by Lou Dubose
Total Defense
Spending
During Reagan's
Presidency Total Defense
Spending While
Cheney was Bush's
Secretary of Defense Total Defense
Spending While
Bill Clinton
Was President
FY $ in billions FY $ in billions FY $ in billions
1981 158.0 1989 304.0 1993 292.4
1982 185.9 1990 300.1 1994 282.3
1983 209.9 1991 319.7 1995 273.6
1984 228.0 1992 302.6 1996 266.0
1985 253.1 1997 271.7
1986 273.8 1998 270.2
1987 282.5 1999 275.5
1988 290.9 2000 295.0
Cheney turned the inevitable reduction in troops garrisoned abroad over to his chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. Cheney bypassed dozens of more senior officers to find the most talented candidate, even if he had misgivings about Powell's position on Iran-Contra. Powell designed a "base force" program that gradually brought home (and in some cases discharged) large numbers of American occupation forces in Europe, coordinating every reduction with individual commands. As personnel accounted for almost 50 percent of the Pentagon budget, Powell's gradual reduction in force helped reduce defense spending.
The selection of Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs, long assumed to be Cheney's choice, was actually something of a shotgun wedding. At fifty-two, Powell was younger than most others who were in line for the job. But he had served as Reagan's national security advisor and was the senior Bush's choice to lead the Joint Chiefs. Powell had doubts about Cheney. He considered Cheney's uncompromising support of Ollie North's rogue operations to be an endorsement of military officers going out of channel and running unauthorized operations. The elder George Bush, however, wanted Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs.
Cheney did make one particularly bold move on the military budget. While Ronald Reagan was president, spending on weapons had spiraled completely out of control. Again, with one decision, Cheney took charge. When he learned that the Navy's A-12 fighter jet was $1 billion over budget and eighteen months behind schedule, he canceled the program and fired the vice admiral in charge of naval aviation. He also ordered two senior officers demoted for mismanagement. With three stars on his epaulets, Vice Admiral Richard Gentz was the highest-ranking officer ever dismissed for failure to manage costs and deadlines on a weapons system. Cheney also curtailed production of the Air Force's B-2 Stealth bomber, from 132 to 20—essentially killing a weapons system designed to penetrate Soviet radar and conduct long-range bombing missions. He targeted the Marines' V-22 Osprey, perhaps the most problematic American military aircraft ever to make it off the drawing boards. But the tilt-rotor, vertical-takeoff helicopter had powerful friends. Congress, led by the Texas and Pennsylvania delegations, overrode the cut. When Cheney refused to spend the money appropriated, Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen and Fort Worth congressman Pete Geren filed suit—more over plant closings than national security. To increase the pressure, Texans and Pennsylvanians on the House Armed Services Committee passed a provision that would cut 5 percent per month from overall defense spending until funding for the Osprey was released. "It wasn't exactly blackmail," says a general who worked on Pentagon budgeting. "But they threatened to be a constant pain in the ass for us until we gave in."
The Osprey proved to be a durable disaster. Midway through George W. Bush's second term, the tilt-rotor helicopter Cheney had tried to ground still wasn't exactly flying. Sixty helicopters had been produced. Five had crashed, which might have been predicted after the prototype crashed. The accidents killed twenty-six marines and four civilians. In March 2006, a year before the aircraft was to be deployed for combat in Iraq, another $71-million Osprey went down in the woods in Florida, though this time no one was injured.
In a 1992 speech, Cheney claimed he "terminated or canceled over 120 different weapons programs." He might have been using canceled software programs to pad his list. And he failed to ground the Osprey. But no secretary of defense since the beginning of the Cold War had taken as hard a look at weapons systems or gone head-to-head with the Pentagon brass and defense contractors. Cheney didn't deliver a peace dividend, but he did stop the exponential growth in the military budget that, along with tax cuts, had driven the deficit during the Reagan presidency.
Most of John Tower's hires at the Department of Defense moved on when the Senate rejected his nomination, but Cheney asked one high-ranking Tower appointee to stay. Paul Wolfowitz had begun his career as a Democrat, working for Washington senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. He crossed party lines to work in the Nixon and Ford administrations, then took a midlevel position at the Pentagon when Jimmy Carter was elected president. Cheney's decision to keep Wolfowitz, though little noticed at the time, was a small first step toward the invasion and occupation of Iraq that consumed the Bush-Cheney administration fourteen years later.
While Wolfowitz was at the Defense Department during the Carter administration, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown asked him to look at Third World countries where the United States might face a threat. Wolfowitz's Limited Contingency Study, carefully tracked in James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, shifted attention from the Soviet threat and considered the possibility of the seizing of Saudi Arabia's oilfields by a Persian Gulf nation. It focused specifically on Iraq, described in the study as the preeminent military power in the region. At the time, no one involved in preparing the report considered Iraq a threat. Saddam Hussein had not consolidated his power, engaged in any widespread repression, or acquired chemical weapons.
What concerned Wolfowitz was oil.
Brown wanted nothing to do with the report. He shelved it, fearing that were it leaked, the Iraqis would believe the United States was working on behalf of the Saudis. But Wolfowitz would not let it die, even if it would not be made policy during the Carter administration.
In a Pentagon where Dick Cheney was running the show, Wolfowitz was in a better position to again turn his attention to the Persian Gulf. In 1992 he was responsible for drafting the first biennial Defense Planning Guidance document that would not focus on the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz had assigned the project to his deputy, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Libby delegated the work to Zalmay Khalilzad. Both men would figure prominently in the administration of George W. Bush, Libby as Cheney's chief of staff and Khalilzad as the American ambassador to occupied Iraq, where he would exercise the plenipotentiary power of a viceroy.
The new planning guide, shaped by Khalilzad, Wolfowitz, and Libby, envisioned a superpower so dominant that it could intervene in and resolve any conflict: "Potential. . . competitors need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests." The United States would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." A nuclear arsenal would "provide an important deterrent hedge against the possibility of a revitalized or unforeseen global threat, while at the same time helping to deter third party use of weapons of mass destruction through the threat of retaliation."
Among the threats the report anticipated were conflicts that threatened access to Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, and terrorist threats to U.S. citizens. The primary case studies that justified the use of the tactics described in the plan were Iraq and North Korea. The report made it clear that the United States would act unilaterally; there was no role for the United Nations.
A Defense Department employee who believed the policy Wolfowitz was promoting needed to be debated in public leaked the report to The New York Times. The report was immediately denounced by President Bush. The leaked document became a political issue in the 1992 campaign, attacked by Clinton. It angered foreign leaders, who saw it as a blueprint for American hegemony. After Bush distanced himself from it, Wolfowitz followed
. Khalilzad was left hanging, the principal author of an orphaned report rejected by all of his superiors. Then Cheney read it. He told Khalilzad, "You've discovered a new rationale for our role in the world." He issued the report under his own name. "He wanted to show that he stood for the idea," Khalilzad said. "He took ownership in it."
The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document would go back on the shelf while Bill Clinton was president. But like the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, it wouldn't go away. The original Iraq War thinking rejected by Harold Brown and George H. W. Bush had taken root and would be waiting eight years later when Dick Cheney returned yet again to the White House.
Cheney's canonization of the report marked an odd but important historical moment. George W. Bush was sitting in the owners' box seats of the Texas Rangers ballpark, where he was a managing partner and a 2 percent owner, while the men who would define his foreign policy ten years later were sitting in their Pentagon offices, where they were in charge, writing the foreign policy they would hand him after the 2000 election.
"He was the finest secretary of defense I've ever seen, from the standpoint of the military," says a general who was already at the Pentagon when Cheney arrived. It is a common response to the open-ended question: How would you describe Dick Cheney as secretary of defense? Like Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who would break with the Bush-Cheney administration because of its conduct of the war in Iraq, the general, a career officer who saw Cheney work at the Pentagon, describes him as a near-perfect administrator: "He was in control. Bill Clinton is the smartest man I've ever worked with. But Dick Cheney came close. In a briefing, he's so smart he's intimidating. He listens. He listens in a way that most people don't listen. And he gets everything. It is daunting, can be frightening. But when you walk out of his office, you know that he understands every detail you briefed and every implication of the decision he's going to make. No emotion. No anger. He's annoyed if you are not prepared. I have never seen him raise his voice."
Cheney's time at the Pentagon was a dress rehearsal for the vice presidency. He had no administrative experience, but he seemed to understand, almost instinctively, that the secret to success and control lies in staffing. David Gribben, the high school friend from Wyoming who served as Cheney's chief of staff in the House, was also his chief of staff at the Pentagon. Pete Williams, the former Wyoming television newscaster who worked as Cheney's House press person, was the Pentagon spokesman. And David Addington, who had been with Cheney since Congress, was now his special civilian assistant.
"Cheney always has the best staff," the Pentagon source says. "David Gribben was loyal, smart, and had no ego. And he understood legislative affairs. Pete Williams could take the most complex issue and dumb it down into a sound bite. And David Addington is one of the smartest people I ever knew. He was on top of things."
Addington, the Pentagon source added, could read the draft of an appropriations bill in one day and ferret out the one paragraph that wasn't supposed to be there: "He would fix that one paragraph, and he would know exactly which undersecretary had been over there on the Hill freelancing." After cleaning up the bill, Addington would "add a corrected provision that might adversely affect the undersecretary and send him a little message."
At the Pentagon, it sometimes seemed as if David Addington was training Dick Cheney to be vice president—or perhaps president. Almost every decision started in Addington's office, where he would meet with "the uniforms," civilians—even the Joint Chiefs. Then he would take his decisions in to Cheney, who would be briefed. When necessary, Addington would take the parties into Cheney's office. Addington, by intellect and force of personality, took charge and dealt with the details. "He allowed Cheney to be the chief."
"Addington was always deeply involved in issues," the Pentagon source says. "But he was always in the background. If you wanted to get something to Cheney, you did it through Addington. For three years it was the best-run operation you could imagine. It worked because Addington ran it on behalf of the Secretary of Defense."
Addington also worked on appropriations, which Cheney mastered by collaborating with Jack Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Murtha is an institutional politician, always aware of and insinuating himself into positions of power in the House. When Cheney was appointed secretary of defense, Murtha hosted a dinner for Cheney and his wife and the Appropriations Subcommittee members—known as the cardinals—and their spouses. It was an invitation to collaborate—and a showcase of Murtha's influence on "Approps." Cheney, Murtha, Addington, and a few high-ranking officers from the Pentagon managed DOD appropriations and developed a working relationship between the Congress and the uniforms, to ensure that in a time of shrinking budgets, no vital weapons systems or bases were cut. Powell was intimately involved in appropriations. But difficult problems were resolved by discussions between Murtha and Cheney.
Murtha is a hawkish former marine and Vietnam veteran who has cultivated close ties to the military. Congressional staff traveling with him on congressional delegation trips ("codels") complain that he spends so much time listening to enlisted men that schedules are difficult to keep. Cheney and Murtha remained close friends when Cheney became Bush's vice president, which later made Murtha's harsh criticism of the Bush-Cheney White House so loaded. "I like guys who got five deferments and have never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Murtha said in November 2005. One of Murtha's staff members insisted the Democratic congressman's statement didn't pertain to Cheney, but that was a hard sell. Cheney is the only high-profile member of the Bush administration who had five draft deferments and is making decisions that put American soldiers at risk.
Some of Cheney's critics claim the Pentagon brass was hostile to Cheney because he was a secretary of defense who had avoided service in Vietnam. (After all, during his confirmation Cheney had said, "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.") A retired officer who was at the Pentagon while Cheney was there disagreed. "I never saw it," he says. "Everyone immediately saw he was a good administrator who had good relations with Congress. That's what matters. Rumsfeld came over as a former Navy pilot and within six months no one in the building wanted to talk to him because he is so arrogant. Cheney came over here aware that he knew nothing about defense issues. Cheney and David [Addington] listened."
Wilkerson, a career officer who worked for Colin Powell at the Pentagon and State Department, also says Cheney's deferments were not an issue. "There may have been a little grumbling," the retired officer says. But he added that Cheney was far too good at what he did, and far too protective of the interests of the armed forces, to engender much hostility. Wilkerson describes a moment at the end of the Gulf War at which the very officers who might have been expected to be Cheney's critics publicly embraced him. "It was at the National Military Command Center at Fort Leavenworth. Everyone got together, all the military types, and presented Cheney with an honorary certificate of graduation from the Command General Staff College. The little speeches that accompanied that. . . were quite poignant."
While Dick Cheney's first big challenge as secretary of defense was the U.S. attack on Panama, his defining moment was the first Gulf War. The textbook success of both ventures perhaps convinced him that invading Iraq in 2003 would be quick work, followed by Iraqis tossing rose petals at American soldiers as they prepared to move east into Iran. Though he never wore a uniform, Cheney had been involved in every American military adventure since the Korean War: Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. If he missed Somalia and Bosnia, the company he directed had won big, lucrative contracts in both attempts at nation building.
The invasion of Panama was a textbook exercise in regime change. Initially a CIA asset, Panamanian president Manuel Noriega had become impossible for the American president to control. Noriega's thugs had beaten and bloodied their boss's opponent in the presidentia
l race. Panamanian soldiers had shot one American serviceman and briefly detained an American lieutenant (and his wife, whom they threatened to sexually assault). They also arrested a CIA operative who was operating a clandestine radio station. It wasn't hostile warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, but for the first Bush administration, a sufficient casus belli to invade a country and remove a thuggish regime.
Cheney had been six months on the job at the Pentagon when the senior George Bush made the decision to attack Panama. It was a decision made in careful collaboration with Cheney, who was attentive to detail, aware of the larger foreign policy context of the invasion, and not hesitant to put overenthusiastic generals on short leashes. At one point he questioned plans to use the Stealth bomber, a high-tech radar-evading aircraft designed to penetrate Soviet defenses. (He reluctantly signed off on it, though he regretted it later.) He refused to allow the lieutenant's wife to do a TV interview in which she would have described the sexual taunts of Noriega's soldiers, arguing that it would only be inflammatory. He cut one target from the list of sites to bomb, complaining about a Stealth attack on a Noriega hangout. And he went after Congress for encroaching on the executive's authority to conduct foreign policy. Members of Congress, whom Cheney caustically referred to as "my former colleagues," were "literally calling [executive branch] agencies downtown, or even people in Panama," Cheney complained. "That creates all kinds of problems. [They] certainly complicate our lives when they run out and make public pronouncements in front of the press, knowing only half of what there is to know." Cheney also refused to provide New York congressman Charles Rangel copies of combat videos shot by Apache helicopters in Panama. Rangel was responding to numerous complaints that most of the civilians killed died in Apache attacks on civilian targets.