Last week Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the
results of a four-month assessment of how the Pentagon should respond to
reductions in spending in the next decade.
The Obama administration has already directed $487 billion of reduced
spending over the next ten years. The
sequester, or other congressional action/inaction, could result in even more
cuts. The question is: What should be cut and by how much.
This is from Thom Shanker’s report in The New York Times
on Secretary Hagel’s report:
“Under the largest cuts the Pentagon is considering, Mr. Hagel described a
trade-off: The military, he said, could maintain its size – as measured in the
number of Army brigades, Navy warships, Air Force fighter squadrons and Marine
expeditionary units – but not buy the most advanced new weapons. Or, he said, the Pentagon could shrink the
force and put money into the next generation of weaponry.
A decision to trade numbers for capability would involve a large drop in
the size of the active-duty Army, which could shrink to between 380,000 and
450,000 troops. The Marine Corps would
drop to between 150,000 and 175,000 personnel. (Under current budget orders, the Army already
is set to fall over five years to 490,000 from a peak of 570,000, and the
Marines are to drop to 182,000 from 202,000. The ground forces still would be slightly
larger than they were before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the beginning of a
decade-long military buildup.)
The largest Pentagon cuts would also require a concurrent reduction in
aircraft carrier strike groups to 8 or 9 from 11. In addition, some number of Air Force
squadrons could be retired.
‘This strategic choice would result in a force that would be technologically
dominant but would be much smaller and able to go fewer places and do fewer
things, especially if crises occurred at the same time in different regions of
the world,’ Mr. Hagel said at a Pentagon news conference.
The other option – to maintain a sizable military to assure an overseas
presence and project global power – would require the cancellation or
curtailment of weapons programs, while slowing the development of cyberwarfare
tools and reducing the number of Special Operations forces, Mr. Hagel said.”
Here are my thoughts/concerns:
1. Modernization is
good, but quantity matters, too. As I
said here, when it comes to weapons, “You can’t use what you can’t afford to
lose.” The theory is simple. If you have so few of a particular weapon,
that your capabilities are significantly hurt if you lose one (or a few) of
them, then you can’t really use the weapon, at least to its full capability,
because you will be so worried about losing it.
Having the most up-to-date and capable weapons is important, but it is more
important to be able use the weapons you have.
It is entirely probable that you will get more value, on the battlefield
(or wherever), out of a larger number of slightly less capable weapons than you
would out of a smaller number of the most advanced weapons.
2. The size of our
military is obviously dependent on the resources available. You can’t spend what you don’t have – or at
least, not for long. We don’t have
unlimited resources to give to the Pentagon.
There are budget restraints on them, just like everybody else.
However, in spite
of what the Obama administration seems to think, defense comes first – or at
least very close. It’s not green energy
subsidies first, high-speed rail second, and then defense. We have enough money to spend what we need to
spend on defense. We just need to do it.
3. To say that we
have enough money, does not mean we should waste it. The purpose of the Defense Department is to
defend our country and protect our interests.
It is not to provide jobs by keeping open bases we don’t need or producing
unnecessary weapon systems in somebody’s congressional district. It’s defense, not pork. Congress – and the people – need to
understand that.
In addition to
looking at how many servicemen and women we need, we need to look at all of the
civilian employees there are at the Pentagon and elsewhere. According to Gordon Adams, “the ‘big money’
is in the [Defense] department’s overhead.”
Secretary Hagel said:
“‘Unlike the private sector ... the
department simply does not have the option of quickly shutting down excess
facilities, eliminating entire organizations and operations, or shedding
massive numbers of employees.’”
Why not? Is it that the Defense Department can’t – or that
it won’t? Gordon Adams notes that the
number of independent contractors at the Pentagon is almost equal to the number
of civil service employees. Similarly,
we have more civil servants and independent contractors than active-duty combat
forces. Companies are cutting middle
managers all the time. Why can’t the
Pentagon?
The point is that
the Pentagon needs to cut staff, bases, and politically-driven weapons systems,
so it has the money it needs for important things, like troops and quantities
of weapons. And Congress needs to
support these efforts, not hinder them.
4. MOST IMPORTANTLY
(and I put this in all capital letters because I want to scream it), when we
determine the proper size of our armed forces, and especially our Army and
Marine Corps, we cannot assume that there will be no more Iraqs or Afghanistans
– or that there won’t be any ground wars.
We have thought that before.
After World War II, many people thought that, because of nuclear
weapons, we would not have to fight conventional wars again. General Matthew Ridgway disagreed. Korea showed he was right.
After Vietnam,
the country said, “No more Vietnams.”
The military agreed, and they turned their focus and their training to
fighting wars in Europe against the Soviet Union. Fortunately, that war never happened, though the
training for it was of use when we kicked Iraq out of Kuwait in the Gulf War of
1991.
The problem came
later in Iraq and then Afghanistan.
After Vietnam, not only did we focus on fighting big wars in Europe, we
also forget what we had learned about fighting insurgencies in places like
Vietnam. General William Westmoreland
did not fight the right war when he was in Vietnam form 1964 to 1968, but
General Creighton Abrams did when he took over in 1968. His “One War” philosophy focused on protecting
the people and disrupting the Communists’ supply lines. (For more on this, see here.) What General Abrams accomplished, and what
the Army learned from it, was forgotten in the reaction to our failure in that
country. “No more Vietnams” not only
meant never fighting another such war.
It also meant forgetting what we learned there.
As a result, we
had to learn how to fight insurgencies all over again, when the insurgency started
in Iraq. Even though we now say “No More
Iraqs,” we need to make sure that we do not forget what we re-learned in Iraq
and Afghanistan. We do have The
Counterinsurgency Field Manual that General Petraeus, et al, wrote, but the
book by itself is not enough. We need
the training and the capabilities to go with it. While we may not want to fight another
Iraq-type war, we don’t get to decide that by ourselves. Our enemies get a vote, too.
The Administration
seems to think that counterterrorism and Special Operations forces are the way
to go. That may be true, which is
exactly the point. It “may” be true, but
it may not. We have to prepare not only
for how we want to fight in the future, but also for how our enemies want to
fight against us.
Army Chief of
Staff General Ray Odierno made that point in May of this year:
“As the United States implements a
new defense strategy that de-emphasizes land wars in the Middle East and
increasingly casts an eye on the watery expanses of the Pacific, Odierno warned
against the assumption that United States has sworn off land wars for good.
‘The thing I worry about is that in
everybody’s declaration that there’s going to be no more ground wars, we need
no more ground forces, that we’re going to make the Army too small,’ he said. ‘I see nothing on the horizon yet that tells
me that we don’t need ground forces.’ …
Odierno said he joins those who
hope for an end to land wars – but not those who suspect the United States no
longer needs a large Army capable of fighting them.
‘In order for us to deter our
adversaries and have the right capacity to protect this nation, you’ve got to
have the right number of ground forces,’ he declared.”
As we figure out
how much to spend on the Defense Department over the next ten years – and
beyond, we need to remember that the cheapest military is one that is strong enough
to deter our enemies from ever fighting us.
The most expensive military is one that isn’t ready to fight the wars it
needs to fight.
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