[iwar] [fc:Clinton.Undead.Haunting.Pentagon]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-05-29 19:11:10
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 19:11:10 -0700 (PDT)
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Insight Magazine
June 17, 2002
Clinton Undead Haunting Pentagon
By J. Michael Waller 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team are pulling their hair out
trying to bring the Pentagon's policy apparatus into line with the
president's wishes. At every turn, it seems, they run into entrenched
bureaucrats, Clinton holdovers and others who not only pursue their own
agendas but actively fund outright opponents of the administration. 
The Pentagon's policy shop faces the tremendous challenge of serving as the
brain of an open-ended international war on terror while also providing
guidance on reshaping the nation's defenses to meet new threats and adopt
new technologies. The first of these tasks was thrust upon it Sept. 11, when
the Department of Defense (DoD) senior-management team was only a couple of
months into the job; it since has remained that team's primary focus. 
Daily headlines ranging from the shooting wars in the Middle East to a
possible war between India and Pakistan to an escalation in narcoterrorist
violence in Colombia and a host of other crises continue to show that the
Pentagon can't pick the time or the place where its attention will be
needed. Added to the mix are the quotidian tasks of negotiating five-year
budget plans through a difficult election-year Congress, balancing the State
Department's college of rationalizers on international arms and defense
agreements with existing allies, new friends and old enemies - and trying to
move ahead on presidential priorities such as defending the nation from
missile attack. 
With a clear and urgent set of missions and an experienced leadership,
several observers ask why there isn't a clearer focus with a more purposeful
movement on key policy issues at a time of tremendous popular support for
the war, for the secretary of defense and for the president himself. Part of
the answer lies in the degree to which the message is muddled - not only in
the media, in Congress and within the DoD, but by the scores of Clinton
holdovers and countless bureaucrats whose opposition to presidential
initiatives and policies is in fact funded by the Pentagon itself through
internal think tanks and external consultants. 
"This cognitive dissonance is to be found in three places: Pentagon and
interagency-loan billets, the defense university system and in grants to
contractors, academics and the 'CINC-tank' system of specialized regional
policy shops - a series of self-styled policy centers created during the
Clinton administration to bring what [conservative public intellectual]
David Horowitz labeled 'tenured radicals' into the DoD ranks," says a
Rumsfeld operative who asked to remain anonymous. 
"CINC tanks" is shorthand for the five policy groups under the direction of
the regional military commanders-in-chief (CINCs) that frustrated officials
say have become sponsors of sinecures for shelved Clinton/Gore policy
operatives. While not necessarily "radicals" in the political sense, such
individuals have used their Pentagon-funded platforms to attack President
George W. Bush's policies. The Honolulu-based Asia-Pacific Center for
Security Studies, the CINC-tank of the U.S. Pacific Command, has come under
fire during the last year for sponsoring outspoken opponents of the
president's initiatives. When Rumsfeld curtailed Chinese military access to
the United States following Beijing's forced downing of a U.S. Navy
intelligence aircraft last year, the center's director, retired Marine Lt.
Gen. H.C. Stackpole, openly criticized the secretary's move. Stackpole also
drew ire for allegedly undermining the president's missile-defense
initiative by criticizing it publicly during a visit to Australia - one of
the few countries wholeheartedly behind Bush's early national
missile-defense plan. 
The DoD's Africa Center for Strategic Studies is a virtual hive of left-wing
activists at a time when Africa is of increasing importance as a theater of
fighting international terrorism. One of the center's senior academic
officials previously was with the International Human Rights Law Group, and
was a World Bank consultant and U.N. diplomat. The center's academic chair
of civil-military relations is listed as "a development and gender
consultant." Its academic coordinator is noted for her experience in "policy
analysis and community activism" with the Washington Office on Africa, which
actively sympathized with Soviet-backed revolutionary movements during the
Cold War. 
"The runaway CINC tanks are polluting the military officers they share
billets with, they sow discord against the president's policies and
legitimize criticism through their supposed representation of the JCS [Joint
Chiefs of Staff], and they spin our allies' rising officers in the wrong
direction," says a defense scholar currently trying to fix the problem for
the Pentagon. "Some of the CINC tanks credentialize leftists and people with
few legitimate credentials even as they deny the same opportunities to our
good junior officers who are needful." 
The National Defense University (NDU), in addition to educating U.S.
military officers, plays host to research and advanced-studies institutes
that focus on different defense areas. Adm. Paul Gaffney, the NDU's
president, wins high marks for keeping the university on an even keel. Its
Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) operates as a think tank for
the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Insiders tell Insight that politicized Clinton appointees are being rotated
out as soon as their contracts expire. "INSS was a problem area, but it's
come a long way and still needs a little more work," says a longtime veteran
of the Pentagon policy shop. "It needs good people who can follow
national-security-related immigration and energy issues. It needs a Claire
Sterling to connect the dots on terrorism, drugs and proliferation - a
big-picture person who is cleared to study highly classified information and
put the pieces together." 
The late Claire Sterling was a journalist who defied the U.S. intelligence
community's conventional wisdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s and pieced
together a covert Soviet-sponsored operation in support of international
terrorism that she dubbed the "terror network." 
The Pentagon policy veteran adds: "It also needs some good China people. The
China part of INSS is too small and it doesn't have the ability to fight the
'panda huggers' in every other institution of government. Congress tried to
give INSS a strong China shop but refused funding when a panda hugger was to
be appointed to run it." 
It's hard for the defense secretary to promote the president's policies when
members of his own think tank publicly undermine them, insiders tell
Insight. Richard Sokolsky, a visiting INSS senior fellow, blasted Bush's
nuclear-posture review in a Washington Post op-ed last January. Arguing that
Bush's proposed unilateral cuts of 6,000 operationally deployed warheads to
fewer than 2,200 didn't go far enough, Sokolsky compared them to President
Bill Clinton's "timid" proposals of five years before. The INSS figure said
that "it is hard to imagine a plausible contingency" that would merit Bush's
plan to stockpile nuclear warheads, and said that Bush should make further
radical cuts to help "Russian President Vladimir Putin defend his
pro-American policy from domestic hawks." Sokolsky argued that the Bush plan
leaves 10 times as many operational warheads as the United States ever would
need. The United States should make further unilateral disarmament cuts
until it had only "a few hundred" nuclear warheads, this Pentagon "expert"
argued, keeping none in reserve. 
"Those types of public articles undermine policy and don't serve the
secretary or the president," says a senior Pentagon official dealing with
nuclear-missile issues. 
Nobody has produced a dollar figure, but it appears the national-security
community is paying more people to oppose administration policy than to
develop it. Some make a finer point: The money is going to political
opponents of the administration to shape the administration's own policies.
A case in point, one critic says, was a May 6-7 National Security
Agency-sponsored conference to map out a four-year strategy for homeland
defense. Administered by ANSER, a major defense consulting firm, the
conference recruited a range of policy experts from across the political
spectrum. This created "an opportunity for the field's leading thinkers and
practitioners to examine how the nation can cultivate an effective
homeland-security posture for the long term," according to ANSER. It was
"intended to provoke debate, develop new ideas and offer recommendations for
policymakers who must design homeland-security policies, strategies and
institutions." 
But the invitation list shows that, apart from a few invited
Bush-administration officials, the participants were weighted against the
administration's conservative approach and included many former Clinton-Gore
appointees. Even where a sponsored policy event was organized by friends of
the administration, such as a November 2001 Rand Corporation conference to
develop a new policy toward Cuba, out-and-out apologists for the Cuban
regime such as Wayne S. Smith were included in the deliberations.
A source close to the Pentagon's policy office laments, "You have no idea
how hard it is to work on the war, find extra hours to develop a
forward-looking policy that tracks with the president's and SECDEF's
[secretary of defense's] priorities and then try to advance it on the Hill
or in the [decision-making] process, and find yourself outmanned by an
opposition funded not by the leftist foundations or the
congressional-opposition staff budget, but by your own policy shop's
budget." 
J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight.

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