His military legacy is already becoming painfully clear. Equipment, personnel, training and maintenance are all suffering from this administration's cutbacks in military spending. That fell to 77 percent under Bill Clinton. Many of these planes are being cannibalized to get spare parts to keep other F-16s flying. Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.
Pilots complain that their ground crews too often are unfamiliar with the aircraft that they fly.
The pilots themselves are getting less combat training. Rand Corporation studies have concluded that pilots flying long hours of boring duty over Iraq or troops spending time on essentially non-military duties in places like the Balkans will need more retraining to bring them back up to the level of preparedness needed for real combat. Yet these quixotic missions remain popular inside the Beltway, among the growing number of politicians and journalists who have never worn a uniform or dodged a bullet. Significantly, the only military branch that is meeting its recruiting goals is the Marine Corps, which is the only military branch that has resisted the trendy unisex basic training and other bright ideas imposed on the military by the Clinton administration. People who want a military career are not looking for careers as social workers or as guinea pigs, much less as expendable fodder for ill-defined missions to enhance a presidential image.