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"Fiscal realities call on us to strike a new balance between investing in military power and attending to the fundamentals of national strength on which our true power rests."

November 18, 2010

The presidential debt commission co-chairs (Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson) decided to move forward yesterday and present the package they want the commission to discuss over the next two weeks. In defense, it is a striking package, with a great deal of merit and no small amount of courage in tow. It also has one critical weakness, which I will come to.

The Army should be sitting pretty today. It has 67,000 more soldiers than it did ten years ago, bigger than the entire military force of a number of other countries. And, according to DOD, the Army’s budget has grown, more than doubled, from fiscal year 2001 to FY 2010, or 180% in current dollars and 118% in constant dollars. Outstrips the growth in the overall Pentagon budget, and leaves the Army with $215.6 billion this year, about twice as big as China’s estimated overall defense budget.

Despite all the hype about Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his cuts of big-ticket military projects, the Pentagon's $680 billion budget is actually slated to increase in coming years. This is unconscionable at a time when taxpayers are under enormous stress and when the U.S. government must reduce spending across the board. Barack Obama can save big bucks without undermining U.S. security -- but only if he refocuses the military on a few, core missions.

Fiscal austerity has arrived in Europe, and defense is not being spared, which now risks opening a new round of useless bickering over the "defense burden." The Germans have announced plans to reduce their combat forces by more than one third, or 85,000. The French are slowing their defense acquisition programs and looking for new ways to partner on projects with their allies. And the UK announced yesterday a plan to reduce their defense plans by eight percent over the next four years, retiring its Harrier aircraft, eliminating the Nimrod aircraft program, trimming the force structure, and mothballing one of the two aircraft carriers it plans to build over the next decade.

The title of Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars is ambiguous: Is he referring to the two on-going wars the United States is waging in Iraq or Afghanistan? But only Afghanistan can fairly be called "Obama's war," and Iraq gets very short shrift here. Why then the plural
"wars?"

Like Woodward's previous series of books Bush at War, Obama's Wars is as much, if not more, about the political war at home as it is about the war in Afghanistan itself. Of course, every war involves lots of domestic debate and struggle, and bureaucratic politics hardly wane when the balloon goes up, but the United States' most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been notable in that they have sparked more civil-military conflict on the home front than we've seen since the Vietnam War.

With the Senate close to voting on the defense authorization bill, Congress is poised to pass the largest military budget since World War II -- roughly $550 billion, excluding funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

President Barack Obama is expected to sign it, pending resolution of minor disputes like funding for the alternative Joint Strike Fighter engine.

Book Forum
Wednesday, September 1, 2010

The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Featuring the author Richard Immerman, Professor of History and Marvin Wachman Director, Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University; Robert Kagan, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Derek Leebaert, Partner, MAP AG; moderated by Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute, and Executive Director of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.