by Dick Cheney
ON FEBRUARY 28, 2014, as Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border, Russian foreign minister Lavrov was on the phone with Secretary of State John Kerry. Lavrov failed to mention the troops on the march. Kerry briefed the press after the phone call, seemingly still unaware of events on the ground in Ukraine. Lavrov, Kerry reported, told him the Russians “do not intend to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine.” Furthermore, they “are prepared to be engaged and involved in helping to deal with the economic transition that needs to take place.”
A few hours later, when it became clear what was happening, President Obama issued a statement warning that “there will be costs” for any Russian invasion of Ukraine. After watching him fail to enforce the infamous red line in Syria, is it any wonder the Russians ignored this warning?
Since then, Putin has formally annexed Crimea and sent troops farther into Ukraine. In May 2015, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko warned that Russia had 50,000 troops deployed on Ukraine’s border and more than 40,000 “separatist” proxy troops inside the country. Between the signing of the second cease-fire agreement in Minsk in February, and May 2015, the Ukrainian government reported it had lost twenty-eight towns to the Putin-backed “separatist fighters.”
The United States and the European Union have imposed several rounds of sanctions but otherwise allowed the invasion to stand. Ukrainian requests for the United States to provide military support were met with blankets and meals ready to eat (MREs). Early in the crisis, President Obama took the military option off the table, explaining in March 2014, “We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine.”
Putin likely already knew that or else he wouldn’t have risked the invasion in the first place. He is now turning his sights toward other countries in Europe with significant Russian-speaking populations, including the Baltic states, which are members of NATO. Putin’s objective is threefold: 1) to return territory to Russia in an effort to reclaim its historic power and standing; 2) to diminish American power and influence in Europe; and 3) to destroy the NATO alliance.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea have also done lasting damage to the international nuclear nonproliferation structure. In 1994, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, as Ukraine signed the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state. In exchange for Kiev’s agreement to send its nuclear materials and weapons to Russia, the U.S., U.K., and Russia agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Russia is clearly in violation of its obligation under this agreement. Ambassador Eric S. Edelman, undersecretary of defense for policy under President George W. Bush, has pointed out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “left standing . . . will establish that security assurances offered by nuclear weapons states to states that willingly give up their weapons or weapons programs mean precisely nothing.”
As the credibility of U.S. security guarantees comes into question, Moscow continues to escalate its nuclear rhetoric and threats. In March 2015, the Russian ambassador to Denmark warned that Russia would aim nuclear missiles at Danish ships if Denmark, a NATO member, joined NATO’s missile-defense system. The Russians have deployed nuclear-capable missiles to Kaliningrad, which borders NATO members Poland and Lithuania, threatened to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea, and simulated a nuclear attack on Warsaw during annual military exercises.
Cheating on the INF Treaty, building up and modernizing their strategic nuclear forces, undertaking increasingly hostile military exercises, threatening the use of nuclear force against countries that ally themselves with the West, invading and occupying Crimea, invading Ukraine—these are Russian policies in the aftermath of the reset. Not only did the reset clearly not improve U.S.-Russia relations, it did real damage to America’s global strategic interests and standing.
Six years into the Obama administration, the Iranian nuclear weapons program is advancing rapidly, and Iran’s power and influence have spread across the Middle East. The threat to America and our allies is grave and growing. Nuclear proliferation, which President Obama promised to halt, will instead be guaranteed as a result of the Obama nuclear deal allowing Iran to enrich uranium. Russia has invaded Ukraine, threatens the Baltic states and other European nations, is cheating on its obligations under the INF Treaty, is expanding its nuclear capabilities, and is providing advanced antiaircraft missiles to the Iranians. Meanwhile, President Obama reduces our nuclear arsenal, dismantles key elements of our missile defense, and imposes significant cuts on our conventional forces as he ushers Vladimir Putin back into the Middle East as a global power.
The “outstretched hand” to Iran and the “reset” with Russia have failed. Regimes like the ones in Tehran and Moscow don’t “unclench their fists” when America “extends” a hand. They don’t feel constrained by the “international system” or the “new world order” in which President Obama puts so much faith.
They arm themselves, mass their forces, capture territory, and seize their chance to dominate as much of the globe as possible with their tyrannical rule.
SIX
Disarming America
We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression—to preserve freedom and peace.
—PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN, MARCH 23, 1983
Our successful defense of freedom was not due to the words we used, but to the strength we stood ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, REMARKS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY NOVEMBER, 22, 1963
For seventy years, the foundation of America’s security has been the unmatched might of our armed forces. Our military superiority and our willingness to use our forces when necessary have guaranteed freedom and peace for millions around the world. We have been, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, “by destiny rather than by choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.”
It’s a duty no other nation can fulfill. America does it at a tremendous cost but the price of inaction would be far higher. The 2014 bipartisan National Defense Panel explained it this way:
There is clearly a cost to this kind of leadership, but nowhere near what America paid in the first half of the 20th century when conflict was allowed to fester and grow until it rose to the level of general war. Indeed, our policy of active global engagement has been so beneficial and is so ingrained that those who would retreat from it have a heavy burden of proof to present an alternative that would better serve the security interests and well-being of the United States of America.
Today, this burden of proof rests with Barack Obama. He has overseen a reduction in U.S. military resources and readiness and a corresponding decline in the capacity of the United States to influence events in key parts of the world.
Dedicated to a vision of an idealized community of nations where none lead, none follow, and all progress is shared, President Obama apparently sees no danger in abandoning our leadership role in the world and diminishing our power. Convinced, it seems, of his own powers of persuasion, he sees little need for conventional or nuclear deterrence. Certain that “the arc of history bends toward justice,” he appears unconcerned with the need to ensure America can defeat her enemies. In fact, in August 2014 and again in May 2015, he told the world we have no strategy to do so with respect to ISIS. Committed to a progressive agenda of immense increases in domestic spending, he strips the military of the resources it needs to defend the nation.
In President Obama’s first year in office, his then defense secretary, Robert Gates, recognized the Pentagon would be facing increased pressure for cuts. He undertook what he described as a preemptive effort to prevent other policy makers and legislators from seeing “the defense budget as the place to solve the nation’s deficit problems.” Gates tasked each service to come up with savings from wasteful or underperform
ing programs. He promised the service chiefs—based on assurances from the president—that the exercise would not result in overall cuts in the defense budget. The services, Gates said, would be able to keep the funds they saved to invest “in programs of higher value.”
After identifying approximately $78 billion in savings, Gates announced the cuts he planned to make at a press conference at the Pentagon on January 6, 2011. Even though the reductions he announced were deep and included cuts in the overall size of the Army and Marine Corps, Gates’s effort to protect military spending from further cuts failed. He couldn’t protect the defense budget from President Obama. On April 20, 2011, President Obama announced he would seek an additional $400 billion in cuts in military spending on top of what Gates had already proposed. Gates later described his sense of betrayal:
I felt [President Obama] had breached faith with me both on the budget numbers for FY2012–2016 that [Obama budget director Peter] Orszag, [White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel, and I had agreed on—with Obama’s approval—in the fall of 2009, and on the promise that Defense could keep all the efficiencies savings for reinvestment in military capabilities. . . . I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.
The situation grew even worse in August 2011, when Congress passed the Budget Control Act with a sequestration provision that would compound the damage already being done by President Obama’s cuts. Part of an agreement to authorize lifting of the debt ceiling, the act provided for $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and, if a joint House and Senate committee failed to agree on a plan to cut another $1.2 trillion, then sequestration would go into effect. This would require across-the-board arbitrary cuts, 50 percent from domestic discretionary spending and 50 percent from the defense budget, even though military spending accounts for only roughly 17 percent of government spending.
Sequestration was intended to be an alternative so drastic that Congress would be compelled to find a way to avoid triggering it. They failed. Sequestration required roughly a $500 billion cut in the defense budget. This was additional to cut reductions the president had already ordered, resulting in more than $1 trillion being slashed from the nation’s military budget over the next ten years.
Not only are the cuts far too deep, but the system of mandatory across-the-board reductions prevents the Department of Defense from having any input into the budget process. The funding cuts are arbitrary, rather than being the product of strategic assessments about what is necessary to defend the nation. There has not been a defense budget based on a serious analysis of the threats facing the nation and an assessment of the military capacity necessary to defend against those threats since the Gates 2012 budget.
It should also be noted that defense spending is not the main driver of our deficits. These cuts that are so devastating to our national security contribute little to the effort to get federal spending under control.
In January 2015, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno told the Senate Armed Services Committee that because of the budget cuts, the U.S. Army is as unready as it has been at any other point in its 239-year history. At the same hearing, Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh said America’s current aircraft fleet is “now the smallest and oldest in the history of our service.” Added Welsh, “It is also the least ready—less than half of our combat coded units are fully combat capable.” The Air Force, Welsh explained, “simply cannot get smaller and still meet the demand of current and projected operations.”
In testimony in March 2015 before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert warned that “Navy readiness is at its lowest point in many years.” Marine Corps Commandant General Joseph Dunford told members of the House Appropriations Committee in February 2015, “Approximately half of our non-deployed units—and those are the ones that provide the bench to respond to unforeseen contingencies—are suffering personnel, equipment and training shortfalls.” This will, he said, delay response times and put American lives at risk unnecessarily.
In July 2015 the Army announced it would be necessary to reduce the size of the force by 40,000 due to the budget reductions, leaving the Army smaller than it has been since before World War II. Budgetary constraints may also force the Navy to pull the USS Theodore Roosevelt out of the Persian Gulf in the fall of 2015 before another carrier is ready to take its place. The U.S. would then be left with no carrier presence in the Middle East in the midst of the growing threats from ISIS, al Qaeda, and Iranian-backed terror groups.
The difference between the amount the Pentagon projected it would need in the Gates 2012 budget and the amount it has received gives some idea of the critical nature of the situation. According to the National Defense Panel:
Including the 2015 budget request, the Defense Department has already lost $291 billion compared to the funding plan Secretary Gates recommended for fiscal year 2012, with $646 billion of still more reductions ahead unless current law is changed—bringing the projected total cuts to $937 billion.
The situation is likely far worse than even the nearly $1 trillion shortfall the National Defense Panel warned about. The 2012 Gates budget was developed prior to the rise of ISIS, the establishment of the caliphate across a large swath of Iraq and Syria, the collapse of the Iraqi security forces, the aggressive spread of Iranian influence throughout the Middle East, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, the loss of U.S. embassies in Libya, Yemen, and Damascus, and increasing aggression by China in the South China Sea and East China Sea. While Washington has been drastically cutting America’s defense budgets, the threats to our nation have been growing. On January 28, 2015, General Odierno testified:
In my thirty-eight years of service, I have never seen a more dynamic and rapidly changing security environment than the one we face now. We no longer live in a world where we have the luxury of time and distance to respond to threats facing our nation. Instead, we face a diverse range of threats operating across domains and along seams—threats that are rapidly changing and adapting in response to our posture.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger agreed. “The United States,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “has not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.”
Given the increasingly dangerous threat environment, the United States should be increasing, not decreasing, its military capabilities. As Michèle Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, explained:
The international security environment is more complex and volatile, and as we have seen, I would emphasize it is only going to get more challenging. . . . U.S. leadership could not be at more of a premium right now. It’s also a time that requires investment to ensure that we retain a strong and agile military to shape the international environment, to deter and defeat aggression when we must, to reassure allies and partners, and to ensure that this president and future presidents have the options that they need for an increasingly dangerous world.
Rather than ensuring that America’s military has the resources it needs to confront growing threats, President Obama and sequestration have set us on a path that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide for the nation’s security in the decades ahead.
The president has adopted strategies that contribute to America’s vulnerabilities. Since the Cold War, one of the fundamental tenets of our force structure has been the requirement that the United States maintain the ability to defeat two adversaries simultaneously in two different geographic theaters. The Defense Department’s 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review explained the importance of this concept:
Maintaining this core capability is central to credibly deterring opportunism—that is, to avoiding a situation in which an aggressor in one region might be tempted to take advantage when U.S. forces are heavily committed elsewhere—and to ensuring that the United States has sufficient military capabilities to
deter or defeat aggression by an adversary that is larger or under circumstances that are more difficult than expected. . . . Such a capability is the sine qua non of a superpower and is essential to the credibility of our overall national security strategy.
In 2012 President Obama abandoned this concept. Rather than sizing our force to be able to defeat enemies simultaneously in two theaters, President Obama’s strategic guidance required only that “when U.S. forces are committed to a large scale operation in one region, they will be capable of denying the objectives of—or imposing unacceptable costs on—an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”
President Obama’s troop reductions and budget cuts, compounded by sequestration, raise the question of whether the United States could carry out even this new limited objective. For example, although the strategy guidance envisions that the United States will be engaged in counterinsurgency and stability operations, it includes this caveat: “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” In other words, regardless of what America’s enemies have in mind, America will have sufficient forces to fight only small, short wars.
In his cover letter transmitting the new strategy, President Obama asserted that the United States was able to make changes to our national security strategy “as we end today’s wars.” His assumption is that withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan will make large-scale conflict a relic of the past. The president offered no facts to support such a notion, but one can see why he would want to believe it. A world without large wars provides a rationale for draconian cuts to the military.
At about the time the president issued his new defense strategic guidance, a senior Obama political appointee in the Pentagon called one of the authors of this book. It was likely that he was making courtesy calls to all the former secretaries of defense to preview the new strategic guidance. The official explained elements of the new strategy, especially what would become known as the “pivot to Asia.” The idea seemed to be that because President Obama was ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and we had killed Osama bin Laden, America could now turn its attention away from the Middle East and focus on Asia.
