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Option C proposed to cut the Base Force by eight more Air Force wings, three more Army divisions, and 110 more ships. Some of his options were more extreme than others, but Aspin signaled that the one he meant to be taken seriously (“the most prudent and promising,” he called it) was Option C. He described these in a February 1992 report to the House Armed Services Committee. Not satisfied with the Base Force projections, Aspin developed “four illustrative options” of his own for sizing the armed forces. He said that “American concern about economic threats means that the new American force must be a less expensive one” and that it “must be created from the bottom up, not just by subtracting 25 or 30 or 50 percent from the old Cold War structure.” The Base Force, he said in a speech to the Atlantic Council in January 1992, “did not represent a new conceptual approach for a new security era but was essentially ‘less of the same,’ that is, a downsized force largely shaped by Cold War priorities.” Numerous overseas bases were to be closed, and US forces in Europe would be cut by half.Īspin was not impressed. They also adopted a new force structure-called the “Base Force”-that would reduce military strength by about 25 percent over six years. Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the concurrence of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.Īt the end of the Cold War, Powell and Cheney had revamped the defense strategy to focus on regional conflict. His ideas found favor with Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, whose campaign Aspin joined as an advisor.Īs Aspin readily acknowledged, the armed forces were already several years into a major drawdown, instigated by Gen.
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By 1992, he was committed to a very deep reduction of the defense budget and a restructuring of the armed forces. He had supported the Bush Administration on the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but he hammered the Pentagon regularly. Aspin had been in Congress since 1970 and was a leading voice on defense matters. In fact, it went on to shape the defense programs for the rest of the 1990s.īut that gets ahead of the story, which began earlier when Aspin was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.Īspin had been a Rhodes scholar, an economics professor, and, for a short time in the 1960s, was a systems analyst in the Pentagon for Secretary of Defense Robert S.
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There was a torrent of criticism, but Aspin stood by the Bottom-Up Review, and it became policy. To make matters worse, Aspin admitted that the budget he had announced in March wouldn’t cover even the scaled-down program proposed in his report. The report called for a substantially reduced force structure, but thus cut, the force could not meet its specified responsibilities.
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No solution had been found when the report was published in October. The Joint Staff struggled through the summer to bridge the gap between Aspin’s arbitrary budget and a credible defense program. That and other details would be worked out in a “Bottom-Up Review” to follow. Incredibly, he made his cut without calculating the impact the reduction would have on force capability. In March 1993, Les Aspin, the new Secretary of Defense, announced a whopping cut to the defense budget. The Bottom-Up Review, completed 10 years ago this month, is one of the stranger episodes in the annals of Pentagon force planning.īriefly, what happened was this.