President Bush has officially put a stake into the heart of the “peace dividend”—all that money we were going to save because the Cold War ended. Bush now says he believes the Army and Marine Corps should be expanded.
With the world the way it is, a lot of people agree with Bush. But take a look back to the days of his father’s administration and the presidency of Bill Clinton. The world was a nasty place then, too. But during that period, we went through years of declining military budgets. For my book “Clear Moral Objectives,” I built a timeline of what was happening in the world and how we addressed those events with our Defense Department budgets.
Pick up the story with newly-sworn-in President Bill Clinton’s first budget, submitted on March 27, 1993. He asked for $263.4 billion—$10 billion less than the final budget under the first President Bush. The budget scrapped most funds for President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, called “Star Wars” by the media. |