Chuck Hagel’s first major speech as secretary of defense is receiving the sort of attention that one would expect. But the real news will be made when the Obama administration’s budget hits the streets, reportedly on April 10th. As the saying goes, “show me the budget, and I’ll show you your priorities.”

For now, Hagel’s speech at the National Defense University focused on the sorts of reforms pushed by his predecessors, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, with mixed success.

Much more hard work, difficult decisions and strategic prioritizing remains to be done. Deep political and institutional obstacles to these necessary reforms will need to be engaged and overcome. 

…the military’s modernization strategy still depends on systems that are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for.  We need…an acquisition system that…rewards cost-effectiveness and efficiency, so that our programs do not continue to take longer, cost more, and deliver less than initially planned and promised.

Of course, Hagel is right. There is still enormous waste and inefficiency within the Pentagon. The Army’s discovery of $900 million in unnecessary parts, and Sen. Tom Coburn’s Department of Everything report, remind us that not every dollar is spent wisely. In some cases, it appears that no one knows what has been spent, or why, which is why I’m a fan of a Pentagon audit.

A more restrained foreign policy would generate savings well in excess of $1 trillion over the next decade. Calls for other countries to do more to defend themselves finds favor within the scholarly community (e.g. here, here, here, and here), and with the American people. But Gates and Panetta rejected such a strategic shift. They were, no doubt, following the lead set by the president, who declared in his 2012 State of the Union address that the United States would continue to underwrite the security of the entire world (and, left unsaid, allow every other country to free ride on the backs of U.S. troops and U.S. taxpayers).

Short of a strategic shift toward self-reliance, however, Hagel has fixed on reforms that could produce significant savings. Specifically, “fiscal realities,” he explained,

demand another hard look at personnel – how many people we have both military and civilian, how many we need, what these people do, and how we compensate them for their work, service, and loyalty with pay, benefits and health care.

Unfortunately, and I’m sure that he knows this, reducing payrolls and reforming pay and benefits also happen to be the most difficult to achieve politically.

Democrats typically oppose cuts within the civilian workforce, part of what Hagel referred to as the “world’s largest back-office.” The number of civilians on the DoD payroll is 15 percent higher than in 2001, although it has come down slightly since the high point in 2011. Spending over that same period has grown at an even faster rate, up more than 25 percent in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. If Hagel is serious about cutting costs, temporary furloughs won’t be enough; the DoD civilian workforce must shrink permanently.

He must also tackle pay and benefits for active-duty military personnel, and health care spending, especially for working-age retirees. Gates famously said that “health care costs [were] eating the Defense Department alive,” but members of Congress have repeatedly blocked even minor reforms to TriCare for Life. Meanwhile, the mere suggestion of reforms to the decades-old military retirement system elicits fierce opposition.

But I think that we may be approaching the point, perhaps soon, when a bipartisan coalition steps in to apply the brakes. At an event that we hosted last month, I asked Barry Blechman of the StimsonCenter, Jacob Stokes from the Center for a New American Security, and Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, if there was any realistic alternative to major reform of the military’s pay and benefits. They all said that there was not.

If a dozen other DC think tanks are willing to admit publicly what is painfully obvious to even casual observers, that might provide sufficient political cover for members of Congress to allow such reforms to go forward.

At least, I would like to believe that it could. Just as General Motors is fast becoming a pension payment company that builds cars on the side, the U.S. military is becoming a pension and health care organization that occasionally fights wars. 

American alliances are systems that transfer wealth from U.S. taxpayers and their debtors to citizens in wealthy allies. With Uncle Sam paying for those countries’ defense, their governments are free to use their own revenues for welfare programs or other domestic priorities. This is a sucker’s bet from an American perspective, but pretty great from the perspective of the citizen of a rich country who benefits from this largesse.

The Wall Street Journal’s news section over the weekend showed this phenomenon in an article illustrating the wages of sequestration. In the course of trimming the U.S. troop presence in Europe from 74,000 to 67,000 over two years, the strategically vital hamlet of Praia da Vitória in the Azores will be particularly hard hit. You see, the U.S. military presence will be reduced there, possibly by more than 1,000, devastating the economic well-being of the village, population 22,000.

One sympathizes with the Portuguese citizens who, over three generations, have come to rely on U.S. taxpayer dollars for their well-being. They don’t really know a world without that economic nourishment, so it must be unnerving to think about what will happen without it.

The story reads like a bad breakup. One U.S. official quoted in the article charged with breaking the news that we’re just not that into them remarked that the Portuguese felt “we are no longer important to you and we have been your best friend. They took it personally.” Worse, they felt “strategically devalued.” Other unnamed officials rubbed salt in the wound, noting the danger that the removal of U.S. troops threatened to “diminish the continent’s value as a strategic partner,” implying that its strategic value is provided by Washington.

The article also noted that the Portuguese are already whispering about having their eye on another suitor:

Since word of possible cutbacks at the base surfaced a year ago, rumors began circulating that the Americans would leave [the base] entirely, and that China, which has growing economic ties with Portugal, would establish a naval base their to patrol the Atlantic.

An American conservative movement worthy of the name would realize the economic strain the country is under and wouldn’t be embracing situational Keynesianism and trying to insulate the bloated military budget from cuts. It would be pointing out that this system of transferring money from U.S. taxpayers to taxpayers in Japan, or Germany, or Portugal is bad for Americans, unconservative, and unnecessary.

Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of conservative movement.

To both a greater and lesser degree of success, foreign policy scholars have tried to explain the disconnect between President Obama’s soaring idealism of America’s role in the world and his halting political caution about it in discrete situations. That vacillation has drawn criticism, both for being too meddlesome and for not being meddlesome enough. 

Daily Caller contributor Adam Bates ably sums up the president’s incoherence as “not based on any particular logic or worldview beyond the president’s own desire to distance himself from America’s foreign policy past without bothering to actually change any policies.” Indeed. As this author has written in the past, specifically on counterterrorism policies, 

On the one hand, Obama openly rejected Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ approach to foreign affairs. On the other hand, Obama’s sophisticated demeanor opened him to criticism, with hawks condemning him as too weak and easily manipulated by America’s enemies. 

The administration has supported policies that have failed to deliver tangible benefits to the American people (Libya), continued to prop up brutal regimes (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt), and helped tether our country to the region’s parochial quarrels (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and perhaps ever-more-so in Syria). Despite seemingly courageous attempts to distance itself from failed policies of the past, the Obama administration has managed to drift into strategic purgatory.