[File date: 9/15/92] PLEASE DISTRIBUTE Remarks by Governor Bill Clinton National Guard Association Convention Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, Utah September 15, 1992 Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, General Ryan, distinguished officers here at the podium, and Congressman Aspin, Congressman McCurdy, Representative Owens and Senator Moss. I'm glad to see all of you here, and very honored that you asked me to be here. I appreciate your permitting my adjutant general to introduce me. That was another illustration of Clinton's second law of politics, which is, whenever possible, be introduced by someone you've appointed to high office. They will always exaggerate your virtues. From the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord to the heroic Guardsmen and women who were critical to our victory in the Persian Gulf War, you have done your part to keep this nation's ancient commitment to preserve the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity. This morning I want to talk to you, the citizen- soldiers of America, as soldiers and as citizens. One of my proudest duties as governor is to be commander in chief of our National Guard. They have always been a source of great pride and honor to all the people of our state, whether fighting in the Gulf War, training in Europe or Central America, or saving the people of our state from misery and death. In war and in peace, whether serving in Desert Storm or helping your fellow citizens get their lives back together, you uphold the mottoes of the National Guard. You are neighbors helping neighbors. You were Americans at their best. You were always ready, always there. I never know to what extent my own speech produces these bizarre results. My father-in-law actually had a heart attack during my inaugural address in 1983, and when he woke up in the hospital, I told him it wasn't that good a speech. At any rate, I'm glad to be back in touch. Our state mobilized 3,000 people, and sent 2,200 personnel overseas in support of the effort to remove Saddam Hussein. How's this? Congressman McCurdy said this is just another reason why we shouldn't cut the Guard budget too much. At any rate, our state was proud to provide the third- largest number of Guard personnel of any state in the country to the Middle East during the Gulf War. We were proud of all of them, but especially proud of the 142nd field artillery brigade which performed superbly in combat, serving with both American and British troops in the liberation of Kuwait. When they came home, some of our men and women faced additional hardships in reduced pay or job losses. I worked hard to protect them as well as we could. In our state, we passed a law which made up the difference for state employees between their state salary and their Guard pay while they were gone. We encouraged our private employers to do the same; provided grace periods on taxes for Arkansans who served in Desert Storm; and established family assistance centers and support groups to ease the considerable hardships of those whose loved ones were called to serve. I never will forget seeing unit after unit off. And I saw one group of three in the same family, two brothers and a sister, the children of a man who had made a career in the National Guard. I saw one single mother with four children on her way to the Persian Gulf, with her oldest child taking care of the other three. They were remarkable stories. And when those people came home, we gave them a welcome-home celebration with 100,000 people in the streets of Little Rock, a city that has a population of 178,000. It was the biggest celebration in my lifetime. The National Guard in my state in this country has been just as important in peace as in war. In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, in the best tradition of neighbors helping neighbors, Guard units from neighboring states worked with their counterparts in Florida and Louisiana to come to the aid of people who had lost everything. Our National Guard opened armories as collection points for food and supplies, and sent two convoys to Louisiana to help those who had been hit hard there. In times of emergency in our own state, I've called on the Guard to help with missions from helping communities recover from ice storms and floods and deathly sweeping tornadoes, to destroying buildings used by drug dealers, to putting down a riot by refugees at Ft. Chafee in 1980. And I know that is typical of the good work which has been done by the Guard in every state in this country, and often in situations that require the highest order of skill and sensitivity, such as was required of the California National Guard when they helped to restore order after the disturbances in Los Angeles. You are the nation's oldest military service, and well aware that now, in the aftermath of the Cold War, crucial decisions are being made and a great debate is underway about how to meet our national security needs in this new era. Now that the Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union is no more, leaders from the administration and from Congress and from both political parties agree that we must scale back our armed forces. The question is, how we should do it, and what kind of force structure we need to maintain the world's strongest defense. For while we no longer face a hostile superpower, we do face challenges in a changing and still dangerous and perhaps even more chaotic world. The challenges we face are less predictable, but no less real. We still must have the best equipped and best trained military to meet today's threats. We have to shift the focus of our military to meet the real threats that we face today and those we think we are likely to face tomorrow: aggressive tyrants like Saddam Hussein; new regional conflicts; ethnic and racial strife that could spread beyond the borders of particular nations; terrorism and the threat of proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. A major threat we will have to face for several years to come. Our forces must be more mobile, more precise, and more flexible, and they must have the technologically advanced weapons they need to prevail and to prevail quickly. That is why I support more emphasis on some weapons systems, including the V-22, and fast sealift and airlift. I will never allow a hollow Army. It is true, as the president said this morning, that my five-year defense budget contains somewhat less money than his does. But listen to the difference. $1.36 trillion in my budget, as opposed to $1.42 trillion in his over five years, a difference of only five percent. And we provide in our budget for fewer troops in Europe, less spending on the Brilliant Pebbles portion of Star Wars, but more reliance on new weapons systems, and more reliance on the Guard and the reserve here at home. The budget I recommended, and I must tell you for the record was processed again last year, not last week, so it is not something I prepared for this occasion, the budget was arrived at in consultation with defense experts, including people who had served in the Reagan administration, and military advocates like Congressman Aspin, who's here with me today, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; Congressman Dave McCurdy who addressed you yesterday, my neighbor from Oklahoma; and Senator Sam Nunn, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I know that we must ensure that we have the resources we need to strengthen the two attributes that made the American military the best in the world: the outstanding quality of our personnel; and the overwhelming superiority of our technology. I still believe we should strive not for a Democratic national security policy or a Republican national security policy, but for an American national security policy. I have done my best to develop that in this campaign. For example, in supporting the tough line that the president and the administration have taken against Saddam Hussein, making it clear that this election process should give him no comfort as he seeks to violate the United Nations resolutions; and in calling for stronger international action in Bosnia and Somalia, policies which now have been embraced by this administration. All these things are more effective precisely because they have strong bipartisan support. I hope that we can reach a bipartisan consensus on the force structure we need for the future, and on the role of the National Guard and of the reserve. I think you should be full partners in all areas of our force: combat force; combat support forces; combat service support forces. You know, and I know, there will be further cuts. The Guard will not be exempt, but I am committed to a balanced reduction that retains to traditional combat orientation of the National Guard. When the American people choose a president, they want someone they can trust to act in moments of crisis. Every president in the last half century has had to confront the fateful decision to put some Americans in harm's way. I do not relish this prospect, but neither do I shrink from it. If elected I will ensure that we have the resolve and the strength, constantly, to deter, sometimes to fight, and when we fight, always to win. I will fight to ensure that the troops we send into battle are the best in the world. But as we scale back our military in the aftermath of the Cold War, a strong role for the National Guard and the reserves, in my view, makes more sense, not less. After all, the Guard can preserve combat readiness at a cost of 25-75 percent of that of the active forces. The Guard makes sense as a force to deal with unforeseen contingencies. And the Guard can make invaluable contributions, as Senator Nunn has noted, in rebuilding America here at home; in providing engineering and medical assistance to distressed communities; and serving as role models and mentors to kids who need them; and doing the things which will build up our nation's strength and our security here at home, and still maintain the traditional combat orientation of the Guard. The Bush administration has proposed cuts and rescissions of dollars already approved by Congress, which reflect a lesser role than I believe the Guard and the reserve should play in our future force structure. I want the National Guard, I will say again, to be a full partner in all areas of total force. I do not want to imply that that means there will be no cuts. Congressman McCurdy can tell you of a situation in Oklahoma where a Guard unit was promised by this administration that it would not be cut, and three weeks later it was devastated. I will level with you: there will be cuts, but I want a stronger role for the Guard and the reserve than is called for in the present Bush force plan. Desert Storm proved once again that the Guard and the reserves can get the job done and do it right, and we should not eliminate the historic combat role of the Guard. Nor must we permit the Guard not to be able to have the resources it needs to fulfill its roles here at home. We have seen recently from Los Angeles to Miami to Hawaii that the Guard has been there to save the day and save lives. And yet it appears that the base force plan now proposed would render some state Guard forces incapable of even meeting their state missions of natural disaster relief and dealing with urban unrest. The National Guard has always set the standard for public service for our people. And as we reduce our defense forces, we must never forget that. So I have tried today to tell you as clearly as I could, admittedly from the bias of a governor who has seen his Guardsmen and women there, time after time, day after day, year after year, what I believe the role ought to be in the future. In closing, I would like to take a few minutes to talk to you about your role as citizens. For in just seven weeks, you will be called upon to perform another duty, to choose not just between two candidates for president, but between two different paths to the 21st century. I agree with the comment made by President Bush here today that we are facing a new and different global economic challenge. But I disagree that it has come on us all of a sudden. We have been in the midst of an emerging global economy for well over a dozen years now. And for a dozen years, we have been governed by a theory of economic response to that challenge, which has been euphemistically dubbed, trickle-down economics. The theory holds that government has a very limited responsibility to help the American people prepare to compete and win in a global economy; and that the most effective national government is that which keeps taxes lowest on those who have the most money, because they will in turn invest that money in job growth and development in our country, making us stronger in global competition. If you look at the last 12 years, we now have a chance to assess whether that theory has worked. In 1980 we had the highest wages in the world. Now we are 13th and dropping. The census figures themselves demonstrate that over two-thirds of the American people, including most of the people enrolled in National Guard units in every state in the United States, are working longer work weeks for lower wages than they were making 10 years ago, when you make adjustments for inflation. They are paying more for health care, for housing, for education. And if they're middle class people, they're paying more in taxes. And yet, last year, we saw the biggest decline in family income in over 30 years. In the last 30 years, we've had the slowest economic growth rate in 50 years. We had the first decline in industrial production ever recorded in our country. And more people work for government today than work in manufacturing. Other nations with which we compete, which are growing more rapidly, nations which realize that economic security is a part of national security, and that in that sense national security has to begin at home, have a totally different approach to the world's challenges. And we must learn from that, and craft a uniquely American approach. I believe it is time to abandon trickle-down economics, not to go back to tax-and-spend and divide the pie, but to go forward with a theory that says we have to invest, and educate, and train and compete; that we do not have a person to waste; that we need a national economic strategy of partnership between government, business, labor and education, to dramatically increase the incentives for people in the private sector in new plant, and equipment, in research and development, in the commercial technologies that will give us the same lead in the economy that the defense technologies give us on the battlefield, and in training the best educated workforce in America. If a workforce that is trained well works in the Persian Gulf, believe me, it will work in the factories, on the farms, in the small businesses, on the main streets, in the heartland of the United States of America to bring this country's economy back. Over the last few months, as I have entered this race for president, I have had the opportunity to talk to a number of people who were active in the last two administrations; who were called Reagan Democrats. Many of them have come home to support our campaign, not because I'm a Democrat, but because they believe in the defense policies I have outlined, and more importantly they know that national security begins with economic security. And today, in another state, a number of high tech corporate leaders are announcing their support for this campaign. Many of them have been Republicans for years, and they are supporting me not because I am a Democrat, but because they know we need a new American economic policy that goes beyond the partisan divisions that have paralyzed this country for more than a decade now. And I ask all of you to think about that. This nation has been around for more than 200 years because whenever we had to do so, the people of the country fought to keep it alive; fought to protect it from its enemies; but also had the courage to make the changes that were needed to make to keep America going. Today, wherever I go, I find people full of cynicism about whether government can be made to work for them again, except when something bad happens and they see something like the Guard. Then they know government works, and they're proud their tax dollars are going to you. But I ask you to think about this. Think about the history of your country. Can we really say that the crisis we face today is too great to be solved? Think of the problems faced by George Washington and the founders, when most people in most states wanted to keep the states independent. They wanted to print their own money. They wanted to have their own military forces. They didn't trust having a central government. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the founders said, things could be better. The other crowd said, things could be worse. It was literally a miracle that we created a nation out of these disparate colonies, but we did. And that was a greater challenge than we faced today. Can anyone say the challenge we face today was greater than the challenge faced by Abraham Lincoln when he became president in 1861 and this country was divided? His wife lost three of her brothers fighting for the South. The best military commander of his generation, Robert E. Lee, resigned from the Army and went home to fight for his state. And the country was again beginning to come apart. And Lincoln literally laid his life down to keep the country together. Can anyone say the challenges we face today are greater than those faced by Franklin Roosevelt, when from the chains of his wheelchair he lifted a whole nation up in the Great Depression, and then guided us through a great war? My fellow Americans, what is killing this country today is not the size of our challenge but the dimension of our disbelief. And we need faith and conviction that we can confront these problems in an American way that goes beyond the kind of paralysis we've had at home for the last 10 years; that reflects the same sort of spirit and determination and commitment of resources that we saw in Desert Storm. If we do it, we will once again make America young again, and we will be faithful to the traditions of the founders, and we will do our job in this generation as Americans. That is what I ask you to ponder for the next seven weeks. So that we can be strong abroad, we must again be strong at home. Thank you very much.