Military Service Members Wary Of Their New, Highly Inexperienced Commander-In-Chief

When asked how they feel about President-elect Barack Obama as commander in chief, six out of ten active-duty service members say they are uncertain or pessimistic, according to a Military Times survey.

In follow-up interviews, respondents expressed concerns about Obama’s lack of military service and experience leading men and women in uniform.

“Being that the Marine Corps can be sent anywhere in the world with the snap of his fingers, nobody has confidence in this guy as commander in chief,” said one lance corporal who asked not to be identified.

For eight years, members of the U.S. military have served under a Republican commander-in-chief that reflected their generally conservative views and led them to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now, the troops face change not only at the very top of the chain of command, as Obama nears his Jan. 20 inauguration, but perhaps in mission, policy and values.

Underlying much of the uncertainty is Obama’s stated 16-month timetable for pulling combat troops out of Iraq, as well as his calls to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to allow gays to serve openly in the military, according to survey responses and interviews.

“How are you going to safely pull combat troops out of Iraq?” said Air Force 1st Lt. Rachel Kleinpeter, an intelligence officer with the 100th Operations Support Squadron at RAF Mildenhall, England. “And if you’re pulling out combat troops, who are you leaving to help support what’s left? What happens if Iraq falls back into chaos? Are we going to be there in five years doing the same thing over again?”

Let’s examine, for just a moment, the chain of events that brings us to why our service men and women are circumspect about Barack Hussein Obama. I will trace the manner in which his predecessors utilized the finest military force in the world.

When Ronald Reagan became President he had only one well-defined foreign policy goal: containing the Soviet Union. He primarily wanted to stop the Russians from growing larger—as it tried to do when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979—and to keep other non-Communist countries from becoming Communist. He disliked the decade-long détente begun by President Nixon and continued by President Ford intended to ease relations with the Soviets. Reagan firmly believed that the USSR was using détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to take advantage of the United States. The "window of vulnerability" was fast approaching when Moscow would be able to launch a preemptive first strike against Washington and destroy the U.S. nuclear defensive systems.

Reagan believed that the U.S. needed to prepare its military defense systems for this onslaught and that only through military preparedness could the world achieve a stable peace. His Secretaries of State, General Alexander Haig and George Schultz, as well as his Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, among others, assisted Reagan in developing this Cold War strategy. During Reagan's two administrations, the U.S. military increased to unprecedented peacetime levels.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, he actively sought both political and economic reform in the USSR as well as an easing of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

For the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, a Soviet leader approached the United States to seriously discuss a possible peace. Despite America's blossoming relationship with Soviet Russia during Reagan's second term, the President still had to deal with many issues elsewhere in the world, namely in the Middle East and Latin America. In the 1980s, U.S. relations with many states in the Middle East were incendiary, primarily because Reagan continued to pledge support for the Jewish state of Israel at the expense of the many Muslim Palestinians living in the region.

Almost every other Middle Eastern state opposed the existence of Israel and supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization, headed by Yasser Arafat. In 1982, when Israel attacked the PLO headquarters in Beirut, President Reagan dispatched several thousand U.S. Marines to the country to serve as peacekeepers. In retaliation, a pro-Palestinian suicide terrorist bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and killed 239 Marines. The U.S. immediately retreated.

President Reagan did not back down from the Libyan terrorist attack on U.S. forces in Germany, however. Libya, too, disliked American involvement in the Middle East and funded many terrorist organizations that pledged to destroy the United States. After learning of the attack in Germany, Reagan launched a missile campaign on Libya, bombing the personal residence of Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi survived the attack, but backed away from anti-American terrorist movements.

The Reagan administration also became heavily committed in various hotspots throughout Latin America, particularly in those areas where the fight against Communism still raged. Reagan also sent 10,000 US troops to the island of Grenada in 1982 to combat the few hundred village warriors who tried to overthrow the government and establish a Socialist state. As soon as the American soldiers arrived, the conflict was over in a few hours. Surprisingly, the American public strongly approved of Reagan's decision to send in the U.S. Army. Reagan sent the troops just two days after the 239 Marines in Beirut had died, and an American victory in Latin America boosted public spirits.

The Clinton administration presided over an excessive downsizing of the U.S. military, seriously weakening the magnificent fighting machine built by Ronald Reagan and honed by George H.W. Bush. It squandered our American military might and left the country an object of scorn for its enemies, inviting them to misbehave.

The Clinton defense team did not do a good job of managing military morale, taking far too long to figure out a way to distribute an arduous workload fairly and sustainably across a smaller force. As a consequence of that ineptitude, U.S. troops became overworked and demoralized, and many left the military or considered doing so.

Clinton abandoned the old Teddy Roosevelt dictum to "speak softly and carry a big stick." Instead, he spoke as though on an endless loop tape recording while brandishing a toothpick. Under Bill Clinton, the U.S. military was seen around the world as merely large and overweight—much like a sumo wrestler hired to contain an angry mob.

While it seems that America has no stomach for a protracted war in any region of the world, the irrefutable truth is that Bush’s use of our military has protected the homeland from any further attack since that awful day on September 11, 2001.

In a Department of Defense press release dated December 11, 2001, President Bush said, "We have to think differently. The enemy who appeared on Sept. 11 seeks to avoid our strengths and constantly searches for our weaknesses. So America is required once again to change the way our military thinks and fights. The great threat to civilization is that a few evil men will multiply their murders and gain the means to kill on a scale equal to their hatred. We know they have this mad intent, and we're determined to stop them."

He said the United States will meet the threats posed by terrorists by every means. "We will discover and destroy 'sleeper' cells," he said. "We will track terrorists' movements, trace their communications, disrupt their funding and take their network apart piece by piece."

"What's different today is this sense of urgency: The need to build this future force while fighting this present war," Bush said. "It's like overhauling a car engine while you're going at 80 miles an hour. Yet we have no other choice. Our military has a new and essential mission. For states that support terror, it's not enough that the consequences are costly, they must be devastating. Our military culture must reward new thinking, innovation and experimentation," he said. "Congress must give defense leaders the freedom to innovate instead of micromanaging the Defense Department. Every service and every constituency of the military must be willing to sacrifice some of their own pet projects. Our war on terror cannot be used to justify obsolete bases, obsolete programs or obsolete weapons systems. Every dollar of defense spending must meet a single test: It must help us build the decisive power we will need to win the wars of the future."

One truth is that America's financial crisis will limit President Obama’s power to act, drawing his attention away from pressing global problems and putting strains on the overseas alliances he seeks to nurture. Though Obama is wildly popular abroad, his defense of U.S. interests will inevitably clash with those of other nations.

Consider the European Union and China. Obama needs Europe's backing to stabilize Afghanistan, combat terrorism and impede the spread of nuclear weapons. He needs firmer ties with China to shore up U.S. interests in volatile South Asia and slow global warming. But he risks alienating both powers if his administration erects trade barriers to protect American jobs, an imperative he stressed in the campaign.

The other truth is that, even with wider international support, it may be impossible for Obama to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, broker peace between Arabs and Israelis or stabilize African countries beset by civil strife. The realities on the ground are intrinsically more complex for Obama the President than presented by Obama the candidate.Obama would do well to review the bone-jarring ride Clinton got in his first year in office: Terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and an American humanitarian mission to combat famine in Somalia deteriorated and ended in a humiliating U.S. retreat.