By Jim Talent
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
I’m going to delve into the world of Pentagon budgets.
It’s an arcane world, and I avoid it whenever possible, but it’s not possible
to avoid it now — not if readers want to understand the magnitude of the
challenge facing the Trump administration where the armed forces are concerned.
First, some history is necessary.
America’s armed forces have been declining in size,
strength, and technological capability relative to its adversaries’ ever since
the end of the Cold War.
The active duty military is around 40–50 percent smaller
than it was in the 1980s. In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell proposed a plan
for the Department of Defense going forward. That plan — called the Base Force
— cut the size of the armed forces by about a quarter. When the Clinton
administration came to power, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin did a “Bottom Up Review”
of the military and adjusted the plan so it would cut the size of our forces by
around another 10 percent.
Our forces today are smaller than those that resulted
from the Bottom Up Review and much smaller than they would have been under the
Base Force plan. To take one example, Secretary Cheney and General Powell
thought the Navy would need 451 ships going forward, Secretary Aspin planned
for 346 ships, and today there are only 280.
During all those years, the mantra was that the military
could be smaller because the government would invest in its technological
superiority. For the most part that investment didn’t happen. Many if not most
major modernization programs were also canceled, either before any new systems
had been procured at all or after only a fraction of the necessary upgrades had
been bought.
As a result, all of the services are in desperate need of
new systems and technology to replace their aging infrastructure. The Air Force
today is flying older airframes — the fleet has an average age of 27 years —
than at any time since its inception. The Army needs to replace its inventory
of tracked vehicles, beginning with the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The Navy is
slowly burning itself out, struggling to maintain an adequate forward presence
overseas, yet lacking a fleet of sufficient size to support today’s deployment
rate.
I can’t emphasize enough how much an aged inventory
debilitates the armed forces. It drives up maintenance costs, it eats up a
budget that is already too small, and it’s a constant threat to readiness.
Imagine having to maintain and rely on a 30-year-old car.
The Pentagon faces two other huge holes in its budget.
First, the Air Force must replace its aging and vulnerable satellite system, on
which both the armed forces and the civilian economy are completely dependent.
That will be a huge expense that is currently unbudgeted. Second, as President
Trump has noted, both the land- and sea-based legs of the nuclear triad must be
modernized or replaced, another expensive undertaking that is currently
unfunded.
While our forces were declining over the past few
decades, their missions were increasing dramatically. Operational tempo, the
rate at which forces are deployed, increased substantially even in the
low-threat environment of the 1990s. Since then, North Korea has gone nuclear,
Iran is in danger of doing so, we are fighting Islamic terrorist groups in
about a dozen countries, Russia is rearming and has invaded two of its
neighbors, and, most ominously, the Chinese have engaged in a 20-year buildup
of forces that made them the dominant naval power in the Western Pacific and at
least a regional peer competitor of the United States.
All of these events have imposed substantial new
obligations on forces that are smaller and less capable, relative to our
potential adversaries’, than they were 20 years ago. And of course, the United
States has in the last 15 years fought two long and difficult land wars. Those
conflicts imposed tremendous stress, with all its attendant costs and
consequences.
To sum up, even before the defense sequester, there was a
growing mismatch between American strategy and American resources. I remember
having private conversations with members of the Joint Chiefs who believed the
modernization shortfall alone was $20 billion dollars per service. But nobody
in the last three administrations admitted it publicly, because nobody, then or
now, could figure out how to pare down our strategic requirements without
abandoning our vital interests, and because neither Democrats nor Republicans
wanted to spend the money to enable the armed forces to perform the full range
of their missions.
It’s still hard to believe that so many well-meaning
people could have done something so destructive for so long. But that’s what
happened.
In 2011, Secretary Bob Gates took a step toward
confronting the problem. Having spent two years cutting modernization programs,
Gates got permission to propose a ten-year budget for rebuilding the armed
forces. That plan called for modest yearly increases in the defense topline — not
enough even to offset inflation, and nowhere near enough to recapitalize our
forces, but the best Gates could get out of the Obama administration all the
same.
Within six months of Gates’s proposal, Congress passed
and Obama signed the Budget Control Act and conditional sequester of 2011,
which arbitrarily reduced the Gates budgets by about $100 billion per year
beginning in 2013.
In the five years the sequester has been in effect, the
Department has lost $484 billion dollars compared to Gates’s budget plan. The
table below shows the loss through fiscal year 2017, the latest year for which
figures were available as I was writing this:
(All figures in
millions of dollars)
The sequester dramatically worsened all the long-term challenges
the Pentagon was facing and in addition created an enormous present-day
readiness problem. Each of the services is now facing major shortfalls in money
for training, maintenance, and munitions. Everyone knew the sequester would
have that effect; Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of its disastrous
consequences. But it passed anyway, and has continued in effect ever since.
As Jim Mattis testified last summer:
I retired from military service
three months after sequestration took effect. Four years later, I returned to
the Department and I have been shocked by what I’ve seen with our readiness to
fight. For all the heartache caused by the loss of our troops during these
wars, no enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of our military
than sequestration.
Now, apart from the members of the Senate and House Armed
Services Committees, who have fought the sequester from its inception, the only
current elected office-holder who bears no responsibility for this sorry state
of affairs is Donald Trump. While both parties and both of the political
branches were undermining American security for the better part of 20 years,
Mr. Trump was building commercial real estate and starring on reality TV.
The president campaigned on rebuilding the military, and
I believe he is sincere in wanting to do so. Secretary Mattis will submit a
budget for fiscal year 2019 asking for $716 billion. At least $60 billion of
that money is intended to fund current combat activities and will largely not
be available to increase force size, improve readiness, or recapitalize the
services for the future.
So the administration’s baseline request for fiscal year
2019 will be somewhere around $650 billion dollars; the budget deal lifts the
sequester caps by that amount so it can actually be appropriated. That is a
major victory — it represents nearly a $100 billion increase in defense funding
over two years — but it will still be
well below the $673 billion Secretary Gates projected would be necessary in
fiscal year 2019.
(Remember that the Gates budget was inadequate at the
time, that he proposed it before the sequester caused so much additional
damage, and that the world has gotten a lot more dangerous since 2011.)
I don’t fault the Trump administration for not requesting
more in fiscal year 2019. Secretary Mattis has only recently had most of his
team appointed, confirmed, and installed in the Pentagon. The administration
had to develop its National Security Strategy and National Defense strategy
before it could build a budget to match, and that took time as well.
Moreover, the defense-industrial base is so fragile —
another result of years of underfunding — that the Pentagon isn’t immediately
capable of spending all it needs to spend anyway. And Deputy Secretary of
Defense Patrick Shanahan has promised that the fiscal year 2020 budget will be
a “masterpiece,” which means, one hopes, that the department will for the first
time in years actually be allowed to budget for what it really needs rather
than having to stick to numbers set arbitrarily by the Congress or OMB.
Only the department has the analytical resources to
determine with any precision what the budget should be in the out years. But
there is little doubt that another large increase in fiscal year 2020 will be
necessary. As an example, Mackenzie Eaglen of AEI has estimated that the
baseline budget for that year should be $705 billion, which would mean a total
increase of defense funding, over three years, of more than $150 billion
dollars.
That’s a lot of money; I can envision readers of this
column sucking in their breath. But it’s only slightly above Gates’s
projections for fiscal year 2020, it’s significantly less than 1 percent of
America’s GDP, and it’s only necessary because the government has been so busy
for so many years digging the department into such a deep hole.
Personally, I feel caught between the need to build up
right away and the importance of doing it right. The Trump administration feels
the same tension, and it deserves the benefit of the doubt as it decides how
quickly to tackle the monumental challenge it faces. But it is essential that
neither Mattis, nor Shanahan, nor the president himself underestimates or
understates the magnitude of the damage they are trying to undo.
The Trump administration cannot allow Congress to believe
that the fiscal year 2019 budget will be the last major increase it will
request. As I have written time and again, the sequester did not actually save
money when it was imposed; it simply postponed and enlarged the bill that had
to paid. That bill has now come due. If the administration lowballs the real
cost — if they allow Congress to appropriate less than is really needed — they
risk becoming responsible for a state of affairs they did not cause, and
complicit in the terrible consequences that may well overtake our country, no
matter what they do now, at the eleventh hour after so many years of neglect.
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