Bullets, and Biting Them

From Bob Gates' speech at Notre Dame, on the defense budget and U.S. strategy. The all-important "To Be Sure" graf:

To be sure, a strong military cannot exist without a strong economy underpinning it. At some point fiscal insolvency at home translates into strategic insolvency abroad. As part of America getting its financial house in order, the size of our defense budget must be addressed. That means culling more bureaucratic excess and overhead, taking a hard look at personnel levels and costs, and reexamining missions and capabilities to separate the desirable or optional from the essential. But throughout this process we should keep in mind historian Donald Kagan’s observation that the preservation of peace depends upon those states seeking that goal having both the preponderant power and the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve it. And we must not forget what Winston Churchill once said, that “the price of greatness is responsibility…the people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.”

"Culling more bureaucratic excess" is not a recipe for avoiding "strategic insolvency." The defense budget, including the wars, is $700 billion every year; without the wars, it's around $530-$550 billion. What really is a rigorous approach is to "reexamin[e] missions and capabilities." Simply put, the U.S. has to jettison some things it does abroad. If solvency is the indispensible aspect of U.S. power, then the military needs to look at whether it can afford the "full-spectrum" capabilities it's talked about developing during the latter years of the 2010s. One person's "full-spectrum" is another person's refusal to prioritize roles and missions. Gordon Adams, Chris Preble and the Sustainable Task Force folks are really, really right about this.

You can look at Libya as either a proof or a refutation of the Solvency imperative: it's a new, open-ended commitment for the military and the country; it also places the U.S. in a supporting role. From my perspective, it's more refutation than proof, but it's a reasonably ambiguous case.

Adams, Preble et. al and Gates are not very far apart on this. They'd agree on the outlines for strategy. Maybe they'd debate each marginal case. That's healthy. But typically this debate gets charactured into an annoyingly binary choice between isolation and hegemony, which is a roadmap to slouch toward insolvency. 

Comments

[mikey]

It seems to me that significant reductions in the military ("defense") budget are practically easy, albeit politically impossible. 2 really obvious places to look for BIG savings:

1.) Strategic doctrine. In today's strategic environment, the US could eliminate manned strategic bombers and land based ICBMs. Reduce the stockpile to around 300 of the most modern 'dial-a-yield' warheads, reduce the fleet to 3-4 boomers (2 at sea, 1-2 in refit). How many hundreds of billions would that move save? The acknowledged threat is a single warhead from a rogue nation or non-state actor, and the delivery system that contemplates is a shipping container. The reduction in capability envisioned here doesn't put the US at any higher risk, it just more accurately and honestly aligned capabilities with the real-world threat environment.

2.) International footprint. The US could easily shut down 50-75% of its foreign bases, pre-positioning equipment and pulling back to a limited number of mega-bases. Again, very large savings, zero loss in capability.

There you have it. HUGE start in cost reduction - unfortunately it would be a political football, used to tar whoever suggested it as an un-American appeaser of the first order.

Oh. And it would obviously be worthwhile to end the pointless conventional military presence in Afghanistan, but that's another conversation altogether...

mikey

[J.]

What's more feasible is a general cut in overseas operations, modernization programs, and personnel costs (specifically health care). It's a perhaps little known fact how little the service members pay for health care, costs have been largely frozen since 1995. And while we all want the service members to have the best health care possible, the huge costs of sustaining that rate is pushing other programs off the table.

If the DOD can agree to rein in its major acquisition programs and get them to avoid spiraling costs and extended schedules every year, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible, and bring up health care costs to be equal to say, at least those civilians in the federal government (or dare I suggest the public in general?), these steps would significantly reduce the defense budget.