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The changes announced in the Pentagon’s new budget guidance are, from my perspective, mostly good news, but woefully insufficient. They show how even limited austerity
encourages prioritization among weapons systems that suddenly have to
compete. A few more budgets like this and we’ll be getting somewhere.
The White House has not yet released the actual budget, but the
Pentagon yesterday released a new document that explains the minor cuts
in line for its slice. The document, unlike all the other defense
strategy and guidance documents that have come out in recent years,
sticks to plain English, avoids geopolitical gobbledygook, and tells you
the budgetary impacts of its assertions. For that alone the Pentagon
deserves some credit.
The document claims to be a guide to savings of $487 billion over 10
years. But you only get that figure by counting against past White House
budget requests and their associated spending trajectory. We are saving
just $6 billion from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, or 3.2% adjusted for inflation.
If we leave out falling war costs, we have essentially frozen defense
spending for two fiscal years (2011 and 2012), letting it grow at about
inflation and then slightly slower, respectively. The Pentagon expects
defense spending to grow at the rate of inflation or faster starting in
fiscal year 2014, although their estimates of inflation are self-serving.
The new spending trajectory would cut about 8 percent from the base budget by the end of the decade. That’s from a budget that doubled in real terms from 1998 until 2012. And some of those savings are not really saved; they have simply migrated into the war budget. Keep in mind also that those savings are just a plan, one that is unlikely to last, particularly as presidents and Congresses change.
The biggest change in this budget is the beginning in a reduction of
ground forces. The document says we will cut 80,000 troops from the Army
and 20,000 from the Marines. The rationale is solid: we are probably
not going to be committing large numbers of troops to another occupation
of a populous country in revolt any time soon. Yet the cut leaves both
forces with more personnel than they had prior to the expansion of
ground forces that began in 2008. A real strategic shift away from occupational warfare would entail a bigger drawdown of Army and Marine personnel.
The document also reaffirms the
administration’s decision to remove two army brigades from Europe,
roughly halving our combat presence there. That’s good news
given the absence of threat there and our NATO allies’ free-riding on
U.S. taxpayers. But it only amounts to recommitting to a Bush
administration plan. And we are unfortunately adding troops in the
Philippines and Australia, at best a useless gesture that may encourage
China’s military buildup.
The budget also takes a useful step in reducing the amount of
tactical Air Force squadrons by six. Given the precision-revolution in
targeting that makes each aircraft far more destructive and the
increased Navy capability to strike targets from carriers, far bigger
cuts in these forces are possible. Oddly, this reduction comes without a
planned reduction in the purchase of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
Even worse, the Pentagon here reaffirms its commitment to the F-35B—the short-take-off and vertical landing version—taking it off
“probation.” That version is meant to fly on amphibious landing ships
to support missions where Marines attack shorelines. It’s hard to
imagine such a mission where helicopters are insufficient for
air-support and there is no carrier-based aircraft available to help the
Marines, especially now that the Pentagon is again planning on operating 11 carriers.
The new version of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle is
evidence of austerity forcing choices. The Pentagon now wants to cancel
it because it is at least as expensive as the U-2 manned aircraft, which
accomplishes similar tasks. This budget also usefully endorses the
early retirement of some of our airlift capacity and tries to kill a new
Army ground combat vehicle.
Another positive development is the request
for two new rounds of base closures. This process requires legislation
from Congress to form a Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC).
Still, the hard choices here are few. Many observers were hopeful that budget savings would include cutting our excessive
means of delivering nuclear weapons. But while the proposal delays
production of the new ballistic missile submarine and speaks vaguely of a
“different” sort of nuclear arsenal, it supports the continuation of
the triad. There is still hope on this front, however. The Air Force plans
to build its next bomber initially without nuclear weapons delivery
capability, adding it later in development. That amounts to dangling
bait for budget cutters. Like the F-35B, the nuclear bomber has an
unnecessary mission that a more austere budget would cause us to
reconsider
So while the changes in this budget may be the first step toward a more restrained military posture, including perhaps a strategy of offshore balancing,
they are a minor one. A true offshore balancing strategy would involve a
greater shift of resources from the Army to the Navy. This budget, by
contrast, seems unlikely to end the traditional budget split where each service gets roughly one-third of the base.
Unsurprisingly, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta used his press
conference yesterday to push Congress to amend the Budget Control Act to
avoid sequestration, the across-the-board cuts in the Pentagon’s budget
due next January, which would roughly double the cuts outlined here. I
have argued
that these pleas seem to play into Republicans’ hand in the coming
budget negotiations. Readers should also know that the Pentagon could
avoid the “meat-axe” nature of sequestration (to use Panetta’s language)
by budgeting at the level sequestration would accomplish, roughly $492
billion, or about what non-war defense spending was in 2007. That would
let the Pentagon choose how to make cuts. The strategic insights guiding
these minor cuts could be exploited to make those larger ones.
Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.
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