Tag: pentagon budget

Military Spending and the Budget Deal

By
Christopher A. Preble

The budget deal announced last night offers two sets of potential cuts in military spending.

The first set of potential cuts, created by the budget caps, target “security” spending. That includes the Pentagon, State, foreign aid, the Department of Homeland Security and Veterans (the discretionary portion of Veterans spending, to be precise). The deal caps “security” spending at $684 billion for this fiscal year and $686 for the next. That requires little pain; the 2012 security cap is only $5 billion below what we’ll spend on those categories in fiscal 2011. The White House claims that the caps will generate $350 billion in savings from base defense spending for ten years. They get there, dubiously, by projecting security spending at the capped level across the decade, even after the caps expire, and counting as savings the difference between that spending trajectory and what CBO now projects. They are also assuming that all the savings go to defense, even though Republicans will try to make the other security categories absorb the pain.

The second set of potential cuts, which occur automatically if the Joint Committee fails to reach its spending cut goals, target defense spending directly. This could add $500 billion in defense cuts over ten years, the White House says.

Assuming that is true, the maximum amount of defense cuts possible here is $850 billion. That is a cut of roughly 15 percent compared to planned spending based on the president’s February 2011 budget submission — not including the wars. It is roughly on par with the cuts proposed by the Bowles-Simpson Commission. The total savings are much lower, roughly half, if you compare the cuts to what we actually spend now, rather than the increases we were planning on in past planning documents.

And remember, that $850 billion is a maximum; it may not materialize. It will be lower, if, as hawks hope, the cuts fall on the non-defense elements of the security category. It will be lower if the Joint Committee finds other accounts to cut, avoiding the triggers.

Still, that possible amount is enough to make hawks apoplectic. We are sure to hear more complaints about “gutting or “hollowing out” the force. But let’s keep some facts about military spending in mind:

The Pentagon’s budget has more than doubled over the past decade, and current projections call for the Pentagon to receive more than $6 trillion from U.S. taxpayers through 2021. If its budget got cut by 15 percent, that would return us to roughly 2007 levels. That hardly seems like “gutting”. After such cuts, we would still account for more than 40 percent of global military spending, and our margin of military superiority over any combination of rivals would remain unrivaled.

The focus should now shift to strategy. The White House says the Pentagon’s ongoing roles and missions review will guide the first round of security cuts. The aim is to eliminate military capabilities that are unnecessary or provided by multiple services. We should go deeper, looking to what missions, allies, and possible wars, we can jettison.  The recommendations should guide not only the first set of cuts, but also the second. That means making recommendations for the Joint Committee on additional defense cuts and preparing for automatic cuts should they occur. There is nothing preventing those cuts from being achieved by retiring force structure required by needless missions—such as defending rich allies that can defend themselves.

We should also keep in mind that this deal hardly solves our deficit problem and does not exhaust the possible savings we should seek. Deeper military cuts are possible and could even enhance security given the right strategy.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics

Gauging the Mood of Congress on Military Spending

By
Christopher A. Preble

Amidst the wrangling over a debt deal between the White House and Congress, the most interesting movement pertains to military spending. Several reports today suggest that up to $700 billion in military spending cuts is under consideration, which would amount to a bit more than 10 percent less than current projections over the next 10 years. A more realistic bottom line might be $300 billion, which could be achieved by allowing the budget to grow at the rate of inflation (in other words, no real cuts in spending).

As always, the devil is in the details. From what baseline? Over what time period? Would the cuts apply only to the base DoD budget, or all national security spending, including the costs of the wars, as well as the budgets for the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs? Most important is timing. If the savings are all backloaded in the out years, they may never materialize. Today’s budgets project spending out five or 10 years, and the “savings” really just amount to a new set of projections against that baseline. Plus, these agreements are rarely binding on future congresses; a different cast of characters will be responsible for passing DoD appropriations bills in 2018 or 2020.

One thing is clear, however. People here in Washington are now considering military spending cuts that they thought strategically unwise and politically impossible just a few years ago. And conservatives are joining in. South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney offered an amendment to the DoD budget appropriation bill that would have frozen spending at 2011 levels, a $17 billion cut below the amount voted out of committee. Meanwhile, three Democrats and three Republicans co-sponsored an amendment to cut the proposed increase in the FY 2012 budget in half, generating savings of $8.5 billion. The bad news for taxpayers is that both amendments failed. The good news is that some in the GOP are starting to match their rhetorical zeal for spending cuts with actual votes that do so; 43 Republicans voted for both measures. (h/t DSM)

It is no longer credible to declare military spending off limits in the search for savings, and most Americans understand that we can make significant cuts without undermining U.S. security (William Kristol being one of the predictable outliers).

I’ll hazard a prediction: I think that military spending in FY 2012 will be slightly less than President Obama initially requested, but still not less than will be spent in FY 2011 (in other words, they’re still only faking cuts).

To get real cuts, Washington is going to have to clear some things off the military’s plate. If we want a military that costs less, we have to ask it to do less. And I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for that—yet. Starting a new war in Libya (and signaling that similar missions are in the military’s future) doesn’t help.

Perhaps the key will be to connect two seemingly disconnected dots: our subsidizing defense spending for other rich countries has allowed them to divert money to dubious social spending and a too-large public sector with too-generous pay and benefits. I don’t know how Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) can go to their constituents and say they’re cutting popular programs here in the United States, and holding the line on the DoD’s budget, so that our European and East Asian allies can fend off cuts in their pensions and avoid taking responsibility for their own security.

For more, see the video after the jump.

Cross-posted from The National Interest.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Defending Defense Badly

By
Benjamin H. Friedman

Monday was budget day, where the President sends Congress the budget he would like it to pass and reporters and analysts scurry around reacting, as if the he were issuing stunning edicts rather than predictable suggestions . Due to a Healy-esque aversion to this species of DC pageantry, I was not planning to comment.

Then I read this oped in Politico where James Fly and John Noonan of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative flack for the President’s defense budget.  It demonstrates the intellectual poverty of the case for current defense spending so well that I decided to discuss it.

Fly and Noonan first claim that the White House wants to cut defense spending by $78 billion over five years, repeating the President’s talking point and labeling the reduction “deep and far-reaching.” But as Chris Preble wrote earlier, the cut is to the rate of spending growth. Neither Obama nor Secretary Gates has ever proposed cutting actual defense spending. In the unlikely event that the administration’s new five-year spending plan holds up, the non-war portion of Pentagon spending will cost taxpayers $2.918 trillion from fiscal year 2012 to 2016, rather than last year’s proposed $2.994 trillion, a reduction of 2.5 percent. We will still spend more on the non-war Pentagon budget, even adjusting for inflation, than we did in the prior five years, which was the most ever. Some cut.

The oped dutifully repeats Gates’ claim that he canceled procurement programs worth more than $300 billion in 2009. It does not say that that’s a speculative lifetime spending estimate, that new programs replaced those canceled, and that other Pentagon spending categories, like personnel, have grown more rapidly than procurement, eating any savings.

When they try their own arguments, Fly and Noonan do even worse. They write that “it is worth asking whether other federal agencies or domestic entitlement programs have been forced to reduce their budgets to the same extent that the Pentagon has over the past two years.” Though they mean to imply otherwise, the answer, since they asked, is yes, more. As they could have figured out by looking at OMB’s historical outlay table, total non-defense discretionary spending has not grown over the last two years. Defense has.

It gets worse. Fly and Noonan complain that we lack a military that can handle “any unanticipated contingency, which cancould [sic] emerge at any time.” We could triple defense spending, reinstitute the draft, and still not meet that standard. What if we had to occupy India? And why is instability anywhere always our problem?

Of course they also mention China, noting that it wants to use its military to assert “its long-term interests” and recently tested a stealth fighter. Given that we spend almost as much researching, developing and testing new weapons as China spends on its whole military, that we have far more advanced stealth and surveillance technology, that we have eleven carriers while China has one that they can’t really operate, and that we have no good reason for war with China, the Chinese’s effort to build a military that can protect their interests is unalarming, reasonable and a terrible argument for our current defense budget.

Beyond China, Fly and Noonan make no effort to justify military spending with specific threats. They just assert that the world is “volatile” and the “strategic landscape” grows “increasingly perilous.” Actually the world has been getting less volatile for several decades, if we measure volatility by the frequency and human cost of wars. And even if that were not true, why should our military aim, quixotically, at pacifying all war, rather than self-defense?  Strategy is a product of our making, not a landscape we passively confront.  National security threats to Americans are quite limited in historical context, and mostly avoidable. A less activist stance would avoid the peril we now increase by having defense commitments in so many unstable places.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

The Pentagon’s Faux Cuts

By
Christopher A. Preble

President Obama might want it to appear as though he is reining in defense spending with his budget submission for FY 2012, but his approach to the Pentagon’s budget reveals the opposite.

Perhaps the president hopes that his adoption of the faux cuts that Secretary Gates put on the table last month will be seen as responsible. Perhaps he is taking a prudent first step and signaling to the military, and its suppliers and contractors, that the days of double-digit increases are over. That may be; but far deeper cuts are warranted. . If the president had truly wanted to send a signal, he would have followed the advice of his own deficit reduction commission and endorsed far deeper cuts in military spending.

The Department of Defense will spend $78 billion less over the next five years than previous projections. This amounts to a drop in the bucket – technically just over 2% – of total Pentagon spending over that period. Nonetheless, in Washington-ese, this constitutes a cut. But the base budget (excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) will increase – from $549 billion to $553 billion, the largest budget in the department’s history. In the past 12 years, the budget that has doubled in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

Deeper cuts should be made along with an effort to lessen worldwide defense commitments, reducing the strain on the force. It will be up to outside pressure – either from Congress or from interested groups outside of government – to force Washington to cease acting as the world’s policeman, and forcing other countries to take responsibility for their own defense.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Tax and Budget Policy

Robert Kagan for the Defense

By
Christopher A. Preble

The calls for cutting the federal budget continue to build in Congress as the new GOP members try to make good on their promise to rein in the deficit.  And, right on time, the latest issue of the Weekly Standard features an article by Robert Kagan critiquing the chorus of calls for cuts to military spending. 

I think Kagan’s critique is reasonably fair, certainly more so than others of the recent past.  But his basic premise, that national security spending is unrelated to the national debt, simply is not true.  At the The Skeptics, I address this:

It is of course true that entitlements and mandatory spending pose the greatest threat to the nation’s fiscal health, but $700+ billion [in defense spending] isn’t chump change. The question of what we should spend on the military ought to take into account the trade-offs, an argument that Dwight Eisenhower advanced in his farewell address just over 50 years ago, and that Charles Zakaib and I highlighted last week. (See also James Ledbetter’s discussion on this point.)

…

Actually, it is a question of fairness, but not the one that [Kagan] proposed. Because security is a core function of government (I think one of the only core functions of government), it would be a mistake to treat military spending as synonymous with spending on, say, farm subsidies. But Kagan’s writings presume that other countries’ governments do not – and should not – see their responsibilities in the same way. Kagan contends that American taxpayers should be responsible for the security of people living in Europe or East Asia or the Middle East. Or anywhere in the world, really… It simply isn’t fair to ask Americans to pay for something that other people should pay for themselves. For reference, the average American—every man, woman and child—spends two and a half times more on national security than the French or the British, five times more than citizens living in other NATO countries, and seven and a half times as much as the average Japanese.

Justin Logan is in the process of authoring a lengthier response for publication, but in the mean time click here to read the full post at The National Interest.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Gates’s ‘Cuts’ and the Neocons’ Lament

By
Christopher A. Preble

As I discussed last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s latest attempt to “cut” the Pentagon’s budget are phony. The Secretary would ideally like to see the $78 billion over five years in savings filtered elsewhere into the budget; meanwhile, the 2012 budget will actually grow.

This hasn’t stopped uber-hawk Max Boot and a cadre of neocons from attempting to spin the Secretary’s announcement as the latest example of military downsizing that will make our services less prepared to deal with any conflict or international issue around the globe. I rebut Boot’s claims over at The Skeptics:

In his latest offering at The Weekly Standard, Boot wails that the personnel cuts “will bring the Army’s active duty strength down to 517,000—still larger than it was in 2001 but far smaller than it was in 1991, and not big enough to meet all of the contingencies for which it must prepare.”

Boot doesn’t define the “contingencies” that he wants the military to prepare for, but it seems pretty clear that he disagrees with Robert Gates’s assessment that “The United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon – that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire.”

…

One can only imagine how hysterical [the neocons] would be if Gates had actually proposed to reduce the amount of money going to the military every year. As it is, the DoD budget is slated to grow. Gates explained at last week’s press conference that his goal was “a steady, sustainable and predictable rate of growth” without explaining why the Pentagon should simply expect to see more money every year while the rest of the country is supposed to be cutting back.

My word of advice to anyone who wants to know what Gates has actually proposed: look at the facts, not the neocons’ interpretation of them.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Voters Recognize U.S. Military Spending Tops Other Countries

By
Christopher A. Preble

That is the headline of a press release announcing the results of a recent Rasmussen poll. The survey of likely voters finds that 58 percent recognize that the United States spends more on its military than any other country in the world.

The headline writers have obviously taken this as a positive. I think one can just as easily spin it in the other direction. It is deeply disturbing that 19 percent of Americans think that some country spends more than us, and that another 24 percent are unsure.

I don’t think this is just a reflection of my recent penchant for finding the dark lining in every silver cloud. If I were a professor teaching a course in U.S. military history, I’d be distressed if 19 percent of my students thought that Robert E. Lee was victorious at the battle of Gettysburg, and that another 24 percent weren’t sure. If 19 percent of students in a basic economics course thought that the price of something rises when demand falls and supply increases, and another 24 didn’t know, that would be a problem. Likely voters are presumably more interested in policy than registered voters or the generic American adult. Even among this modestly self-selected group, it would be unrealistic to expect that 100 percent would have a clear understanding of some basic facts. But 58 percent is a failing score, even by the most generous standards.

The respondents could be excused for their ignorance or confusion if someone was arguing the contrary. But no one is. The fact that we have an enormous military budget — far larger than any other country, or combination of countries — is the public policy equivalent of the sun rising in the east. Even the hawks calling for additional increases in Pentagon spending (on top of a DoD budget that has grown more than 86 percent in real terms over the past 13 years) don’t dispute the fact that we currently spend more than anyone else. On the contrary, all experts agree that we spend much more than number two (China), and most calculate that 300 million Americans spend nearly as much on our military as do all other citizens of the world combined. (More than 44 percent of the world total, according to conservative estimates that likely overstate China and Russia’s actual spending.)

So while some might be encouraged that only 19 percent of likely voters think that some country spends more than us, and that another 24 percent aren’t sure, I am not. It suggests that I have a lot more work to do.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

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