then aim the laser beam at a target. The idea was to have a dozen satellites that could be used to knock out missiles as far as 2,500 miles away -- essentially in the boost phase. But the Clinton Administration put SBL on the back burner, only to have the Republican controlled Congress push for it in 1997. Congressional and industry sources estimated the system could be developed and deployed for between $4 and $15 billion, but the Pentagon's Cost Analysis Improvement Group reportedly placed the total at $100 billion.
With the funding and technology uncertainty, the program developed into a technology demonstrator that would be a scaled-down version of one of the satellites. First estimates put this program at $1 billion, but by 1998 continued technology problems raised this estimate to more than $2 billion.
Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration pushed ahead with the Air Force's Airborne Laser (ABL) system. In congressional testimony early last year Secretary of the Air Force F. Whitten Peters affirmed the service's commitment to the ABL. He saw a definite link between ABL development and SBL in that the latter could draw on lessons learned in aiming, tracking, and laser control of the ABL system. Yet in a significant turn of events for both ABL and SBL, this year the Air Force cut back on ABL funding by over 50% because of "higher priorities."
If this were not enough, the Army has been working with Israel on a laser defense against short range surface-to-surface Katyusha rockets. The original idea was to develop and field a system in 12 months that could be employed on Israel's northern border. But four years later, the Tactical High Energy Laser or THEL continues to have "challenges" in integrating the various parts of its battle management control system. A successful detection-tracking demonstration last October at White Sands Missile Range encouraged the Army's Space and Missiles Defense Command (SMDC), but the critical final stage -- firing the laser and hitting the target -- still has not been demonstrated. A scheduled January-February test did not occur and SMDC is still unsure as to when it will happen. Moreover, even though the U.S. and Israel split the cost of THEL in half, the U.S. has not maintained its share of the funding.
One of SMDC's chief complaints is that the array of High Energy Laser programs promotes unseemly competition and undercutting of one agency by another. In fact, an April 2000 report by yet another independent review panel seems to corroborate this view. The High Energy Laser Executive Review Panel recommended both centralizing management of ABL, SBL, and THEL and a more equitable funding balance between the basic scientific research effort with the more expensive demonstration projects so that future developments are not stifled. This suggests that the panel believes the current projects are running out of steam because elementary research has been underfunded.
Sounds like the 1980s Star Wars "deja vu all over again."
For additional information, see "Missile Defense Update," Weekly Defense Monitor, Volume 4, Issue #12, March 23, 2000.
The European Alphabet Soup
By Tomas Valasek, Senior Analyst, tvalasek@cdi.org
Something's afoot in Europe but nobody seems quite sure what it is.
At a December 1999 summit in Helsinki, Finland, the fifteen members of the European Union (EU) agreed to form a defense organization. It will have its own 50,000-60,000-strong army serving in peacekeeping and crisis management roles. European leaders dubbed their new initiative the Common European Security and Defence Policy (later abbreviated to CESDP).
The United States is a European power in its own right with around 100,000 troops stationed on the continent. Naturally, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense as well as Congress quickly chimed in with their opinions on CESDP. Or did they? The problem is, virtually all U.S. officials refer to the European defense efforts as ESDI, which stands for European Security and Defense Identity. Both the House and the Senate of the U.S. Congress held hearings on ESDI. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott affirmed that "the U.S. is for ESDI."
There is not one reference to ESDI in European Union's communiques. Assuming both U.S. and European officials are referring to the same initiative, what explains the different names? A simple mixup? Maybe, maybe not.
ESDI is not just another name for EU's initiative but rather a different concept altogether. In the early 1990s, NATO launched the European Security and Defense Identity as a means to strengthen European military capabilities and to give Europeans a larger role in the alliance. ESDI was a direct response to the Balkan wars that broke out in early 1990s. The mayhem in Bosnia and Croatia left European countries embarrassed at their own inability to prevent or intervene in the conflict. Hence ESDI is a way of raising Europe's profile in NATO operations.
The United States, which has long complained about allies "not sharing the NATO burden," enthusiastically supported Europe's plans. Alas, ESDI never got far off the ground. Most European countries balked when it came to committing money to defense and reforming their Cold War era militaries. When NATO launched its air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, the United States again found itself in the familiar role of leading the military operations and contributing most of the materiel. Of the 1,058 NATO aircraft fighting in Yugoslavia, over two-thirds - 731 planes - were American. The subsequent peacekeeping operation was a more international affair with about 10-15% of troops coming from the United States and the rest from Canada, European NATO allies, and countries from as far away as Azerbaijan and Argentina.
After Kosovo, Europeans renewed efforts to add military muscle to their economic prowess. This time, however, the responsibility was handed to the European Union. Presumably, being in charge of their own military affairs will prove more of an incentive for EU members to invest in their militaries than being subordinated to a U.S.-led NATO. The EU had already been trying to coordinate members' positions on foreign policy issues as part of its effort to "deepen" European integration in addition to enlarging the EU. The Common European Security and Defense Initiative, launched at Helsinki, is an extension of the EU's foreign policy efforts in the best Clausewitzian tradition.
The EU's plans, however, caused grumbling in the United States. Stephen Larrabee of the Rand Corporation summed up the worries of many in the U.S. defense establishment when he said in recent Senate testimony that the new European initiative "could end up weakening, rather than strengthening, NATO." ESDI, on the other hand, promised to increase European contributions to NATO without jeopardizing U.S. control over the organization. The persistent use of "ESDI" rather than "CESDP" by U.S. officials could be a subtle transatlantic hint that the way to strengthen European defenses is through NATO rather than the EU.
Equally likely, however, the references to ESDI may betray simple ignorance of EU terminology. Even critics of CESDP actually use ESDI in their verbal attacks on the initiative. John Holton of the American Enterprise Institute recently warned that "it is possible that ESDI has a hidden agenda to project European military power 'out of area' without U.S. involvement." The true ESDI (under NATO) could hardly do that, for it would be subject to U.S. veto.
To the credit of Washington pundits, Europe has become a veritable jungle of acronyms. Between ESDI, CESDP, CFSP, PfP, WEU, and EDC (all current or past European defense and foreign policy initiatives), simply remembering the right acronym has become a hurdle. It may be necessary to get the language straight first before the substance can be addressed.
Democracy and the U.S. Military
Oscar Lurie, Associate Researcher, olurie@cdi.org
Financial support of America's military forces soaks up half of all the money Congress has available to allocate for federal activities (discretionary spending) other than Social Security and the other outlays required by statute (mandatory spending). Once the Soviet Union collapsed and no other power arose as a competitive threat, the Pentagon and its congressional and industrial supporters were hard pressed to justify such high levels of spending. One rationale used was the notion that military forces were needed to encourage and expand democracy.
Curiously, this looks a little like setting the fox to watch the chickens. Tight discipline is essential for effective military organizations, but for an entire nation it is the culture of tyranny and the antithesis of democracy. Throughout most of the 20th century the U.S. has maintained friendly relations with and sometimes actively sustained dictators. The U.S. government and the Pentagon were involved with the Shah's 27 year reign in Iran. Marcos' dictatorship would not have survived as long as it did without the revenue from and implicit support by the thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the Philippines. Manuel Noreiga of Panama was only one of many dictators favored by successive U.S. administrations and supplied by the Pentagon. And in the Middle East today the American military continues to support the Turks despite the severity of their campaigns against the Kurds.
The U.S. military has been employed in nominally democratic countries, but not for the purpose of substituting true democracy. In Grenada in 1983, U.S. forces intervened to evict communists who had seized power from a Marxist-leaning party. The 1989 U.S. assault on Panama was part of the drug war. The public purpose of the "almost" invasion of Haiti in 1993 was to restore an elected president who had been ousted by scoundrels, but the main U.S. motive was to halt the overwhelming flow of refugees into America.
In September 1999, the Pentagon reported it had almost 30,000 military personnel in the Persian Gulf area. The Navy had over 16,000 personnel manning an aircraft carrier and supporting vessels while the Marines had 2,200 afloat. Ashore, the Army deployed 1,700 soldiers and the Air Force almost 8,000 more. These forces protect Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other unelected hereditary monarchies from Iraq. Yet in March 2000, Amnesty International accused the Saudi government of widespread human rights abuses including arbitrary arrests, torture of detainees, and barring access by family members and lawyers to prisoners. Amnesty also reported long-standing discrimination against religious minorities and suppression of political dissent. This is not to say that there may be sound national security reasons to have American military forces in these nations, but in light of this record it hardly seems that encouraging democracy is one.
In developed countries, encouraging democracy is a function for civilian organizations -- both governmental and non-governmental (NGOs). In the U.S. an authoritative tabulation shows that more than $700 million is being spent by civilian agencies each year out of the public purse, primarily by USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) and USIA (U.S. Information Agency) but also by the State and Justice Departments, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Asia Foundation, and the Eurasia Foundation. Several dozen NGOs are also encouraging the development of democracy abroad, such as the Carter Center, the American Bar Association, universities, research and policy institutes, private foundations, and a few for-profit development consulting groups.
These agencies usually direct their aid toward the holding of elections, political parties development, creating constitutions, judiciaries, police, legislatures, civic advocacy and civic education groups, trade unions, and media organizations. This is not work for soldiers, sailors, or airmen.
In sum, aiding democracy to grow and be healthy is not an appropriate function for the military and is no justification for an overgrown military establishment. If our policymakers are sincere about making support to emerging democracies a national goal, they could demonstrate this commitment by diverting a few billions from the military budget to agencies and organizations who are competent to do this job.
NATO Criticizes Russian Security Doctrine -- Top U.S. and NATO generals in Europe are calling the new Russian security doctrine "a step in the wrong direction" and are requesting that the document be revised. General Wesley Clark, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commander of U.S. troops in Europe, made the remarks on Monday during a visit to Latvia. The security doctrine itself has not been published, but Russian authorities released a broader National Security Concept on January 14. It classifies as external threats attempts to "[broaden] military alliances which jeopardize the military security of the Russian Federation...," a clear reference to the expansion of NATO. The document also labels as threatening "the deployment of foreign troops (without the permission of the UN Security Council) on the territory of countries...friendly to the Russian Federation." NATO's air war against Yugoslavia, a Moscow ally, took place without UN Security Council approval.
USAF Exercise in Slovakia -- On April 1, twelve U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter planes landed at the Kuchyna air force base in southern Slovakia. The aircraft crews and 250 accompanying personnel will conduct a two-week bombing and strafing exercise. The use of the Slovak training range by the USAF was made possible by a Memorandum of Understanding signed by U.S. and Slovak military officials on February 9, 1999. Two more USAF exercises at Kuchyna are scheduled for this year; the USAF is leaving behind radars and communication equipment for future use by the USAF and the Slovak Air Force. The U.S. Army has also scheduled exercises in neighboring Poland. Flight and firing restrictions in most Western European countries are forcing the Army to move its training exercises eastward.
Bosnian Serb Arrest -- French troops with NATO's Stabilization Force in Bosnia arrested Momcilo Krajisnik, a former president of the Bosnian Serb Assembly and the highest Bosnian Serb official to be arrested to date. The UN-organized International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia requested Krajisnik's arrest for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions allegedly committed during the 1991-95 war in Bosnia. The arrest came a week before local elections in Bosnia scheduled for April 8. Nationalist politicians such as Krajisnik and Bosnia Serbs' war-time leader Radovan Karadzic have dominated the country's political scene since the war's end.
U.S. Peacekeepers Injured in Kosovo -- Eleven U.S. troops were hurt, most lightly, after being stoned and clubbed by a Serbian crowd in southeastern Kosovo. The melee began when peacekeepers arrested a local man for possession of hand grenades. The arrest drew a crowd which attacked the U.S. and Polish troops on the scene. In an eight-hour battle that followed the Serbs clubbed and stoned the troops while the peacekeepers fired rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, injuring dozens. The Department of Defense also said it would reinforce the U.S. contingent in Kosovo. Two unmanned drones and a company of reconnaissance forces will be based in neighboring Macedonia and tasked with observing ground movements in the volatile Presevo region in southern Serbia, the site of clashes between Albanian fighters and Serbian police.
Comanche Approved for EMD -- The Pentagon has approved the Army's Comanche helicopter program to move into the Engineering and Development (EMD) phase. During the $3.1 billion EMD phase, which will last through 2006, the two existing prototypes will continue flight testing, and an additional 13 new Comanches will be produced. The decision comes on the heels of the Army's unveiling of its new aviation modernization program, which includes the purchase of 1,213 Comanches. Estimates of the total cost of the Comanche program run as high as $44 billion.
This week on America's Defense Monitor:"Military Nuclear Mess: Out of
Sight, Out of Mind?"
For the past fifty years, the United States government has produced hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of nuclear waste. With the Cold War over, it is time to begin the process of disposing of this military nuclear mess. The Department of Energy has created an underground disposal facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant to permanently store military generated waste which contains, among other deadly toxins, plutonium. However, whether this facility will safely store the nuclear material for the 24,000 years dictated by the half-life of plutonium is hotly debated. Is WIPP the answer to our nuclear disposal problem, or is it simply a way to bury it out of sight and out of mind?
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