It is a difficult position to hold, especially when sinkholes develop beneath your feet. In February, the New York Times objected to the unrealistic requirement that US forces be ready to fight two near-simultaneous regional conflicts. Within the month, the Clinton Administration had put Serbia and North Korea, more or less simultaneously, on what sounded very much like warnings of war. When presenting the new defense budge, the Administration said the force projections were even lower than prescribed by the radical Bottom-Up Review in 1993. Personnel strength will eventually drop to at least 1.3 million below the Cold War level.
Recent experience says otherwise.
In the Balkans, in Korea, and from the expanded mission in Somalia to the aborted venture in Haiti, potential uses for the armed forces arose with astonishing regularity during the first year of the Clinton Administration. US military force was used against Iraq nine times in 1993. In its annual human rights report, the State Department said that armed conflict poses the most significant risk to human rights in the world today. That is no surprise to proponents of a strong defense posture, who have said much the same thing for years. A by-product of the Cold War was that the superpowers exercised a sort of global restraint on lesser powers.