It's a stunning turnaround - the truth from Dick Cheney. Cheney
praises the Clinton Administration's support for the military and
criticizes George W. Bush in his role as Commander in Chief.
The U.S. military forces trained and equipped by the Clinton Administration were responsible for the stunning success of the "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq War, "one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted".
Thereafter, the Bush Administration failed to support, maintain and properly lead the military.
So says Dick.
And he's not just shooting the shit for partisan purposes - he knows what he's talking about. He reminds us, frequently, that his service as Secretary of Defense gives him unique
expertise to make these assessments. This is not political! This is about his sincerely and deeply-held belief in a moral duty to protect this nation and support our troops.
In fact, these issues are so genuinely important to Cheney that he would never use them to score political points, smear an opponent, make a power grab, or obfuscate the truth, and that being the case, I have no doubt that he stands by every one of his statements below.
Stunning Success of Clinton Military
Dick Cheney acknowledges that the Clinton Administration's military was responsible for the stunning success of the "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq War.
First, Dick makes it clear that the military technology used in the Spring of 2003 in Iraq was vastly superior to that used in Gulf War in 1991, based on his first-hand knowledge as Secretary of Defense:
Having been involved in planning and waging the Persian Gulf War in 1991 as Secretary of Defense, I think I can say with some authority that this campaign has displayed vastly improved capabilities, far better than we did a dozen years ago. In Desert Storm, only 20 percent of our air-to-ground fighters could guide a laser-guided bomb to target. Today, all of our air-to-ground fighters have that capability. In Desert Storm, it usually took up to two days for target planners to get a photo of a target, confirm its coordinates, plan the mission, and deliver it to the bomber crew. Now we have near real-time imaging of targets with photos and coordinates transmitted by e-mail to aircraft already in flight. In Desert Storm, battalion, brigade and division commanders had to rely on maps, grease pencils and radio reports to track the movements of our forces. Today our commanders have a real-time display of our own forces on their computer screens. In Desert Storm, we did not yet have the B-2. But that aircraft is now critical to our operations. And on a single bombing sortie, a B-2 can hit 16 separate targets, each with a 2,000-pound, precision-guided, satellite-based weapon.
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More:
Military transformation will be the work of decades, and a responsibility of every branch of our armed forces. Yet we are well along in making these changes, as all the world witnessed in the battle of Iraq. ...Our military displayed vast new capabilities that were not yet operational 12 years ago, when I was Secretary of Defense. With less than half the ground forces used in Desert Storm, and two-thirds of the air power, our military achieved a far more difficult objective in less time and with fewer casualties.
Historians and military planners will study the battles in Iraq for years to come, but the basic reasons for its success are known already. The most obvious factor was speed. Our soldiers and Marines raced to Baghdad across 350 miles of hostile terrain in one of the fastest advances in history. The rapid advance prevented the enemy from mounting a coherent defense, from turning unconventional weapons against our forces, from harming its neighbors with Scud missiles, and from destroying the bridges, dams, and oil fields it had wired with explosives.
Precision technology was also crucial in the defeat of Saddam's army and the liberation of Iraq. Tomahawk missiles fired from our ships were more accurate than those used in Desert Storm, and could be re-targeted in a matter of hours instead of days. American artillery groups could rely on satellite guidance and computerized targeting. A dozen years ago, only 20 percent of our air-to-ground aircraft could hit targets with precision munitions. In this battle, all of our air-to-ground aircraft had precision-guided capabilities. Thanks to all of these advances, we were able to destroy the command centers of the Iraqi regime, while minimizing civilian casualties and leaving Iraq's economic infrastructure largely intact.
Situational awareness was vital to our victory in Iraq. Throughout the history of warfare, commanders have wanted to know two basic facts: The exact location of the enemy, and the exact location of friendly forces. Yet, rarely has such knowledge been available. In Desert Storm, for example, only our air commanders had anything near a real-time picture of operations. In this year's battle, all of our component commanders shared a real-time computer display of air, land, and sea forces. This allowed our military to integrate joint operations more effectively than ever before. Desert Storm was essentially two distinct campaigns: A 38-day air war followed by a brief ground war. The battle for Iraq was a single unified campaign. All of our air, land, sea and special operations forces shared the same intelligence, the same information, and the same objectives.
We will never forget that in this conflict, as in all of our conflicts, the most important ingredient for success was the men and women who served, ...and the men and women of our armed forces, including our Special Operations Forces, the Third Infantry Division, the First Marine Expeditionary Force, the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, and the air and naval units that supported them.
Thanks to them, U.S. and coalition forces maintained the initiative at every stage of the conflict, controlled its pace, and so determined its outcome. With our victory in Iraq, we have removed a threat to our country and to our friends in the region. And all nations, friend and foe alike, can be certain that the United States military is second to none... link
Second to none. He is roundly signing the praises of the U.S. military - 2003. That really is a remarkable transformation in just "a dozen" short years.
Second, Dick states that a Commander in Chief leads a military that was built by those that came before:
A commander-in-chief leads the military built by those who came before him. There is little that he or his defense secretary can do to improve the force they have to deploy. It is all the work of previous administrations. ...
That is why we were able to win ... And that is why the current administration has been able to conduct its vast military deployments, from Baghdad to Belgrade.
The ships and planes were ready. The pilots and crewmen were prepared. The missiles, the ammunition, the equipment, and the men and women to use them were all there.
That is the military...inherited. link
By 2003, the military had been successfully transformed (which, as Dick stated above, is a long-term process):
Yet the conclusion of the war will mark one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted. ... And coming on the heels of the Afghanistan operation last year, it's proof positive of the success of our efforts to transform our military to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
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The Clinton Administration spanned the years 1992-2000. The Bush Administration had only been in power for 26 months (including a 6-week vacation) when the Iraq war started (and less than that when the Iraq War details were being planned and not shown to Colin Powell, and the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan were fought).
So as between the two administrations, which was responsible for the condition of the military in the Spring of 2003, particularly the vast improvements from the Gulf War? Cheney makes it clear - it had to be Bill Clinton. No other conclusion can be drawn.
According to Cheney, George W. Bush is an Inept Commander in Chief
Cheney seethes with criticism for the Commander in Chief. Relying on expertise gained while serving as Secretary of Defense, making him specially qualified for this analysis and also uniquely outraged, he checks off the massive list of failures: recruiting, retention, morale, equipment, supplies, veterans' benefits, inadequate training, unclear mission, overdeployed...
Our military today is overused and under-resourced. ... overseas deployments have multiplied, stretching the services to the limit, and causing shortages of spare parts and equipment. All of this has brought on serious problems of readiness, recruiting, retention, and morale.
...
Let's look at the people in our military - these young men and women who give America the best years of their lives. One need only talk to those who serve, or the many who have left, to get the picture. They will tell you first-hand of parts in short supply, maintenance cancelled or delayed, exercises called off.
...In the circumstances I've described, recruitment and retention inevitably become a problem. ...
For the fifth consecutive year, the Army and Navy will fail to meet their targets for commissioned officers. Both branches are facing a situation where junior officers are increasingly headed for the door.
In a recent GAO survey of more than a thousand officers and enlisted men, a majority said they intended to leave rather than stay and pursue a career.
Why are they leaving? For many, the question really is, why stay - when training is inadequate, equipment is lacking, units are undermanned and forces are deployed in more than a hundred places across the globe, often with unclear missions and inadequate support?
As in civilian life, after all, career decisions are often family decisions. Today, military housing is often substandard. Many schools for military children are run-down and needing repair. Overdeployed soldiers speak of what they call the birthday problem. When you miss a child's birthday for the third or fourth year in a row, in peacetime, reenlistment is a tougher call.
...
... We all know that everyone in the service, from the highest officer to the newest recruit, is not fully free to speak about mission or morale. That is as it should be. But for the Vice President to claim - on their behalf, without fear of contradiction - that all is well in the military, is only to take further advantage of them.
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(Yes. The "birthday problem". That IS a shameful way to treat our troops.)
Sadly, Cheney's criticisms are supported by the facts:
PSB: June '04: LT. GEN. JOHN VINES, U.S. Army: So currently, we are stretched extraordinarily thin.
USAtoday: Jan. '04 Army expanding stop-loss order to keep soldiers from leaving
CSM: Jan. '06 Stop-loss used to retain 50,000 US troops
WP: Oct. '05 Recruiting Shortfall Delays Army's Expansion Plans
MSNBC: May '05 Army, Marines miss recruiting goals again
CBS: Sept. '04 National Guard Recruiting Lags
MPR: July '04 U.S. military faces recruiting and retention challenges
DoD: July '06 Operations Tempo Remains Retention Challenge
Guardian: Dec. '03 The US army has promised to rush new body armour to Iraq by the end of this month after it emerged that tens of thousands of soldiers were sent to the front without the life-saving protective jackets:
Parents of some of the troops have resorted to buying the jackets with their bullet-stopping ceramic inserts themselves and posting them to Iraq. The failure to equip ordinary soldiers properly has caused fury in Congress, where the shortfall in body armour has been contrasted with the generous allocations to other projects in this year's $379bn defence budget.
Most national guard troops and reservists deployed in Iraq have been sent with only Vietnam-era flak jackets that are much less effective in stopping shrapnel and bullets.
USAToday: Mar. '04l Soldiers in Iraq still buying their own body armor
The Associated Press
Soldiers headed for Iraq are still buying their own body armor -- and in many cases, their families are buying it for them -- despite assurances from the military that the gear will be in hand before they're in harm's way.
Body armor distributors have received steady inquiries from soldiers and families about purchasing the gear, which can cost several thousand dollars.
...Nancy Durst recently learned that her husband, a soldier with an Army reserve unit from Maine serving in Iraq, spent four months without body armor. She said she would have bought armor for her husband had vests not been cycled into his unit.
Even if her husband now has body armor, Durst said she was angry he was without it at any time. Her husband also has told her that reservists have not been given the same equipment as active duty soldiers. "They're so sick of being treated as second-class soldiers," she said....
"There still is a lingering level of mistrust with some families as to whether there are people thinking about the best equipment and needs of their loved ones," Turley said. "No one that I know of has been truly held accountable.
CSM: Feb. '05 Back from Iraq - and suddenly out on the streets. Social service agencies say the number of homeless vets is rising, in part because of high housing costs and gaps in pay.
Veterans Against the Iraq War: Mar. '03: Republicans Seek to Slash VA Budget.
The Republican majority of the House Budget Committee is reducing President
Bush's proposed budget by about $844 million in health care and an additional $463 million in benefit programs including disability compensation, vocational rehabilitation, education survivor's benefits, and pension programs from next year's budget. In addition to these cuts, the GOP is planning to cut $15 billion from the veteran programs over the next 10 years.
The soldiers and sailors that are currently in harms way in the the Middle East, are about to have their future veterans' benefits and health care slashed.
Common Dreams: July '06 Homelessness a Threat for Iraq Vets
Herold Noel had nowhere to call home after returning from military service in Iraq. He slept in his Jeep, taking care to find a parking space where he wouldn't get a ticket.
"Then the nightmares would start," says the 26-year-old former Army private first class, who drove a fuel truck in Iraq. "I saw a baby decapitated when it was run over by a truck -- I relived that every night."
Across America on any given evening, hundreds of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan like Noel are homeless, according to government estimates.
The reasons for their plight are many. For some, residual stress from daily insurgent attacks and roadside bombs makes it tough to adjust to civilian life; some can't navigate government assistance programs; others simply can't afford a house or apartment.
..."I'm just an ordinary person who served. I'm not embarrassed about my homelessness, because the circumstances that created it were not my fault," says Beckford, 30, who was a military-supply specialist at a U.S. base in Iraq -- a sitting duck for around-the-clock attacks "where hell was your home."
It was a "hell" familiar to Noel during his eight months in Iraq. But it didn't stop when he returned home to New York last year and couldn't find a job to support his wife and three children. Without enough money to rent an apartment, he turned to the housing programs for vets, "but they were overbooked," Noel says.
While he was in Iraq, his family had lived in military housing in Georgia.
In New York, they ended up in a Bronx shelter "with people who were just out of prison, and with roaches," Noel says. "I'm a young black man from the ghetto, but this was culture shock. This is not what I fought for, what I almost died for. This is not what I was supposed to come home to."
WP: '06 Military Confirms Pre-deployment Training Failures
Bangor Daily News: July '06: Guardsmen recall Iraq dangers:
At first, our armor was just an old Vietnam-era flak jacket bungee-corded around the door," said Cowan, a patrol sergeant with the Kennebec County Sheriff's Office.
Jewett recalled a trip to Balad with Fish in a 5-ton truck with a loose windshield and no protection but for some "hillbilly armor," or steel welded onto the side. "I got there and started looking at the vehicles and thought, oh my god, the reports on CNN and all that are true. This is crap," Jewett said of his first impression of Iraq.
But they made the best of it, he said. "What can you do? You're there so you know you have to be focused and ready to go."??
The Vietnam-era communications equipment - "glorified," unencrypted CB radios - failed regularly, leaving the men unable to contact other members of the convoys, they said. "We were running blind," Jewett said.
The poor equipment once sent the men into the dangerous heart of Mosul, after radios died and the lead gun truck missed an instruction to take a right turn.
...The communications equipment also compromised their ability to transmit back to the base. "Here we are the greatest military in the world and our communication system failed on a regular basis," Cowan said.
"You'd have extended periods of time where you didn't have any communications with the base." "Once you leave the wire, you are on your own," Jewett said.
Equipment upgrades through the Army either were too costly or required excessive paperwork, Grady said. "We were almost at the point where we were gonna all pitch in a hundred bucks apiece and buy it ourselves," he said.
This is most certainly a shameful and disgraceful record. By Cheney's standards (recruiting, retention, morale, equipment, supplies, veterans' benefits, inadequate training, unclear mission, overdeployed), George W. Bush is an unmitigated failure as Commander in Chief.
So what happened after the stunning success of "shock and awe" in 2003, at which time, by Cheney's own account, the U.S. military, as inherited by the Bush Administration, was "second to none", well-equipped and well-trained? As Cheney notes above, a Commander in Chief can do little during his tenure to improve the military, but he most certainly can do a lot to harm it:
A much easier call is where to place responsibility for all of this. It is the record of ...years of stewardship over the American armed forces ... years of neglect and misplaced priorities. ...years of multiplying missions and unclear goals. ... years during which the enemies of freedom have not been idle. link
Do you fail to support the troops if you discuss these problems and point the finger of blame at the Commander in Chief during wartime? Is it wrong to have a public debate about the status of the military during wartime? Cheney says no, flatly dismissing any assertion that those who point out the military's problems are "running down the troops". How dare anyone use such craven demagoguery to avoid taking responsibility for his own failures of leadership. Cheney's attack is withering:
...if you listened closely to his remarks..., you noticed that he did not dispute a single one of [the] assertions. Instead, he merely accused [the official] of trying to "run down America's military for political advantage." He said it was the "wrong message to send our allies and adversaries around the world."
There seems to be some confusion here. Maybe I can clear it up ...
...what lesson do [our potential adversaries] draw from the fact that this Administration has failed to safeguard our nation's most vital national secrets?
... To point out that our military has been overextended, taken for granted, and neglected - that is no criticism of the military. That is a criticism of a president and a vice president, and the record they have built together.
A great debate is taking shape. The American people are listening. And they, in the end, make the decision, as they have done before. link
This is indeed a scathing attack by Dick Cheney on George W. Bush's record as Commander in Chief. Cheney also summarily smacks down those who try to stifle debate by resorting to that tired old canard that an attack in the President is an attack on the troops. Not true, says Cheney.
I propose we adopt this as the "Cheney Doctrine for Patriots" in honor of the man who formulated it and who, I am sure, will pursue it with the utmost zeal:
1. Call for a great debate on the Bush Administration's conduct of the Iraq War.
2. Government officials who "run down the military" by neglect and gross mismanagement do not support the troops. In fact, they disrespect and abuse the troops.
3. Dissent is patriotic. Those who criticize the President do not criticize the troops. Period.