John Singlaub - vice president, America National Network; Major General USA-Ret; former chief of staff, U.S. Forces in Korea; expert in counter insurgency and guerrilla warfare; author; awarded 33 military decorations including the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster. 

I'm delighted to have this chance to speak to a group of friends. That's not always the case when I'm speaking on the subjects I like to talk about.

In order to talk about the defense decline in the United States, it's important that we understand what the mission of the armed forces of the United States really is. It sometimes is a bit blurred as we look at what is happening to our armed forces these days.

The mission of the armed forces of the United States is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. The armed forces do this by deterring war and, when deterrence fails, by achieving quick, decisive victory, on or off the battlefield, anywhere in the world, under virtually any conditions. Now, that's a fairly straightforward mission, and it is important to bear that in mind as we examine what has been happening.

The citizens of the United States have a right to expect that the Department of Defense, which is the civilian link between the Commander-in-Chief, the President, and the war-fighting commands of the armed forces, has provided them with adequate but not excessive resources to accomplish their missions.

Unfortunately, the absence of a clear and coherent foreign and defense policy based upon American national interests and American principles has made it difficult to know if our defensive forces are adequate to fill the assigned mission. It's important to take a look at recent history to know where we stand today, to look at our armed forces and how they came to be in the situation that they're in today. The Cold War just didn't disappear. The Cold War didn't just go away because communism died or because the communist leadership throughout the world had a change of heart and decided to join the free world and the nations which practice free enterprise.

The fact is, it was won. It was won as a result of policies established by Ronald Reagan in his first term.

Three policies in particular contributed directly to this victory in the Cold War.

First of all, President Reagan restored the armed forces of the United States to a credible defense posture from the level to which they had sunk during four years under Jimmy Carter.

This reinvigoration of the armed forces was not only known and appreciated by the armed forces themselves. It certainly was a great increase in their morale, but it was also noticed by our allies and our potential enemies, as well. There was no concealing this. It was a well-recognized fact that the armed forces were now being equipped not only with the right weapons but were being given adequate operational funds so they could train in the use of these weapons. The facilities where they lived and where they worked were being refurbished after so many years of deferred maintenance.

President Reagan also established a second policy. He insisted that the United States should defend itself against enemy missile attack, rather than have a policy that was simply a matter of avenging or retaliating for an attack against the United States.

One of his first steps was to repudiate or discredit Robert McNamara's policy of mutual assured destruction, an idea that was not good when it was first introduced into our defense establishment, but certainly made no sense as nuclear proliferation increased.

President Reagan adopted General Danny Graham's High Frontier concept of using our advanced technology to create a space-based ballistic missile defense system. Danny Graham, as some of you know, collected a group of scientists and said, "Let's see what kind of a technological end run we can make around the Soviets to overcome their overwhelming superiority in ballistic missile attack capability."

They came up with the concept of building a defense which would detect missiles shortly after launch and shoot them down before they had a chance to fall back into the atmosphere, or to render them so damaged that, when falling into the atmosphere, they would burn up.

President Reagan converted that concept, which originated in High Frontier, to the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Department of Defense was directed to establish an office headed by a lieutenant general. Later, at one point, it was headed by Ambassador Hank Cooper. This idea, that we were going to defend ourselves, put the Soviet general staff in shock.

President Reagan withstood the great pressure placed upon him at Reykjavik by Chairman Gorbachev, who tried to insist that if we wanted to get along in this period of glasnost, it was important that we discontinue our very provocative plans to build a ballistic missile defense system.

The President replied that he intended to build that system to defend against any unintentional launch of missiles from the Soviet Union and, in fact, to make sure that he understood that this was purely defensive, he was prepared to share the technology with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet generals informed Chairman Gorbachev that if we built that defense system, it would render their entire strategic rocket force useless.

They could no longer count on a first strike capability which was essential to their ability to use their conventional forces, their massive armored forces in Europe.

That policy, established by Ronald Reagan, started the unraveling inside the general staff at the Soviet command headquarters. I've had a chance, in recent years, to speak to some of those who served on that general staff in Moscow. They attested to the importance of that decision and that policy of President Reagan.

The third major policy that contributed to the defeat of the Cold War forces was the implementation of what became known as the Reagan Doctrine.

I've long been an advocate of special operations and of unconventional warfare. Some of you may remember that in 1981 I gave a talk in which I suggested that the captive nations within the Soviet Empire are our greatest allies and that we ought to be making an effort to inform them that we looked upon them in that way and that there was some hope for them in the future.

Later, Dr. Jack Wheeler proposed a change in the policy of the United States from that of containment to a roll-back of the Iron Curtain. That is, to provide freedom to those enslaved by the Evil Empire. Not only to provide assistance to those who wanted to remain free, but to allow those who had already been enslaved to become free.

These policies, implemented by or through Bill Casey, the director of Central Intelligence, provided aid to the Afghan freedom fighters. Casey did this by encouraging some of the other Muslim nations to make direct contributions, reimbursed in some cases by the United States. We provided aid to the anti-communist forces in Cambodia by encouraging Singapore to take action there.

Many of you know in detail the efforts we made to provide assistance to the Nicaraguan resistance. We, in the course of CNP meetings, heard reports directly from resistance leaders Adolfo Calero and Enrique Bermudez on the progress of that effort, which was clearly a matter of presidential policy even though some of the radical liberals in the Congress attempted to curtail our efforts in that regard.

The United States provided help to Jonas Savimbi in UNITA, the anti-communist resistance force in Angola. And as you know, there were secret meetings between Ronald Reagan and the Pope in which he gave encouragement to the Pope to give encouragement and help to the anti-communist resistance in Poland.

Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, based in Munich, Germany, reported these activities and gave encouragement to those inside the Soviet Union. The end result was great unrest and great internal pressures. Perestroika and glasnost were officially announced, and an attempt was made to relax Soviet political control while retaining economic controls. This further added to the unraveling.

In any case, the Cold War victory produced some significant results. Unlike other world wars, however, and I say "other" because the Cold War was a world war, was a total war. It didn't involve the armed forces of the United States in open conflict with the armed forces of the Soviet Union or the other communist countries, but it was a total war and a worldwide conflict.

In World War I and later in World War II, Germany and Japan were completely destroyed. That is, their industry and their infrastructure were reduced to ruins as a result of the conflict. And that contributed to their willingness to surrender.

Their weapons were destroyed and those that were not destroyed in combat were seized and destroyed by the victorious armed forces. Their armed forces were deliberately demobilized and limits placed upon where they could be employed. The national treasures, that is, the bank accounts of the enemy nations were seized wherever they were, to the best of our ability, and those funds were used for the rehabilitation and the rebuilding that was under our control and, in some cases, in our image.

In the Cold War victory, however, we found that much of the gold, that is, the national treasure, was transferred to the party rather than being held in the government that was being changed.

The party renamed itself. That is, the Communist Party no longer used the words "Communist Party." They called themselves "Socialists" or "Social Democrats," or some other combination, but they did not use the word "communist," initially. The party maintained control of the guns as well as the gold. That is, they usually had control of the armed forces in these countries, and they had the control of the national police and certainly the internal security forces. They were retained in the hands of the party. As they realigned themselves after our Cold War victory to deal with the West, they needed entrepreneurs and people who knew how to do business in a free enterprise society. Unfortunately, in a socialist state the only entrepreneurs were black marketeers. Because black marketing was an essential part of survival in a communist country, these people were not only allowed to operate but they gained great power. Today, we find that they are in fact in charge. We sometimes hear them referred to as the Soviet or the Russian mafia. They were able quickly to seize assets that belonged to the state as it sold them. They banked billions of dollars in foreign banks, great quantities of treasure, gold and hard currencies banked in France, Germany and particularly in Switzerland.

Well, this is a difference in this particular victory of ours. It's different, and it affects what our future threat might be.

We ought to recognize certain benefits of this Cold War victory. First, we had the disappearance or the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which was one of the greatest threats to the security of Western Europe. It was a very powerful, tank-heavy force that had the capabilities of rolling over the north German plain and occupying Germany, the Lowlands, and France in a matter of hours if it was not stopped. That caused us to form a NATO force able to deter such an attack.

This disappearance of the Warsaw Pact reduced the requirement for U.S. heavy divisions and air forces in Europe. It reduced the requirement for the NATO-reinforcing units we maintained here in the continental United States, ready to go take up their role in the defense of Western Europe. It reduced the requirement for airlift and for sea-lift to reinforce NATO, and it reduced the requirement for the strategic air and naval strike forces that were targeted to support NATO defense.

There was another benefit to our Cold War victory. That is, it withdrew military support previously provided by the former Soviet Union to some of its proxies and surrogates, such as North Korea. North Korea depended very heavily upon the Soviet Union for its advanced technology since its falling out with the Peoples Republic of China. Vietnam depended heavily upon the Soviet Union. Cuba, Ethiopia and many others, including the Peoples Republic of China were dependent on or received some military support from the former Soviet Union. That is no longer available. This has an impact upon the size force that we need to defend ourselves.

With these benefits there were some burdens of the Cold War victory, of the particular type of Cold War victory we had. We find that impoverished military forces have been forced to conduct "fire sales" of any and all types of weapon systems. They're willing to sell them to the highest bidder, and this has made an incredible proliferation of all types of weapons. If you want to buy a MiG-29, the latest fighter, I can get them for you wholesale.

The same impoverished military forces are now freelancing and serving as mercenaries in other parts of the world, again complicating the relationships we have.

Another burden is that the military forces from the Warsaw Pact area have no place to go. That is, they have no home. They had been in east Europe for so long, in the Balkans and in Poland and Ukraine, that they had no place to go. So the United States decided to build homes for these officers back in the Soviet Union, so that they would be willing to withdraw.

The breakup of the former Soviet Union caused the loss of control of many nuclear warheads and missiles based in parts of the former Soviet Union over which the current Russian government does not exercise control. The proliferation of nuclear and of chemical and biological weapons is widespread and, unfortunately, increasing. Forces formerly under the strict control of the Soviet Union are now freelance. Nuclear scientists and engineers are now working for rogue nations to help produce new nuclear weapons or to refine the nuclear weapons they have already received in those rogue nations.

The combination of these burdens and benefits makes the evaluation of the official threat analysis very difficult. But we must conclude, however, that there remains a significant threat to the United States from the former Soviet Union and from the People's Republic of China.

Let's take a look at the current situation in this post-Cold War period.

Under President Bush, Secretary Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell took significant steps at downsizing the armed forces worldwide. They reduced the forces stationed in Europe. They took steps to eliminate the air-land-sea forces, whose missions were exclusively related to the defense of NATO. And as we know, they closed and realigned military bases worldwide. They declared a peace dividend, which was to benefit our people and enabled us to contemplate significant tax reductions.

With the Gulf War, we demonstrated the advantages of having forward-deployed forces. That is, those forces that were in Europe were much more readily available for action and use in the deserts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This quick response was essential to the success of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. It certainly justified the retention of forces in Europe for NATO actions outside of the European area. We found that our pre-positioned stores of equipment and ammunition that we had available in Germany and on the Island of Diego Garcia were very, very useful and perhaps ought to be maintained for future contingencies.

The Gulf War was what is called, in modern military terminology, a "major regional conflict," or a "major regional contingency," or MRC, as the acronym is bantered about in the planning circles in the Pentagon. We executed that Gulf War without seriously degrading our capability to reinforce and handle an attack in Korea, and that is a significant point. The national security strategy of the United States specifies that the United States must be prepared to engage in two of these major regional conflicts simultaneously.

This was confirmed by a study prepared by President Clinton's first Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, in what he called his "bottom-up review." He took a look, disregarding what we had, and asked, "What do we need? What are our missions? Let's develop a force to satisfy the requirements of those missions." And that confirmed the need for the ability to handle two MRCs simultaneously.

Of course, the logic of this is simple. If you get involved in a Gulf War, it certainly would reduce our ability to deter conflicts elsewhere, and it would be a signal if we could only handle one at a time. If we got involved in Korea, that would be a time for Saddam Hussein to act up again. We must have that capability. But, unfortunately, in today's defense appropriations and in today's implementation of these policies by the current Defense Department, we have insufficient forces and resources allocated to retain this capability.

What is the record of the Clinton administration? You'll recall that President Clinton, as a candidate, promised to cut defense spending by $60 billion over a five-year period. Yet when he got into office, his first budget doubled that cut, to $127 billion. In addition, the Clinton administration attempted to turn the defense budget into a multi-purpose slush fund, proposing to finance some non-defense initiatives and some questionable State Department initiatives, such as industrial policy ventures, paying for U.N. peacekeeping operations, and so forth.

Military equipment modernization was devastated. It has reached the lowest level since the Korean War. And while reducing the forces and resources, the military has been dispatched to more overseas commitments than ever before.

Forty percent of the army's operational force is forward-deployed. That is, outside the United States. Today a soldier in an operational unit can expect to be away from his home or his bunk in the barracks for more than 138 days every year. That's over four and a half months every year, year after year.

During this period of defense budget slashing, the Clinton Pentagon took for itself a 22 percent increase in civilian officials assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, while, at the same time, the combat force structure was being cut by 40 percent, and real spending by 34 percent.

How does this compare with the past?

Well, defense spending has been declining for some years. It's now declined to be just 16 percent of the total federal expenditures. In the past, 25 percent was normal; during war time, it went up to 45 to 50 percent of federal expenditure. Defense spending as a part of the gross domestic product is the lowest it has been since World War II, at 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product. It is scheduled to go to 2.7 percent. Few countries have that low a part of their gross domestic product devoted to defense.

As a result of Clinton's policies, are we better off? Are we fully protected?

How many times during the political campaign did you hear the President say, "Tonight not a single Russian missile is pointed at the children of America." He said that at least 84 separate times in the course of the campaign.

According to Russian Colonel General Igor Sergieff, who is the commander-in-chief of their Strategic Rocket Forces and who spoke 60 Minutes, the missiles can be retargeted and launched from his war room, most of them within a matter of minutes. Other senior Russian military leaders have acknowledged that. The two presidents did in fact sign that agreement, and it was a very fine public relations gimmick. But the submarine missiles can be retargeted in less than one hour, without the submarines even having to return to their bases.

Our President's statements about how secure we are also included the missiles of the People's Republic of China. Of course, that's not what the Chinese communists are saying. A senior Chinese leader told the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Charles Freeman, in January, 1996, that they felt that they could attack Taiwan without fear of U.S. intervention because American leaders care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan. Now, this is a clear and obvious threat to use nuclear weapons against an ally of the United States, which the President and his co-conspirators in the media have kept secret from U.S. citizens.

These deceptions by the President are designed to take attention away from the basic flaw in our defense readiness. As many of you know but very few other Americans understand, today the United States is completely defenseless against long-range missile threats. Yet ballistic missile threats are real and growing. More than 25 countries, including North Korea, Iran, Libya, Iraq, and Syria currently possess or are seeking to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons warheads. In 1996, Congress passed the Defend America Act that once again called for a ballistic missile defense system for the United States, but the White House has directed the Secretary of Defense to ignore it.

To make matters worse, Russia has a new version of the Akoola nuclear attack submarine. It's very quiet, with long detection ranges, and is greatly feared by the United States Navy. But they're continuing to build these submarines and improve them. The Nunn/Lugar Bill makes this possible, providing the Russians money so they can use their money to build new submarines and use our money to destroy the ones that are obsolete. I'm not sure I really understand that.

Russian nuclear weapons structure is completely out of control. We think we have a nonproliferation agreement with them, but their nuclear engineers are going to work for anyone. The pay their Russian engineers get in Iran, for example, is something like ten times what they're receiving in the former Soviet Union.

Russia is also cheating on chemical weapons, the chemical weapons treaty. They claim that they can't afford to destroy the weapons. Again, the Nunn/Lugar Bill gives them the money to destroy the old World War II vintage materials -- mustard gas and so forth -- that are not very useful these days. Of course, the Soviet Union does not bother to report the two non-toxic chemicals which, when combined in what we call a binary weapon, become a very dangerous poisonous gas. That's a system of safety that we introduced in our weapons. The Soviets use it, and they have chosen not to report those two chemicals which, when combined as they are when the weapon explodes, become a very deadly poison.

As a part of our flawed arms-control agreements with the former Soviet Union, the U.S. has destroyed its chemical weapons. The U.S. has therefore nothing to use to deter attack by rogue nations, including parts of the former Soviet Union.

The President has claimed he favors a theater-nuclear defense system. He admits it is essential to protect the United States and its allies from short-range non-strategic missiles. Yet he has failed to allow our armed services to spend the minimum amount appropriated by the Congress for these systems in the last budget. This has forced some congressmen to initiate a lawsuit against the President for having violated the law.

As with the National Strategic Defense System, America has no defense except the antiquated Patriot missile, which was built to defend against aircraft and not missiles. The fact that it was only marginally useful in the Gulf War was very clearly demonstrated by the fact that we suffered many casualties from missiles that had been hit by a Patriot but fell on our forces or in downtown Tel Aviv anyway.

This deficiency in theater-missile defense has been very significant. It has had an impact on the strategic situation in Korea today. North Korea has learned very well the lessons of the Gulf War. The United States can kill more tanks faster that they can afford to lose them in a conventional attack. That is, we would tear up ten times the number of tanks than they were previously prepared to lose in the course of a day. They have concluded that launching a major tank-heavy attack to seize Seoul, and to drive to Pusan, is not feasible against our current conventional capability.

North Korea has looked for other vulnerabilities of the combined U.S.-Korean Command in Seoul. They have determined that there are many vulnerabilities there. For example, there is no defense against Scuds and their newer missiles which can hit any part of Korea and a great deal of Japan. The Combined Forces Command depends very heavily upon aircraft and airfields to deliver its combat power. Another vulnerability. They also have determined that the headquarters in Seoul of the Combined Forces Command is surrounded by roughly 11 million civilians. And the Combined Forces Command depends upon high usage of electronics and computers. So the North Koreans have recently changed their strategies, their tactics, their weapons and their organization.

Now they intend to use chemical and biological weapons in an attack against the headquarters of the Combined Forces Command, which is surrounded by a large number of civilians, use them against airfields in the southern part of Korea, and to threaten to use them against the airfields in Japan. Their plans consider the delivery of these initial chemical attacks by special operations forces.

We saw their capabilities demonstrated recently as they were practicing this type of attack when the North Koreans beached one of their small submarines that was infiltrating some of the special- operations forces for training and exercises against South Korea, determining details of their vulnerability. They will then, perhaps on the second day, deliver their massive attack by missiles and artillery against the Combined Forces Command. And they intend to use informational warfare, a new concept which is brought about by the incredible success of some of the hackers in the United States, to penetrate and to destroy the computers of the very, very highly-automated Combined Forces Command in Seoul.

Other very destructive Clinton policies involve the social experimentation he has been conducting within the armed forces of the United States. I'd like to discuss these in detail, but I think I've run out of time. I refer specifically to the fact that we have homosexuals in the armed forces, which is totally incompatible with the mission of the armed forces. This President has insisted that women be given roles in combat. Again, this contributes nothing to the security of the United States and has created only problems. This social experimentation has forced us to retain in the armed forces over one thousand individuals who are HIV-positive, which is just an incredible outrage.

He has instituted policies within the Department of Defense, in answer to pressure from the National Organization for Women and other "femi-nazis," in the form of limiting future assignments and promotions for anyone who was associated in any way with the Tailhook Convention some years ago. Again, I would like to discuss what must be done. But time does not permit.

Even if Republicans had won the presidential election, I'm not encouraged by the number of people that would move into positions in the Department of Defense and the Department of State who are truly dedicated Christian conservatives. I think we have an obligation to train more people, more of our young people, for future roles. We have now four years to get started and to accomplish that.