Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been saying for months that he intends to cut defense spending. Yet the cuts he has just announced will not actually reduce overall Pentagon spending: They will merely slow the rate of annual spending increases. Secretary Gates should propose cuts that actually reduce overall Pentagon spending. But given the criticism already unleashed at his modest tinkering, chances for bona fide cuts seem exceedingly slim.
Pentagon spending has been increasing for a decade at the rate of 7 percent a year, adjusted for inflation; or 12 percent annually without such adjusting. Part of that unsustainable pattern of annual spending hikes owes to the cost of two wars. Even so, the rate of spending increase should be winding down: It should not be going up at the 2 percent rate that Secretary Gates proposes.
The Pentagon’s budget is just over $708 billion, or about one-fifth of the total annual $3.55 trillion federal budget for 2010. The defense budget provides $549 billion for regular operating expenses, and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – not counting a pending $30 billion supplemental appropriation for the troop surge in Afghanistan.
Those are huge numbers on their face. Relative to the rest of the world’s combined military budgets, they are stunning. The United States alone spends more on reported military spending than every other nation in the world, combined.
If we just spent more than all our NATO partners combined, that would seem plenty. After all, the British, French, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Italians and the rest of the NATO contingent are all well-armed. But to add to them what Russia, Japan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations spend suggests how out of kilter our military budget is relative to real our core peace-keeping and war needs.
As Secretary Gates himself noted, why should the Navy have 11 aircraft carriers, at a cost of $11 billion apiece, when no other country has more than one?
Secretary Gates proposes to shut down a relatively new command center in Virginia which plans how the separate branches could cooperate better. Even military people concede that how to accomplish that goal should have been obvious long before now. Closing that command would cut 3,000 to 5,000 jobs in Virginia. The state’s two Democratic senators vehemently oppose that idea, and they are sure to get congressional support.
Secretary Gates took on Congress and the defense establishment last year to cancel the F-22 fighter jet contract, a plane designed for the old Cold War era. He could move further along that road by killing plans for unneeded C-17 transport planes, the redundant F-35 multi-purpose fighter, and the $26-billion Osprey jet, a troubled vertical-takeoff-jet project which has limped along for almost 20 years without much success.
Other programs could be jettisoned without security risks, as well. These include a still unproven missile defense system and a super-expensive Virginia-class submarine.
Secretary Gates professes to want to trim unneeded projects so he can shift the savings to more constructive support of troops in the field. Judicious cuts in unneeded programs should provide plenty of money for that, including the dramatic $30 billion run-up in costs for improved medical care for injured veterans and support for military families.
The obstacle that remains to be tackled is what President Eisenhower rightly called the “military-industrial” complex that continues to thrive on exorbitantly expensive, but unneeded, work. That’s the battle Secretary Gates has yet to engage.