Kerry's real record on national defense
By Robert J. Caldwell
October 10, 2004
Call this a national security election. George W. Bush or John Kerry will win Nov. 2 based largely on the public's perception of which is most likely to keep America strong and secure in the face of a global terrorist threat.
Putting aside campaign spin, what's the most reliable indicator of the better national security choice in this race? What the wise voter will heed are deeds, not words.
Bush's relevant record on national security began with 9/11. After the most devastating terrorist attacks in American history, Bush ordered a global military, political, diplomatic and law enforcement offensive against al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that killed 3,000 Americans.
In a stunningly successful U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan during 2001-2002, al-Qaeda was hammered to pieces and its base camps were destroyed. Its state sponsor, the Taliban regime, was crushed and ousted. In 2003, a three-week U.S. military campaign in Iraq removed Saddam Hussein, an international outlaw, ally of Mideast terrorism and previous possessor and user of weapons of mass destruction. The bloody, and partially botched, aftermath in Iraq made the war controversial but its initial accomplishments remain.
Bush vows to finish the job in Iraq and relentlessly pursue al-Qaeda.
Kerry's 20-year voting record in the U.S. Senate constitutes the bulk of his documented national security record. What does that record tell us about John Kerry's career-long mindset on national security and American military strength? It's a question that deserves much closer scrutiny than it has received to date in this campaign.
As the newly elected junior senator from Massachusetts, Kerry arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1985 as an outspoken opponent of the Reagan-era defense buildup at the height of the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. During his 1984 Senate campaign, Kerry proposed slashing $54 billion from then-President Reagan's proposed $289 billion 1985 defense budget. Kerry's proclaimed long-range goal was to slice a Pentagon-gutting $200 billion from defense over four years.
This at a time when the Soviet Union, we know now, was lavishing up to 30 percent of its entire economic output on arms building and the military. The Reagan buildup, by contrast, moved U.S. defense spending from five percent of the U.S. economy's gross domestic product to 6.5 percent – one fifth of the Soviet Union's proportional effort.
A 1984 Kerry campaign position paper called for canceling virtually the entire Reagan defense buildup, and more. Kerry's proposed hit list of weapons systems he favored eliminating included: the Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine, the Trident I submarine, the Trident I and Trident II submarine missiles, the Midgetman and Pershing II cruise missiles, the Navy's Aegis air defense destroyer and Aegis air defense cruiser programs and production of nerve gas munitions (a counter to the Soviet Union's growing arsenals of chemical and biological weapons).
A subsequent Kerry position paper for his 1984 campaign proposed canceling an even longer list of defense projects: the MX intercontinental ballistic missile, the B-1 bomber, the missile-defense Strategic Defense Initiative, the Army's AH-64 attack helicopter, the Patriot air defense missile, reactivation of U.S. battleships, the Marines' AV-8B Harrier vertical takeoff fighter-bomber, the Air Force's F-15 fighter program, the Navy's F-14/A and F-14/D fighter aircraft programs, the Phoenix air-to-air missile and the Sparrow air-to-air missile.
The same Kerry position paper also called for a 50-percent reduction in production of the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Navy's primary long-range strike missile.
Once in the Senate, Kerry compiled a long and consistent record of voting against defense.
Kerry cast at least 10 votes from 1990 to 1996 against funding the Navy's Aegis air defense destroyers and cruisers, the backbone of the fleet's carrier escort force. In 1988, he voted to decommission two Navy aircraft carriers. From 1989 to 1996, Kerry voted 17 times to stop funding for the Air Force's B-2 Stealth bomber, the technological wonder which played central roles in the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. In 1990 and again in 1996, Kerry cast five votes to stop production and upgrades of the Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the indispensable infantry-carrying complement to the Army's M1A1 tank forces.
Kerry voted six times in 1990, 1995 and 1996 against funding for the Air Force's C-17 long-range transport aircraft, vital for providing strategic reach for U.S. forces. He voted eight times in 1990, 1995 and 1996 to eliminate funding for the Navy's F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet fighter-bombers, now the core strike strength of Navy carrier air wings. Kerry voted against further funding for the F-16, the Air Force's main tactical fighter, at least nine times in 1990, 1995 and 1996.
Kerry voted twice in 1990, on the eve of Desert Storm, to cancel the Patriot Air Defense Missile system, the Army's principal air defense weapon. Kerry opposed the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, voting twice against funding this war-winning reconnaissance and intelligence drone in 1995 and 1996.
Kerry cast four votes in 1990, 1995 and 1996 against further funding for the Navy's Tomahawk cruise missile, which proved a brilliant success in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and later in both Afghanistan and Iraq. On at least five occasions from 1990 to 1995, Kerry opposed a new amphibious assault aircraft carrier for the Navy. He voted twice against the Air Force's F-22 Raptor advanced tactical fighter and then cast at least five more votes against F-22 funding in 1995 and 1996. Kerry also opposed the F-35 strike fighter, a joint Navy-Marine-Air Force project, in 1996.
In all, Kerry opposed and voted against some 40 weapons systems that now constitute the core strength of America's armed forces. These were the arms that won the Cold War and vanquished the Soviet Union without firing a shot, that brought victory in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign at a miraculously low cost in American casualties and that now equip U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world from Korea to Bosnia.
Kerry cannot pretend that these votes were only procedural technicalities. He cannot argue that the weapons systems he opposed were merely superfluous or, after 1991, Cold War relics. In case after case, these are the weapons American forces are using today.
In fact, these votes reflected an anti-defense mindset that put Kerry well to the left of the Senate's Democratic caucus and left, too, of even Ted Kennedy. Without the high-tech, war-winning weapons that Kerry tried so hard to kill, U.S. military forces today would be far less effective against our enemies. They would be relegated to using obsolete, worn-out equipment. And they would be doomed to suffer far higher casualties.
Voters can decide whether Kerry's 20-year pattern of voting to disarm America's men and women in uniform counts more than his campaign accusations today about too little body armor for the troops in Iraq. Supremely cynical, some might say.
In 1990, the consistently dovish Kerry voted against military action by the U.S.-led coaltion, 34 nations strong, to reverse Saddam Hussein's invasion and conquest of Kuwait. Following the Gulf War and with terrorism a rising threat to America and its allies, Kerry voted to slash $6 billion from the $30 billion U.S. intelligence budget.
John Kerry quite deliberately chose to announce his candidacy last year for the Democratic presidential nomination against the backdrop of the World War II aircraft carrier Yorktown, preserved as a museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The intended message was obvious: Kerry the reborn hawk and advocate of military strength. The Democratic National Convention he crafted last August to underscore his Vietnam service (but not his anti-war radicalism after he returned) was intended to send the same signal: Kerry the warrior.
Voters must now decide which is the more reliable portrait: the warrior pose today or the 30-year record that began with Kerry's leadership of the far-left Vietnam Veterans Against the War followed by nearly two decades of voting in the U.S. Senate against defense and against a strong American military.
Caldwell, editor of Insight, can be reached via e-mail at robertcaldwell@uniontrib.com
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