Defense Budget Redux Posted by Michael Cohen

So a couple of days ago I had initial praise for Secretary Gates defense budget; but after some more review I'm less optimistic. I think Gates deserves praise for taking on some sacred cows but the NYT is right that "he did not go far enough."

Seeing some of the congressional backlash, it's hardly surprising that Gates wouldn't go whole hog or even cut defense spending, but at some point we're going to have to come grips with a dramatic re-examination of what our military is supposed to do - and as Winslow Wheeler points out at FP that simply hasn't happened:

From a budget perspective, it does not appear that the basic Department of Defense budget has changed; this set of decisions may be budget-neutral, or it may even hold in its future expanded net spending requirements.

Nor does Gates's announcement reorder defense spending away from occupations in foreign lands (the advocates call it "counterinsurgency") or change the fact that the United States will continue to spend most of its defense budget on forms of conventional warfare most reminiscent of the mid-20th century. To fight the indistinct, unspecified conflicts that the United States may face in the foreseeable future, neither the strategy nor the hardware has changed.

Again, I'm not as pessimistic as Wheeler because I think the kind of reforms that we need to see at the Pentagon are an incremental process that will take years if not decades to implement. And as Spencer Ackerman suggests at WINDY this may in fact be the first step in a larger reform process.

But before we start patting ourselves on the back let's remember that half of the budget is still dedicated to fighting enemies that have entered the proverbial "ashbin of history." We're still very far from having a defense budget that accurately reflects the security challenges the United States will be facing in the future.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

One would think that at some point someone would bring up the subject of what the military is supposed to be able to do in the future based on a threat analysis, and that this would determine the size and type of force that is needed.

Robert S. McNamara addressed this systematic approach in the 1960's with his Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS). The idea was to analyze defense requirements systematically and produce a long-term, program-oriented Defense budget. Of course the results of PPBS were perverted by the Vietnam War but the approach was correct.

[JDB]

I agree, Don, that there must be a systetic, analytical approach to foreseeing future threats and ways to counter them. The problem with the process is the Congressional churning of the proposed budget to produce butter for their home districts and states.

The great 2006 movie "Why We Fight" put it best when it described the Military-Industrial-Think Tank-Lobbyst--Congressional Complex. Until Congressional members and leaders--on both the right and the left--acknowledge the dire economic straits we're in and the need to support what is needed (versus what creates jobs and donors), we're going to have the same problem.

This is across the board in government, by the way. Because of the size of the Defense Department, the problem is only that much more visible.

[Don Bacon]

Okay, I'll also respond to my own comment. A threat analysis would show no threat, so it won't be done. Rather, the system that JDB notes will be used, which is to sustain corporate/congressional welfare for useless forces and hardware.

I happened to be in a huge wind farm in central California the other day. Must have been a thousand wind machines spinning around. There was a very large blue machine sitting on a pallet in the service center. I strolled over to look at the manufacturer's plate on the machine -- it was made in Germany and imported into the US. Our engineers are so busy with billion-dollar destroyers and 200-million dollar airplanes that useful stuff has to be designed and manufactured elsewhere.

That's just one deleterious aspect of the bloated US military budget, there are worse ones of course like actually using the military for terrible foreign adventures and spending twelve billion a month in Iraq when we have a severe financial crisis and Americans dying from lack of medical care.
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There is a significant difference between theater missile defense and a strategic anti-ballistic missile defense. Patriots work well and good against SCUDs, but not so well against faster, higher flying, ICBM's with advanced countermeasures (stealth, chaff, maneuver, dummy warheads), and potentially multiple warheads. Try and beat missile command and you get the idea.An entirely different problem with missile defense is that it undermines Mutually Assured Destruction. A second order effect could be a very expensive arms race, both in terms of ABM defensive shields, and arsenals to penetrate those shields.

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