Four years ago, Dick Cheney said: "What the Clinton-Gore administration has done is to shortchange the military, continue to impose significant burdens on them and not made the kind of investments that need to be made. The military is in trouble today." That may or may not have been true in 2000. It's definitely true today.
This leaves an opening for Kerry. He has already pledged to increase the military by 40,000, but that's not nearly enough to meet all of our commitments. Just as Bill Clinton promised in 1992 to add 100,000 police officers, so Kerry should promise to add 100,000 soldiers. This would produce about 2 1/2 divisions of combat power (50,000 soldiers) along with a lot of necessary support personnel.
Such an increase won't be cheap, but it's hardly unaffordable. To help defray expenses, Kerry could eliminate costly weapons programs, like the F/A-22 fighter and the Virginia-class submarine, that aren't needed to fight terrorists and guerrillas. This may not cover the entire bill, however, because the Congressional Budget Office estimates that each new division would cost $9 billion to create and $3 billion annually to operate. And we still need to replace aging military equipment, like 40-year-old B-52 bombers.
There is no getting around the fact that we have to spend more to fight the war on terrorism. We are spending less than 4% of our gross domestic product on the military; JFK spent about 9%, Ronald Reagan about 6%. It's hard to see how we can afford to stint on defense, because the dangers we face today are, in many ways, more immediate than those of the 1960s or 1980s.
In making this argument, Kerry will, of course, face some credibility problems. The Bush campaign is already clobbering him for voting to cut defense spending in the past. That makes it all the more imperative for Kerry to turn the "muscle gap" into a major campaign issue.
Constantly reminding voters of what he did in Vietnam more than 30 years ago isn't going to convince them that Kerry is serious about defending the nation in the future. By campaigning on a hawkish plan to expand the military, he just may make the electorate forget about his dovish votes in Congress.
