America’s defense budget — now around $700 billion a year, including the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts — is once again the target of the budget cutters. The Simpson-Bowles presidential debt commission proposed reducing defense spending by $100 billion over the next decade. But the commission’s work has — from the co-chairmen’s November draft to its final report of December 3 — gone from bad to worse. It’s not that the defense budget is sacrosanct: it can be cut. But it can either be cut wisely or quickly. You can’t do both.
The November draft proposed, among other things, that weapon system procurement would be cut by 15 percent, overseas bases cut by one-third, that the Air Force and Navy’s plans to buy F-35 Joint Strike Fighters would be cut in half. The December 3 final report gave no specifics on the cuts at all, eliminating even the specific cuts proposed in the draft.
Like all other shoot-from-the-lip plans to cut defense spending, the one proposed by the debt commission didn’t answer the crucial questions. Which 15 percent of weapons purchasing would you cut? Which third of our foreign bases would be closed?
Defense budgeting is a science, not an art, which means that unless you apply the foundational principles before you derive your conclusions, your conclusions are bound to be wrong.
A college professor of fond memory tried valiantly to teach me Newtonian physics. “F=ma ” he cried endlessly: force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. And, he said, the laws of physics are the same wherever you go, bad things happen whenever you try to break them. About which more in a minute.
Defense budgets have to provide for everything from personnel and retirement benefits to basic research to develop the future technologies on which our armed forces’ superiority has been based since World War II.
Any Pentagon budget exercise has to begin with the question, “what do we expect the armed services to have to do”? In the Reagan years, we had a process called “Defense Guidance.” It measured all the threats from adversaries and potential adversaries, compared the threat with what we had in the arsenal, and resulted in an outline of the defense budget called the “program operational memorandum”, or “POM” in the inevitable acronym.
The POM would answer the questions Simpson-Bowles didn’t: Which 15 percent of weapon systems don’t we need to buy? Which overseas bases don’t we need to deter threats or to position forces — such as Air Force tanker aircraft — that are essential to deploying forces as quickly as needed to any erupting conflict.
Which brings us back to the physics prof’s rule: if you try to break the basic laws of defense budgeting, what you cut blindly will inevitably result in weaknesses that will cost lives.
The defense budget is not inviolable: there are ways to cut the fat. But what is fat and what is muscle? Neither Simpson-Bowles nor the Pentagon really knows because the analysis of the threats and the comparison between the threat and the assets we have has yet to be done.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates imposed massive cuts on weapons procurement even before the modern version of “defense guidance” — the politicized “Quadrennial Defense Review” — was done. Gates cut the number of F-22 fighters, DDG-1000 stealthy destroyers and ended production of the C-17 heavy airlifter. Those cuts, made without the essential analytical basis, create weaknesses that our enemies and potential enemies can exploit now and in the next decade.
How can more cuts be made without a real analysis of the threats posed by everything from al Qaeda to China? If our national security is to be based on something more substantial than hope and politics, they can’t.
President Obama, Gates and Congress are disinclined to wait. But cutting more without the basis of an expert examination of the threats, the assets and the future needs of our forces would be a mistake of disastrous proportions.
There are clearly weapon systems we are buying that should be canceled and personnel costs that can be reduced. For example, according to published statements by Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, the Northrop Grumman “San Antonio” class amphibious warship is unreliable and too vulnerable to operate under combat conditions. If we need such a ship — and the Marines insist we do — shouldn’t we cancel that program and replace it with one that can perform the mission?
Congressional Republicans should convene a panel of experts with appropriate security clearances and perform their own “defense guidance” analysis to guide legislative action. Without it, any defense budget cuts will endanger our nation’s future security and the lives of the troops.
Jed Babbin was deputy undersecretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several best-selling books including “Inside the Asylum,” and “In the Words of Our Enemies.”
