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Dan Quayle, Competitive Strategist
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15151 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1989 |
2,569 Words |
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John F. Morton
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Last year, during the first TV debate, one of the moderators asked then presidential candidate George Bush what he saw in his running mate, Dan Quayle, that others did not.
Bush cited qualities that most political commentators clearly were not prepared to discover. This negative predisposition has sent reporters everywhere in search of the Quayle story when they could have started with Congress or the Pentagon, where, as anyone who has covered the beat on defense issues knows, the new vice president has been both active and effective.
Quayle sat on the Senate Armed Services committee and cosponsored important bi-partisan defense legislation with fellow lawmakers like former Senate majority leader Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn (D-Georgia). While the public generally was not aware of these efforts, top defense officials were, in both the United States and in Europe. In the Senate, Quayle successfully formulated a realistic, comprehensive, and bipartisan defense policy.
Early in his Senate career, Quayle focused on the reform of defense procurements and the rationalization of planning. Later, he sponsored with Nunn an amendment to extend the so-called two-way street of U.S.-NATO defense research and development (R&D) and procurements. This focus led him to work closely with Pentagon officials who were advancing the "competitive strategies initiative." A little-known term outside the defense community, competitive strategies is percolating upward in the Pentagon and may revolutionize defense planning in the 1990s to the degree that systems analysis changed defense programming in the 1960s. Although the idea of competitive strategies has been around since the bow and arrow, the latest concepts and its jargon were derived under former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. The competitive strategies initiative proposes to encompass all aspects of defense from technology to operations. In essence, competitive strategies are those that accentuate long-term U.S. comparative advantages, including technological, over Soviet weaknesses.
The Byrd-Quayle amendment to the 1988 defense authorization bill required the Pentagon to report on supporting NATO strategy in the 1990s to Congress in January 1988. Much of that report derived from initial findings by the first competitive strategies task force that addressed the military situation in Europe. The timing of the initial report coincided with debate over the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Quayle In Action
In December 1987, Quayle introduced on the Senate floor what he called a NATO Defense Initiative. A package of programs designed to upgrade both NATO's nuclear and conventional deterrence over 15 years (the planning horizon of competitive strategies) at a cost that the United States and its allies could afford was among those in the Pentagon's Byrd-Quayle report. However, Weinberger's departure threatened the momentum behind the competitive strategies initiative. Pushing with Pentagon officials like Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Planning and Resources Dennis Kloske, Quayle ensured that the office of the secretary of defense under the incoming Frank Carlucci remained committed to the initiative.
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