As one of the more than 500,000 people who were "peace dividended" out of the military in 1992-94, I know this started when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. SecDef Cheney announced a 25% drawdown starting in 1992. It went further than 25%, though. The cuts ended up being closer to 40% on the active duty side, with deep cuts in the Reserves/National Guard and civilian workforce, too. The Department of Defense was about the only government agency "downsized" during the 1990s, many other agencies grew quite a bit. It's easy to brag about "reducing the size of government" when virtually all of the cuts come from one large department.

Following the collapse of communism, most people didn't see the need to spend so much on the military. In some ways, they were right. We didn't need a military with about 2 million people like we had in 1991. We could afford to cut back on the number of ships, missiles, planes, and divisions.

Unfortunately, there seemed little plan nor reason to what got cut. As an example, I was a Captain in 1992 with a reserve commission. At the start of the year, there were about 2000 of us in the 1985 year group, reserve commissions, non-pilot status. At the end of the year, there were 105 still in uniform, a 94% kill ratio. I didn't take it personally.

In the meantime, we had little nation-building/peacekeeping missions going on all over the place. At one point in the late 1990s, the Army alone had troops in 100 nations around the world. We didn't cut the operational tempo with no-fly zones in both northern and southern Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, etc. Under the "leadership" of the Clinton Administration, training was cut and so was weapons procurement. As Clinton ordered all of those cruise missiles fired at tents and such, they weren't replaced. It was a unique form of unilateral disarmament.

The result is what we see today - units that are trying to make up for training deficiencies, short on spare parts and personnel, and doing a remarkably good job largely due to their motivation since 9-11. Go to any base today and you'll see people like my son - pulling double or triple duty to make up for personnel shortfalls and largely uncomplaining because they finally feel appreciated again after years of neglect.