NO QUESTION THAT ADM. INMAN WILL DO BETTER AS HEAD OF DEFENSE

`Appointing Les Aspin secretary of defense is more than a bit like expecting a loquacious literary critic to turn out a great novel. It happens, but rarely. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee has a lot of experience talking about the Pentagon, but little running it or any other great enterprise.’

-Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Jan. 6, 1993

It’s another sign of how quick a study Bill Clinton is, and what a congealed murk Les Aspin has made of American defense policy in only 11 months, that the president should have observed the approach of Aspin’s first anniversary as secretary of defense by making it the last.

It also speaks well of the young but ever-growing president that he should choose as the country’s next secretary of defense Bobby Ray Inman, an intelligence operative who in almost every respect is the opposite of Les Aspin.

Note the differences: Adm. Inman was a career naval officer before becoming a business executive; Congressman Aspin came out of politics. The admiral is strong on experience and command, the congressman on theory and negotiation. Inman is a notoriously laconic type, Aspin an almost compulsive talker. The admiral has a reputation as a highly organized thinker who reduces complexities to decisions; Aspin has a way of expanding decisions into complexities.

And finally, Les Aspin was a hotshot in the Clinton campaign. Bobby Inman, as he had no hesitancy noting, voted for George Bush last year.

What an improvement.

Does anybody, including Les Aspin, think he resigned voluntarily? Just the Sunday before he was pushed out, Aspin was asked if he had thought of resigning, especially after the bloody fiasco he was responsible for in Somalia. “I don’t think there’s any problem,” he replied. Even as he spoke, Mack McLarty over at the White House was probably scouting out his replacement.

Days after that, the president was heaping praise on his secretary of defense while throwing him overboard: “From Bosnia to Korea, he has called them as he saw them, bringing to bear a lifetime of experience, dedication and a razor-sharp mind . . . And through it all, he has led with character, with intelligence, with wisdom, and the unflappable good humor that is both his trademark and his secret weapon.” Who says this president dares not speak of character?

I can’t remember Bill Clinton praising a subordinate so fulsomely since he accepted Terry Yamauchi’s resignation as director of the Department of Human Services in Arkansas. Nothing seems to inspire Clinton’s admiration so much as a bureaucrat who has made a thorough botch of his bureau. Our president never seems so fond of people as when he is dumping them. Remember how warmly he spoke of Lani Guinier the night he de-nominated her as assistant attorney general?

It’s not clear what Les Aspin’s fatal error was; there are so many to choose from. He did find that little ol’ $50-billion hole in the administration’s calculations about how much it would take to maintain an adequate defense. But his big problem was not that he was proving ineffective. (After all, Warren Christopher is still secretary of state.) In an administration in which appearance is all, Aspin’s sin was much graver: He appeared ineffective.

Les Aspin had come to Washington as one of Robert McNamara’s Whiz Kids back in the ’60s, and never grew up. He spent 11 successive terms in Congress instead.

John McCain, the senator from Arizona who’s just wild about Bobby Ray Inman, summed up Les Aspin’s problem succinctly: “He was an idea man when he was up here, a guy who liked to sit around and talk theory more than he liked to make decisions and issue orders.”

Aspin would have made a good adviser to a secretary of defense. Unfortunately, the unfailing Peter Principle propelled him into a job one notch above his competence. When that became widely recognized, he had to go, with the usual full honors.

If only Secretary Aspin’s faults had been confined to policy papers. Instead, even when he avoided making life-and-death decisions, he couldn’t avoid making them. Power is like that; there is no abstaining from it after one gains it. Even doing nothing is to do something, perhaps something fatal. Once he was secretary of defense, Les Aspin wasn’t leading some graduate seminar anymore-even if he acted like it. The war games had become war. It is a terrible thing to entrust a theorist with anything that real, and with real lives.

Lest we forget: Eighteen brave American fighting men lost their lives, and 75 other Rangers were wounded that Sunday in October when they were trapped at Mogadishu. Aspin had not acted on the urgent requests of commanders in the field for the kind of armored forces that could have broken through in time. Later he would express his regrets.

What a pity that Les Aspin’s departure was marked with only the usual wheelbarrow of undifferentiated praise. If only his extensive services as a theoretical analyst had led to a commission in one of the armed services, then he could have been court-martialed.

Aspin can be pardoned-he knew not what he did-but that doesn’t mean some of us simpler types can forget the lives sacrificed to his sophisticated abstractions.

About the famous Bottoms-Up Review that Aspin conducted:

The force levels recommended in the review don’t quite jibe with the administration’s budget projection. They’re off about $50 billion by Aspin’s own estimate, and from $30 to $60 billion by other accounts.

This review speaks of fielding enough forces to fight two regional wars plus unspecified other operations “nearly simultaneously” without necessarily providing those forces. Yes, it leaves large armies in place, but only on paper. It cuts back on procurement, operations, manpower and maintenance even while expanding commitments. (Shades of the Carter administration before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan woke it up.)

This review leaves the country without a strategic defense against long-range ballistic missiles, as if such a danger would never arise again. It’s the well known History-Has-Ended fallacy.

Finally, this review is inferior to the two-year study of American defense capacities by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell during the Bush administration, which proposed a considerable build-down from the defense strategy of the Reagan years, the strategy that not only broke the Soviets’ budget but the Soviets.

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Aspin’s review doesn’t even identify America’s strategic interests with any clarity, though it babbles on about using military force in some unspecified fashion to assure “a strong, competitive and growing economy.” It’s not a “bottoms-up” evaluation of American forces but a formula for their “hollowing out,” which rapidly becomes the shorthand description of the Clinton approach to the country’s defenses.

Something tells me that Bobby Ray is going to have his hands and impressive mind full over at the Pentagon. The country’s defense plans are about in the same shape Arkansas’ Medicaid program was in when Jim Guy Tucker succeeded Bill Clinton as governor, and immediately had to call an emergency session of the legislature to patch it up.

It’s a good thing Adm. Inman is said to like a challenge.