This campaign season, both the donkeys and the elephants are making a big stink over security spending. Republicans say that Sen. John Kerry has a “weak record on military affairs” because he's cast several votes against defense spending bills over the course of 6,000 votes and nineteen years in the Senate. Not to be outdone, Democrats have responded by calling Vice President Dick Cheney a weak-willed weapons weenie for his efforts to cut various military programs while he served as Secretary of Defense.
Both campaigns are trying to label the other guy as “soft” on defense because they've advocated for cuts in military spending at some point in their long careers. This is a misguided, dangerous election ploy designed to fool the American people into believing that any reduction to defense spending, no matter what the context, poses a threat to our national security. We aren't buying it, and you shouldn't either.
While Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense for the first President Bush, he presided over one of the most momentous global shifts in recent history: the end of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union had dissolved, there was a sensible movement in Washington to cut back on military spending. Secretary Cheney bowed to this movement, advocating the elimination of the F-14 and F-16 fighter jets, the M-1 Abrams tank, and the Navy A-12 fighter; and supporting major reductions in the military's B-2 Stealth Bomber, C-17 Aircraft, and Maverick Air-to-Ground Missile programs.
When defending his decision to abandon the V-22 Osprey program, Secretary Cheney told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “The reason I recommended to the Congress that we not go forward with the V-22 is costIt was a system we cannot afford and, therefore, the recommendation we made has been undertaken accordingly.” At a time when a major threat had rapidly de-escalated, Secretary Cheney's military drawdown was a commonsense policy.
In their efforts to paint John Kerry as a fainthearted liberal on issues of national security, Republicans claim that Sen. Kerry has cravenly and consistently supported cuts in weapons programs like the B-1, B-2, F-14, F-15, F-16, M-1 Abrams, AH-64 Apache, and the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, among others. Their proof? While many of Kerry's opponents, including Sen. Zell Miller at the Republican National Convention, have suggested that Kerry has opposed these weapons one by one, the truth is that most of their fodder comes from a single vote that Kerry cast against the Department of Defense appropriations bill on October 15, 1990. Among its thousands of provisions, this omnibus bill contained the annual earmarks for the F-16, B-2, and M-1, leading Republicans to make the simplistic charge that Sen. Kerry staunchly opposed these weapons programs. Yet he has voted to fund these same programs almost every year since.
Amid a hectic campaign season, it's easy for one side to take a few votes or quotes out of context and label the other “weak” on national security. This is bad politics, and it's bad policy too: as more candidates get hammered for supporting a strong, economical military, fewer politicians will stand up to oppose wasteful, unnecessary weapons programs that our armed forces don't need. This will also make it harder to close the military's $770 billion long-term budget gap.
At the end of the day, our national security depends on the effectiveness and reliability of our weapons systems, not on their price tag. Partisan attacks that focus on cost, not capability, will only serve to weaken our defenses and increase the financial burden on the military and taxpayers.
