A year earlier, Les Aspin, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had attacked the Bush Administration for proposing an across-the-board reduction of the military, rather than a thorough post-Cold War rethinking. A few weeks before this show, Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, had ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come up with $10 billion in cuts within one week. SO: "In many ways in [Secretary Aspin's] own terms it is a tread-water budget and program that has no fundamental difference in strategy, no different focus than what he inherited, but at the same time he intends to spend less on it. And every time we've done that, historically, we've lived to regret that."