Caleb O. Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 1, 2017. I am Caleb Brown. In his first address to Congress last night, President Trump laid out his plan to hike military spending and smash the one area of budget restraint, the sequester. Bed Friedman is a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute. He comments.
Benjamin H. Friedman: The military budget increase that President Trump proposed, the $54 billion, is big. It’s not as big as he says it is. He says it is historically high. There have been a number of bigger increases percentagewise in the past few decades. And we don’t know, really, where the money would go within the military. That increase, by the way, comes on top of an increase that he will be asking for in this fiscal year, 2017, of something like $30 billion probably for the war account, the overseas contingency operations, and some sort of increase to homeland security spending. So there’s going to be actually substantially more, something approaching maybe $100 billion more spending in security matters.
Caleb O. Brown: What does this mean if you include the Pentagon budget, and overseas contingency operations, and other things, where are we historically with respect to military spending?
Benjamin H. Friedman: We are spending now around what we did in terms of Cold War highs, which were achieved during the Korean War and in the midst of the Regan buildup in the ‘80s. We are about that level. So if Trump got this buildup, which, by the way, he won’t, from Congress, then we would exceed Cold War highs and be back to where we were sort of at the — around the height of the war on terrorism during the end of the Bush administration. So that would be quite a bit by any standard.
Caleb O. Brown: President Trump, in his speech, he’s said we’ve saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing down the price of the fantastic new F‑35 jet fighter, and we’ll be saving billions more dollars on contracts all across our government.
Benjamin H. Friedman: President Trump had a meeting before he was president, and a phone call, I think, with the CEO of Lockheed Martin that makes the F‑35 and extracted a promise to try to hold down the cost of the F‑35, which allowed him to begin bragging on Twitter that he saved the program. It will shock you to learn that that’s not true. There have been announced reductions in the cost of the F‑35, but they are not due to anything Trump did so much as the achievement of some economies of scale in the program and the tendency as programs advance for things to get a bit cheaper. But it’s still a fantastically expensive fighter plane, historically expensive, and it remains to be seen, to be optimistic, whether the Trump administration will have any success in controlling its costs.
Caleb O. Brown: Alright, so he said that he had directed the Department of Defense to develop a plan to demolish and destroy ISIS, he says a network of lawless savages that have slaughtered Muslims and Christians, and he hopes to extinguish this vile enemy from our planet. What indications do we have as early as we are into his presidential term that that is a possible outcome?
Benjamin H. Friedman: It is pretty unlikely. And he is certainly rhetorically setting himself up for failure in that he said when he was campaigning falsely that ISIS had a presence in 80 countries. I mean that’s only true if you count people who are sort of tweeting pro-ISIS things. It’s hardly in a tenth of that many countries, but in any organizational — with any organizational capacity. But what we know so far about Trump’s plans to deal with ISIS indicates that he plans to do the same thing harder that we’ve been doing in Iraq, and Syria, and maybe Libya, with a bit more rhetorical bluster, perhaps. I haven’t seen any indication, there has been no indication, that we’re making any sharp reversals in our policy in the way we are conducting the war against ISIS. Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, was asked and just today brought a new plan to the White House which he presented. We don’t know what it said yet but it seems at the moment unlikely that we’ll create a sharp diversion from the Obama administration’s policies against ISIS.
Caleb O. Brown: Setting aside all of the issues related to Donald Trump’s first pick for national security adviser, the people who sort of form his ex-military national security team, of those people, what can we say about their experience and their likelihood to be willing to be engaged in continued war around the planet?
Benjamin H. Friedman: Well, if we focus on just Secretary of Defense Mattis and the new national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, that’s a retired four-star general from the Marines and a current active three-star general from the Army, it’s a lot of stars, a lot of experience. And Mattis is sort of, as far as we can tell, I think from his testimony and so forth, more of a conventional hawk. He is fairly hawkish on Iran. At least some of his past comments indicate that. He is a fan of U.S. military alliances, far more than the president he serves, and at the same time doesn’t seem deeply enthusiastic about having endless wars in five or six countries as we are now doing, depending on what you count as a war, you know? If drone strikes count, that’s how many we are having. H. R. McMaster is more interesting in some ways in that he has been a leading intellectual and has tended to make the argument that there are no shortcuts to success in military endeavors. That whether it is the revolution in military affairs or special operations command raids or drones, that to really achieve lasting political results which is the point of warfare, you need to make a bigger commitment. So it will be interesting to see how McMaster deals with all these fights we are having where we are using limited means. That seems to violate his kind of core precepts, which you might sum up as go hard or go home.
Caleb O. Brown: How likely is, if that’s the dichotomy setup, how likely is it that he encourages or is successful in encouraging a rethinking of American defense priorities?
Benjamin H. Friedman: I think, I am certainly speculating here because it’s hard for me to know what the National Security Adviser McMaster will do in the situation he is in, but it seems likely he will suggest some pretty serious changes in priorities. He is a pretty creative thinker and has a first-rate background in terms of his military experience and his academic successes — historian who wrote a renowned book about Vietnam — I doubt, however, that he’ll find a very welcoming audience. It is tough to predict but I think there are strong reasons to suspect that the status quo in terms of the wars the United States is fighting now will prevail and continue. I hope not. I hope we can at least end some wars. The president did say a couple encouraging things about his enthusiasm for peace, so maybe he’ll apply that in Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, or Libya.
Caleb O. Brown: And just for the benefit of listeners, when was the last time the Pentagon was audited?
Benjamin H. Friedman: Well, the Pentagon has never really been audit-ready, largely because it has a lot of different financial systems from the legacy of not being a unified entity. But you know I think the real problem with the Pentagon isn’t that it isn’t audited, but that it spends a ton of money with insufficient oversight from Congress and insufficient pressure to control spending. I like to say, and did a few times in print, that austerity is the best auditor. If you want to go after waste and excess, overhead spending, and so forth, cut the budget and watch the military services in particular in order to protect their favorite programs, watch them go after administrative excess. And when you have a buildup, as this president has promised, I think it makes it much more difficult to go after waste and overlap, however you define that. It is very difficult to define what waste is if you don’t have a clear strategy of what you are using military power for. What you are using military power for defines what is wasted and what isn’t.
Caleb O. Brown: What changes between now and the actual passage of a budget? Should we expect — the president of course laid out some very rough guidelines about what he wants in a budget, but not much beyond that.
Benjamin H. Friedman: Yeah, let me answer that with a brief historical foray. Since the passage of the Budget Control Act in 2011, which set caps on defense and non-defense discretionary spending, we’ve had a pattern in American politics in the Congress, which is this: Every year, every single year since then, with the Pentagon screaming and wailing, we get a deal between Republicans and Democrats that raises military spending a bit, along with non-defense discretionary spending. That’s Democrats’, has been Democrats’ demand in order to raise military spending. And, the military gets a bit more money through the war budget, through the overseas contingency operation budget, which is uncapped. So they get some of what they would like, but not all. And those increases are paid for every year by phony savings that are supposed to come at the end of the imagined period of years, but we never get to those savings because those budgets are altered before we arrive at them. This year President Trump proposes a budget that is deficit-neutral in that the increase to the military budget is paid for by cuts to discretionary spending, non-defense discretionary spending. No cuts to entitlements. That budget is not going to pass the Congress. Already you have all sorts of Republican defections. You have John McCain saying he won’t vote for it because it doesn’t spend enough on the military. You have Mitch McConnell saying it’s probably not going to work because of the big cuts at the State Department. You have Mike Simpson from Wyoming saying it cuts too many Republican interests, or programs they prefer. Those are the Republicans. No Democrats are going to vote for it. Trump I think has made it easy for Democrats to vote against it because it cuts so many different things that they can explain it. So what is likely is we get a deal like we had in previous years where he puts some number in OCO for the military, and we spread it around, and it gets paid for out of deficits. I think that we’re headed towards a minor increase in military spending that’s largely deficit-funded, sadly. It would be nice if we could cut back on military spending and actually stay under a defense cap.
Caleb O. Brown: Ben Friedman is a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute. Subscribe to and rate this podcast at iTunes and Google Play, and follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.
