Out of control: the crisis in civil-military relations

National Interest, The, Spring, 1994 by Richard H. Kohn

But what was striking was his willingness to use his power and wield his influence, and his effectiveness in doing so. One leading national reporter called Powell "a formidable bureaucratic foe who knows how to manipulate Congress, the media, interest groups and public opinion."(4) One of his own four-stars, who worked for him on the Joint Staff, echoed this: "the master of the Washington bureaucracy."(5)

Even before assuming the chairmanship in the fall of 1989, Powell concluded that the Cold War was over and that fundamental changes in American strategy and force structure were necessary. Without any authorization from superiors, he developed a set of concepts designed to reconfigure the entire military establishment. He pushed his vision of a new national strategy and significantly reduced and revamped military services.

In effect, General Powell--not the President, nor the National Security Council, nor the Department of Defense--thought through a new national security policy for the country, one based on his own political and international forecasts about Soviet collapse, de-communization in Eastern Europe, German unification, accelerated arms reductions, lessened tensions, and a new focus by the United States on regional conflicts rather than worldwide confrontation with the Soviet Union. The General did not consult the other Chiefs and circumvented the established programming/budgeting procedures in place in the Defense Department since the early 1960s. He developed his plans without any guidance from the President or Secretary of Defense, and he sold the plan to the White House and Congress, in spite of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's initial disagreement with its assumptions about the Soviet threat and opposition from other senior Pentagon civilians.

Powell's goal was to maintain a strong defense and America's superpower status. He even went so far as to advocate a public campaign in order to forestall "a movement toward isolationism" on the part of the American people or Congress. In the spring of 1990, he set the campaign in motion. Partly he wanted to "deflect criticism that the Defense Department wasn't responding to the changed strategic situation," and partly he wished to pre-empt Senator Sam Nunn's announced intention to address the nation's new defense needs from Capitol Hill.

Powell's larger motives, however, were to establish a floor for the defense cuts he knew to be inevitable, and to work out a coherent strategy and force structure which would prevent the kind of helter-skelter, debilitating reductions common to previous demobilizations after American wars. The result, according to the historian of his effort, "was the first change in national strategy in over forty years and a commitment to restructure the armed forces to support that strategy." Thus in the first two years as Chairman, without guidance from above, Powell pushed through the most significant changes in our military establishment since the 1940s.(6)

Powell was only filling a vacuum, because George Bush's National Security Council, James Baker's State Department, and Dick Cheney's Defense Department were so devoid of a vision of the future international system, that their only response to the growing pressures from Congress and the public for new foreign and national security policies was a slogan called "the new world order" and Powell's temporarily salable 25 percent reduction of the military establishment. The irony of Powell's power was that Secretary Cheney apparently came into his office in 1989 extremely sensitive to civilian control, having been told by congressional colleagues that the military were out of control under Caspar Weinberger. Cheney, determined to assert his authority, thereupon publicly lashed out at his Air Force Chief of Staff for negotiating on his own--"freelancing"--a deal with Congress over strategic weapons. The charge was untrue, which Cheney soon learned (if he did not know beforehand), but he kept up the pressure by privately reprimanding the CINC-SAC for his public statements. The following year Cheney summarily fired Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Dugan for statements reported in the press about targeting during the Gulf War. Many in the Air Force to this day suspect Powell of encouraging the sacking because General Dugan had visited the war theater before the Chairman, taking reporters along with him, and because Dugan had proved to be an all-too-effective advocate for air power.(7)