Paul Simon
2008-12-24 20:34:45 UTC
Pentagon Tries to Lock Obama Into an Outrageously Bloated Budget
By Mark Engler, In These Times. Posted December 24, 2008.
The U.S. spends as much on the military in a single year as it did in
the $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the Pentagon is now calling
for more.
At the end of a long electoral season marked by bipartisan vows to
bring "change," Americas massive military budget remains a hulking
and seemingly immutable fact of national life. Given the financial
crisis and the promise of President Bushs departure from office, many
have hoped that overheated defense spending might give way to the need
to addressing domestic problems.
Yet, countering these hopes, the Pentagon has already maneuvered to
lock the Obama administration into greater military spending. On Oct.
9, Congressional Quarterly reported that a forthcoming spending
estimate from defense officials would call for $450 billion in
additional funds over the next five years. The publication Defense
News subsequently confirmed with Bradley Berkson, the Pentagons
director of program analysis and evaluation, that the military would
indeed be seeking additional funds -- although Berkson cited the
figure of $360 billion over six years.
In either case, these billions would be increases on top of already
escalating military budgets. The Pentagon is currently set to receive
$515 billion for 2009, and $527 billion for 2010. Each sum is roughly
five times what the federal government will spend annually on
education, housing assistance and environmental protection combined.
Playing Chicken
The last decade brought a momentous surge in defense appropriations.
Even without the additional money called for in the October estimate,
proposed military spending for 2010 almost doubles the already
astronomical budget from fiscal year 2000, which was approximately
$280 billion.
This, however, is not the whole story. Adding to the Pentagon "base
budget," an extra $16 billion goes each year to the Department of
Energy to maintain nuclear weapons. And Congress funds wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan with supplemental authorizations, which came to $180
billion in fiscal year 2008.
The country spends as much on the military in a single year as it did
in the recent $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the Pentagon is now
calling for more.
Normally, the U.S. president submits a defense request to Congress
early in the New Year as part of the regular budget process, and prior
deliberations with military officials are not made available to the
public. The purpose of leaking the new defense-spending estimate
appears to be political. With Bush leaving office, and amid
uncertainty about a new administration, the Pentagon presumably wants
to set the bar high for military spending.
"The thinking behind [the document] is pretty straightforward," Dov
Zakheim, a top budget official at the Pentagon during Bushs first
term, told Congressional Quarterly. "They are setting a baseline for a
new administration that then will have to defend cutting it."
"Its sort of like trying to play chicken with the new
administration," says William Hartung, director of the Arms and
Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. "Armed Services
puts it out there: This is what we need to meet our mission. Lets
see if you have the guts to say otherwise. They wont get all of it,
but it will complicate matters. They may get more than they would have
otherwise."
The Pentagon in Times of Crisis
On the heels of Washingtons bailout for the financial sector, news
reports have cited predictions from defense observers that military
spending would plateau.
Philip Finnegan, a defense industry analyst at the Teal Group, told
the Washington Post that the economic downturn "leaves the outlook for
defense spending going from being strong to being dim."
In late October, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) went so far as to suggest
that a 25 percent cut in defense spending would be appropriate under
current circumstances. The mere suggestion of such cuts led Rep.
Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) to invoke images of a hostile foreign
takeover. Talking with the Christian-oriented American Family News
Network on Oct. 31, he decried the irresponsibility of such a move, ,
"You know, if we dont make the right decisions about the military,
nothing else will matter, will it? Because if we dont have a free
country what do these other programs matter at all?"
Less alarmist voices contend that, with a recession looming, the time
to curtail military spending in order to fund other priorities is
ripe.
"War production doesnt create real economic health," Phyllis Bennis
of the Institute for Policy Studies recently wrote in a commentary.
"What do all those fancy missile systems, space weapons, battleships,
even tanks and Humvees, produce other than a lot of dead Iraqis and
dead Afghans?"
Instead, Bennis argued, government ought to "bail out our battered
economy [by providing] real jobs to soldiers drafted by lack of
opportunities, and [by redirecting] the hundreds of billions of
war-spending into green jobs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure,
training new teachers and building new schools."
In late September, during a question-and-answer session at the
National Defense University, even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
acknowledged that economic conditions might cool enthusiasm for
Pentagon spending: "I certainly would expect growth [in defense
budgets] to level off, and my guess would be [that] well be fortunate
in the years immediately ahead if we were able to stay flat with
inflation."
Most scenarios presented by defense observers for a net decline in
military spending do not see a reduced "base budget" for the Pentagon,
but rather predict decreases in supplemental war funding.
Since 2001, Congress has appropriated $859 billion for Afghanistan,
Iraq and other military operations related to the war on terrorism.
Under an Obama administration, which promises a gradual withdrawal
from Iraq, this funding stream is expected to dry up in coming years
-- a development that would lead to an overall decline in military
allocations.
Even Sen. John McCains (R-Ariz.) political platform called for
reining in "emergency" supplemental allotments because military needs,
as the national security statement on his campaign website explains,
"must be funded by the regular appropriations process," and relying on
"supplemental appropriation bills encourages pork barrel spending."
Amid widespread belt-tightening, some military analysts say that a new
administration should prune defense funding for outdated Cold War
weapons systems. The F-22 combat fighter -- designed to tangle with a
once-anticipated new generation of high-tech Soviet planes and priced
at $300 million per plane -- could well be on the chopping block, as
could a pricey new issue of attack submarines. Additionally,
government could swiftly save $10 billion per year by cutting ongoing
funding for Star-Wars-style anti-missile programs.
Ghosts of Transitions Past
While the possibility of minor adjustments is real, the chances of any
significant assault on the military budget are remote.
Travis Sharp, an analyst at the Center for Arms Control and
Non-Proliferation, puts it this way: "One of the biggest lessons
during the Clinton years when it came to White House-Pentagon
relations was, Dont do something at the beginning of your
administration thats going to damage your working relationship with
the military and disrupt the trust that the military has for you as
commander-in-chief. "
Sharp says President Clinton soured his relationship with the Pentagon
and with senior military leaders because he got involved with the
"dont ask, dont tell" policy soon after coming into office.
"No matter how good of a defense secretary President-elect Barack
Obama chooses," says Sharp, "if he proposes a 25 percent
defense-spending cut, the military will hate him. And he will put
himself up to be absolutely crucified by Republicans when he runs for
re-election in four years."
Not surprisingly, former U.S. Navy secretary Richard Danzig, an Obama
adviser who is expected to be a candidate for secretary of defense,
told the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 3 that he doesnt "see defense
spending declining in the first years of an Obama administration."
Even beyond the fear factor created by Clintons awkward first months
in office, it is not clear from recent history that Democrats would be
more frugal with defense spending than their Republican counterparts.
"Clinton and [Vice President Al] Gore, as part of the Democratic
Leadership Council, tried to position themselves as tough Democrats
who were not afraid to use force," says Hartung of the New America
Foundation. During the 2000 elections, "Gore actually was claiming
that he would spend more than Bush on the military."
An Obama Doctrine?
For his part, Obama has been consistently hawkish on Afghanistan and
has called for a U.S. troop surge in that country.
Changing trends in military strategy may also lead to costly new
spending. When Bush came into office in 2000, the hottest fad in
defense planning was to deemphasize the use of ground troops, focusing
instead on high technology and air power. This became known as the
"Rumsfeld Doctrine," after its leading proponent, then-Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Subsequently, U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a
backlash against this vision of reshaping the military. Officials such
as Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the U.S. Central
Command, have emphasized expanding the number of ground troops
available for deployment.
Both Obama and McCain endorsed the more-boots-on-the-ground theory.
Obama supports the militarys planned addition of 92,000 Army and
Marine Corps personnel over the next five years, while McCain called
for even more troops. According to defense officials, securing and
equipping these forces will cost $117.6 billion through 2013.
Pentagon official Berkson cites "operations and maintenance support
and capital support" for these troops as a primary rationale for
requesting $60 billion a year above current budget levels.
On the one hand, abandoning the delusion that wars can be won on the
cheap with high technology is a positive development. On the other
hand, the ability of superpowers to succeed in counter-insurgency and
reconstruction operations is itself highly suspect.
"So, youre preparing to fight a kind of war that youve proven
yourself unable to win?" asks Sharp of the U.S. military brass. "Im
not sure that makes sense."
He adds: "If we have more troops, does that mean that were going to
be more willing to go into the next Iraq or Afghanistan? If it does,
then I question the proposal."
America needs not simply a shift to a more fashionable way of thinking
about how wars are fought. Rather, Congress and the Obama
administration need to consider preventative models of security and
address the fact that out-of-control military spending leaves little
money for pressing social needs.
In September, the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the
United States -- a group of progressive analysts and former military
officials convened by the think tank Foreign Policy In Focus (for
which I serve as a senior analyst) -- released a proposal to realign
the defense budget. The report recommends eliminating superfluous
military spending and using the money saved -- about $61 billion -- to
fund neglected aspects of national security. These include stopping
nuclear proliferation, improving transit security and building a
foreign policy grounded in diplomacy rather than force.
"The big picture here is that the military-centered strategy of the
declared global war on terror is the one that is not working," wrote
co-editors, Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies and
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and
senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, in their fiscal
year 2008 report. "And diplomacy, peacekeeping and international
police work are the ones that are."
In the longer term, Hartung counsels a broader shift in thinking.
"Instead of having 700-plus military bases, promising scores of
countries that were going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with them if
they ever have a conflict, and being the worlds largest arms
merchant, I think there should be a scaling back of what defense
means," he says. "The current approach is an aggressive posture, even
if a lot of people in the United States dont think of it in those
terms."
As U.S. economic difficulties worsen, the belief that the country can
afford to maintain this posture may itself prove to be the most
profound threat to our national security.
By Mark Engler, In These Times. Posted December 24, 2008.
The U.S. spends as much on the military in a single year as it did in
the $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the Pentagon is now calling
for more.
At the end of a long electoral season marked by bipartisan vows to
bring "change," Americas massive military budget remains a hulking
and seemingly immutable fact of national life. Given the financial
crisis and the promise of President Bushs departure from office, many
have hoped that overheated defense spending might give way to the need
to addressing domestic problems.
Yet, countering these hopes, the Pentagon has already maneuvered to
lock the Obama administration into greater military spending. On Oct.
9, Congressional Quarterly reported that a forthcoming spending
estimate from defense officials would call for $450 billion in
additional funds over the next five years. The publication Defense
News subsequently confirmed with Bradley Berkson, the Pentagons
director of program analysis and evaluation, that the military would
indeed be seeking additional funds -- although Berkson cited the
figure of $360 billion over six years.
In either case, these billions would be increases on top of already
escalating military budgets. The Pentagon is currently set to receive
$515 billion for 2009, and $527 billion for 2010. Each sum is roughly
five times what the federal government will spend annually on
education, housing assistance and environmental protection combined.
Playing Chicken
The last decade brought a momentous surge in defense appropriations.
Even without the additional money called for in the October estimate,
proposed military spending for 2010 almost doubles the already
astronomical budget from fiscal year 2000, which was approximately
$280 billion.
This, however, is not the whole story. Adding to the Pentagon "base
budget," an extra $16 billion goes each year to the Department of
Energy to maintain nuclear weapons. And Congress funds wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan with supplemental authorizations, which came to $180
billion in fiscal year 2008.
The country spends as much on the military in a single year as it did
in the recent $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the Pentagon is now
calling for more.
Normally, the U.S. president submits a defense request to Congress
early in the New Year as part of the regular budget process, and prior
deliberations with military officials are not made available to the
public. The purpose of leaking the new defense-spending estimate
appears to be political. With Bush leaving office, and amid
uncertainty about a new administration, the Pentagon presumably wants
to set the bar high for military spending.
"The thinking behind [the document] is pretty straightforward," Dov
Zakheim, a top budget official at the Pentagon during Bushs first
term, told Congressional Quarterly. "They are setting a baseline for a
new administration that then will have to defend cutting it."
"Its sort of like trying to play chicken with the new
administration," says William Hartung, director of the Arms and
Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. "Armed Services
puts it out there: This is what we need to meet our mission. Lets
see if you have the guts to say otherwise. They wont get all of it,
but it will complicate matters. They may get more than they would have
otherwise."
The Pentagon in Times of Crisis
On the heels of Washingtons bailout for the financial sector, news
reports have cited predictions from defense observers that military
spending would plateau.
Philip Finnegan, a defense industry analyst at the Teal Group, told
the Washington Post that the economic downturn "leaves the outlook for
defense spending going from being strong to being dim."
In late October, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) went so far as to suggest
that a 25 percent cut in defense spending would be appropriate under
current circumstances. The mere suggestion of such cuts led Rep.
Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) to invoke images of a hostile foreign
takeover. Talking with the Christian-oriented American Family News
Network on Oct. 31, he decried the irresponsibility of such a move, ,
"You know, if we dont make the right decisions about the military,
nothing else will matter, will it? Because if we dont have a free
country what do these other programs matter at all?"
Less alarmist voices contend that, with a recession looming, the time
to curtail military spending in order to fund other priorities is
ripe.
"War production doesnt create real economic health," Phyllis Bennis
of the Institute for Policy Studies recently wrote in a commentary.
"What do all those fancy missile systems, space weapons, battleships,
even tanks and Humvees, produce other than a lot of dead Iraqis and
dead Afghans?"
Instead, Bennis argued, government ought to "bail out our battered
economy [by providing] real jobs to soldiers drafted by lack of
opportunities, and [by redirecting] the hundreds of billions of
war-spending into green jobs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure,
training new teachers and building new schools."
In late September, during a question-and-answer session at the
National Defense University, even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
acknowledged that economic conditions might cool enthusiasm for
Pentagon spending: "I certainly would expect growth [in defense
budgets] to level off, and my guess would be [that] well be fortunate
in the years immediately ahead if we were able to stay flat with
inflation."
Most scenarios presented by defense observers for a net decline in
military spending do not see a reduced "base budget" for the Pentagon,
but rather predict decreases in supplemental war funding.
Since 2001, Congress has appropriated $859 billion for Afghanistan,
Iraq and other military operations related to the war on terrorism.
Under an Obama administration, which promises a gradual withdrawal
from Iraq, this funding stream is expected to dry up in coming years
-- a development that would lead to an overall decline in military
allocations.
Even Sen. John McCains (R-Ariz.) political platform called for
reining in "emergency" supplemental allotments because military needs,
as the national security statement on his campaign website explains,
"must be funded by the regular appropriations process," and relying on
"supplemental appropriation bills encourages pork barrel spending."
Amid widespread belt-tightening, some military analysts say that a new
administration should prune defense funding for outdated Cold War
weapons systems. The F-22 combat fighter -- designed to tangle with a
once-anticipated new generation of high-tech Soviet planes and priced
at $300 million per plane -- could well be on the chopping block, as
could a pricey new issue of attack submarines. Additionally,
government could swiftly save $10 billion per year by cutting ongoing
funding for Star-Wars-style anti-missile programs.
Ghosts of Transitions Past
While the possibility of minor adjustments is real, the chances of any
significant assault on the military budget are remote.
Travis Sharp, an analyst at the Center for Arms Control and
Non-Proliferation, puts it this way: "One of the biggest lessons
during the Clinton years when it came to White House-Pentagon
relations was, Dont do something at the beginning of your
administration thats going to damage your working relationship with
the military and disrupt the trust that the military has for you as
commander-in-chief. "
Sharp says President Clinton soured his relationship with the Pentagon
and with senior military leaders because he got involved with the
"dont ask, dont tell" policy soon after coming into office.
"No matter how good of a defense secretary President-elect Barack
Obama chooses," says Sharp, "if he proposes a 25 percent
defense-spending cut, the military will hate him. And he will put
himself up to be absolutely crucified by Republicans when he runs for
re-election in four years."
Not surprisingly, former U.S. Navy secretary Richard Danzig, an Obama
adviser who is expected to be a candidate for secretary of defense,
told the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 3 that he doesnt "see defense
spending declining in the first years of an Obama administration."
Even beyond the fear factor created by Clintons awkward first months
in office, it is not clear from recent history that Democrats would be
more frugal with defense spending than their Republican counterparts.
"Clinton and [Vice President Al] Gore, as part of the Democratic
Leadership Council, tried to position themselves as tough Democrats
who were not afraid to use force," says Hartung of the New America
Foundation. During the 2000 elections, "Gore actually was claiming
that he would spend more than Bush on the military."
An Obama Doctrine?
For his part, Obama has been consistently hawkish on Afghanistan and
has called for a U.S. troop surge in that country.
Changing trends in military strategy may also lead to costly new
spending. When Bush came into office in 2000, the hottest fad in
defense planning was to deemphasize the use of ground troops, focusing
instead on high technology and air power. This became known as the
"Rumsfeld Doctrine," after its leading proponent, then-Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Subsequently, U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a
backlash against this vision of reshaping the military. Officials such
as Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the U.S. Central
Command, have emphasized expanding the number of ground troops
available for deployment.
Both Obama and McCain endorsed the more-boots-on-the-ground theory.
Obama supports the militarys planned addition of 92,000 Army and
Marine Corps personnel over the next five years, while McCain called
for even more troops. According to defense officials, securing and
equipping these forces will cost $117.6 billion through 2013.
Pentagon official Berkson cites "operations and maintenance support
and capital support" for these troops as a primary rationale for
requesting $60 billion a year above current budget levels.
On the one hand, abandoning the delusion that wars can be won on the
cheap with high technology is a positive development. On the other
hand, the ability of superpowers to succeed in counter-insurgency and
reconstruction operations is itself highly suspect.
"So, youre preparing to fight a kind of war that youve proven
yourself unable to win?" asks Sharp of the U.S. military brass. "Im
not sure that makes sense."
He adds: "If we have more troops, does that mean that were going to
be more willing to go into the next Iraq or Afghanistan? If it does,
then I question the proposal."
America needs not simply a shift to a more fashionable way of thinking
about how wars are fought. Rather, Congress and the Obama
administration need to consider preventative models of security and
address the fact that out-of-control military spending leaves little
money for pressing social needs.
In September, the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the
United States -- a group of progressive analysts and former military
officials convened by the think tank Foreign Policy In Focus (for
which I serve as a senior analyst) -- released a proposal to realign
the defense budget. The report recommends eliminating superfluous
military spending and using the money saved -- about $61 billion -- to
fund neglected aspects of national security. These include stopping
nuclear proliferation, improving transit security and building a
foreign policy grounded in diplomacy rather than force.
"The big picture here is that the military-centered strategy of the
declared global war on terror is the one that is not working," wrote
co-editors, Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies and
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and
senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, in their fiscal
year 2008 report. "And diplomacy, peacekeeping and international
police work are the ones that are."
In the longer term, Hartung counsels a broader shift in thinking.
"Instead of having 700-plus military bases, promising scores of
countries that were going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with them if
they ever have a conflict, and being the worlds largest arms
merchant, I think there should be a scaling back of what defense
means," he says. "The current approach is an aggressive posture, even
if a lot of people in the United States dont think of it in those
terms."
As U.S. economic difficulties worsen, the belief that the country can
afford to maintain this posture may itself prove to be the most
profound threat to our national security.