[R-G] Military fears 'unknown quantity'

[Anthony Fenton]

Article published Feb 26, 2008
Military fears 'unknown quantity'
http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080226/NATION/ 
476716884/1001&template=printart

February 26, 2008

By Rowan Scarborough - Members of Washington's military and defense  
establishment are expressing trepidation about Sen. Barack Obama, as  
the Illinois senator comes closer to winning the Democratic  
presidential nomination and leads in national polls to become  
commander in chief.

But his backers, including a former Air Force chief of staff, say the  
rookie senator believes in a strong military, and with it, a larger  
Army and Marine Corps.


"Any military person who concludes he's a left-wing, hair-on-fire,  
Kumbaya child of the '60s has sadly misunderestimated him, to use  
George Bush's term," said retired Gen. Merrill McPeak.

Still, the mostly conservative retired officers, industry executives  
and current defense officials interviewed by The Washington Times  
cite Mr. Obama's lack of experience in national security. They also  
point to his determination to pull American combat units from Iraq at  
a time when a troop surge has reduced violence, damaged al Qaeda and  
allowed the Iraqi government to progress toward Sunni-Shia-Kurd  
reconciliation.

"We're very concerned about his apparent lack of understanding on the  
threat of radical Islam to the United States," said retired Air Force  
Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who is pro-Iraq war and a Fox News  
analyst. "A lot of retired senior officers feel the same way."

Mr. Obama also has stirred concern in national security circles by  
pledging to talk to the leaders of rogue nations, such as Iran and  
North Korea, without preconditions.

His urging of the Bush administration to conduct air strikes against  
terrorist targets in Pakistan without its approval is privately  
derided inside the Pentagon as the way to ruin relations with a good  
ally. Pakistan will not allow U.S. combat troops to operate on its soil.

Questions about Mr. Obama's commander-in-chief qualifications have  
reached the campaign trail. The Obama camp Wednesday sent out one of  
its advisers, former State Department official Susan Rice, to respond  
to charges from Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee.

Meanwhile, Mark Penn, chief strategist for Sen. Hillary Rodham  
Clinton, held a conference call with reporters to say the campaign  
will make the president's role as commander in chief a top issue  
leading up to March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio.

Lawrence Korb, a military analyst at the Center for American Progress  
and one of a dozen or so national security advisers to the Obama  
campaign, rebutted the lack-of-experience complaint, saying neither  
President Bush nor John F. Kennedy could claim an extensive national  
security background before entering the White House.

Unlike Mr. Obama, though, both men served in the military.

"I think Obama would be very good." Mr. Korb said. "I think the job  
of the commander in chief is to listen to all of the inputs he gets  
and then have a sense of world history and the way the world works,  
and to be able to apply the advice he gets from his military people.  
Remember, Obama was one of the first ones to support a larger  
military, a larger Army and Marine Corps, well before the  
administration did."

Mr. Obama has visited Iraq and other nations as a Senate Foreign  
Relations Committee member.

No other Obama proposal brings more military criticism than his plan  
to bring home one to two combat brigades per month from Iraq —  
meaning all such units would be out by the end of 2009, his first  
year in office.

A senior Pentagon official said an Obama swearing-in "will give the  
Arab street the final victory, the best optics, and the ultimate in  
bragging rights. They win. We lose."

Retired Army Gen. John Keane, an architect of the Iraq troop surge,  
worries that talk of a U.S. pullout makes reconciliation more  
difficult. Gen. Keane has not endorsed any presidential candidate.

"Anyone who is advocating a precipitous pullout of U.S. forces,  
believing this will be a catalyst for political progress, does not  
understand the realities of Iraq and the minds of the key political  
leaders," Gen. Keane told The Washington Times. "The U.S. military  
presence is the glue that is holding things together in Iraq and is  
the fundamental reason for the recent political progress. If you  
remove this presence, the political leaders in Iraq will believe they  
are on their own and will fall prey to their own fears and  
paranoia. ... They will bunker down and the political progress will  
come to a dead stop."

Mr. Korb said Mr. Obama has a "technically sound" proposal for  
withdrawing troops. He said that the candidate realized before the  
war, unlike many politicians in Washington, that things would go  
wrong in Iraq.

"If you go back and you look at the speech he gave on Iraq before the  
war, I think that it was very well reasoned and well argued," the  
adviser said.

As a state senator in 2002, Mr. Obama said, "I know that even a  
successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of  
undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined  
consequences."

Gen. McPeak, who is an Obama campaign co-chairman, said the senator's  
intelligence will dazzle the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I think Obama is going to be an outstanding commander in chief, not  
just an ordinary commander in chief," he told The Washington Times.  
"He has the potential to be one of the all-time greats. I think the  
senior military will learn that about him starting from the first  
minute he occupies the Oval Office. ... There's no question that he  
is kind of scary smart. I think just plain intelligence is a very  
good quality to have in a commander in chief."

Gen. McPeak said it is a "fair comment" that Mr. Obama is viewed  
skeptically by senior officers. The general, who led the Air Force  
during the historic Desert Storm bombing of Iraq in 1991, believes  
the second war was unnecessary. He switched from Republican to  
Democrat in protest.

"I think that's undoubtedly true that the surge has reduced the  
violence there," he said. "But at the strategic level they did not  
set the initial conditions properly and therefore we can never be a  
success."

Defense industry executives worry that Mr. Obama will end six years  
of defense budget increases and, as he has repeatedly said on the  
campaign trail and in debates, tap into war and military funds to  
support his plan for universal health care.

"We've got some trepidation. There is no track record," said an  
industry executive of the first-term senator. "He's an unknown  
quantity and that scares us a little bit."

The National Journal ranked Mr. Obama as the Senate's most liberal  
member in 2007, based partly on his string of votes in favor of  
amendments that mandated a combat troop pullout from Iraq.

Mr. Obama does, however, acknowledge that America is in a war against  
extremists.

"The terrorists are at war with us," he said in "The War We Need to  
Win," a major policy speech. "They seek to create a repressive  
caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are  
fighting against, and what we are fighting for."

One of his five pillars for winning is, "getting out of Iraq and on  
to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The Obama campaign has assembled a team of national security  
advisers, most of whom worked in the Clinton administration,  
including former national security adviser Anthony Lake. To date, Mr.  
Obama has attracted few retired admirals and generals as supporters.

Mrs. Clinton has the backing of two dozen flag officers. "She knows  
and respects our armed forces," said Lee Feinstein, her campaign's  
national security director. "She is the person in this race who is  
most qualified to be commander in chief."

But Loren Thompson, who runs the Lexington Institute and stays in  
touch with defense industry executives, said Mr. Obama is difficult  
to categorize.

"His views are all over the map depending on whether its nuclear  
proliferation, energy independence or the global war on terror," he  
said. "How many liberals say they are going to bomb al Qaeda in  
Pakistan no matter whether the Pakistanis like it or not? He's much  
harder to pin down."