Abstract
Military officers as well as civilian warriors were not particularly fond of Bill Clinton. He was not a man of honor, they said. He was insensitive to military tradition. And he surely did not understand what the armed forces were all about. Their mission was to fight and win America's wars, not to correct social ills, domestic and foreign.
“Worst of all, said Clinton's critics, the armed forces were chronically underfunded, even as the defense budget edged toward $300 billion a year. A draft-dodging president was gutting Ronald Reagan's fine fighting force.
By 1998, Undersecretary of Defense Jacques Gansler could say with a straight face that things had gotten so bad that the U.S. military was in a “death spiral.”
In 1999, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published the hugely provocative Averting the Defense Train Wreck in the New Millennium. If trends continued, it argued, “the United States will remain on the present path of de facto demobilization.”
And last December, the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes said that neither President-elect George W. Bush nor Congress could afford to ignore “the potential for a systemic collapse of the U.S. armed forces.”
Yes, the military is underfunded, says Cindy Williams, editor of Holding the Line ana a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at mit. (Other contributors to Holding the Line include Gordon Adams, director of the Security Policy Studies Program at George Washington University; Owen R. Cote Jr., associate director of MIT's Security Studies Program; Lawrence J. Korb, holder of the Maurice Greenberg chair at the Council on Foreign Relations; and David Mosher, a nuclear policy analyst at Rand.)
The roots of today's “underfunding” problems reach back to George Bush the Elder, say Williams and colleagues. The elder Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, familiar names all, were set adrift by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“After the Cold War ended, the military made significant reductions in the major elements of conventional force structure,” writes Williams. “But the remaining forces look very much like a shrunken version of their Cold War predecessors. … A new strategy based more closely on the nation's current and future security needs and interests is in order.”
In Holding the Line, Williams and her colleagues offer an extended “talking paper” as to how the armed forces might be reshaped to meet future challenges.
As always, Williams, one of Washington's savviest iconoclasts (and now a member of the Bulletin's Board of Directors), speaks plainly. There are budgetary shortfalls. But there are better ways of dealing with them than to throw money at the Defense Department, even if the nation should actually have a surplus of tax revenues for years to come:
“The nation has better uses for the surplus than to return military budgets to their Cold War levels. Additional public investment in education, infrastructure, health care, or non-military technology are likely to have higher economic and social payoffs over the long term.
“Moreover, giving in to pressure to increase the defense budget makes it too easy for decision-makers to postpone the hard choices that are needed to reposition the military for the [twenty-first] century.”
The U.S. armed forces must become leaner, meaner, and more capable of rapid deployment, argue “Williams and her colleagues. They must be high-tech and staffed with well-trained, bright, and adaptable individuals. Above all, the army, navy, and air force must work in concert. “Interoperability” is today's buzzword.
At the highest levels, the U.S. military seems committed to this. “The glossy vision statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the individual services all point toward new ways of fighting that would capitalize on emerging technologies,” writes Williams.
But a closer look at the evidence, she adds, reveals a different picture. Progress toward achieving these visions has been slow “to the point that some in the [Defense Department] have taken to renaming Joint Vision 2010 ‘Joint Vision 2040.’”
Understanding the inertia requires a look at the past. No matter how many reforms have been attempted over the past 50 years, one rule has remained nearly inviolate: Each service is entitled to a third of the defense budget pie, no matter how big or small the pie is. That unwritten entitlement has repeatedly short-circuited attempts at fundamental reform.
According to Holding the Line, the current requirement that the U.S. military be able to fight two major regional wars at roughly the same time—and without the help of allies—is bizarre. It was little more than a Defense Department scheme to ensure maximum post-Cold War funding in the absence of a significant Soviet-style threat.
In the two-war context, the armed forces are underfunded, the authors say. If you want a top-of-the-line but often clumsy Rolls, which is required by the two-war model, you will have to pay big bucks. But if an agile, road-hugging BMW is all you really need, you'll save money and get to more places faster, while still going first class.
If the United States abandons the two-war requirement, the size of the military could be scaled back and the armed forces could get by nicely, thank you, on $300 billion a year, give or take a few.
That more modest military would serve the nation well. It would still be the world's most powerful by a wide margin, capable of handling any foreseeable threat. Each service would continue to get, as in the past, about a third of the defense budget.
Nevertheless, even a scaled-back military would not be ideally suited to handle tomorrow's contingencies. It would still look too much like a condensed version of the Cold War force: heavy on main battle tanks, light on rapid deployability.
Three chapters outline a different approach to reshaping the armed forces. Instead of reconfiguring the armed forces in ways that preserve the one-third rule, defense budgets would be allocated to best meet future threats. Realistic threat assessment would guide budget allocations, not the “needs” of each individual service.
Each of the chapters on reform recommends a different approach. One favors the army as the keystone force, another tilts toward the navy, and the third argues that the air force should be central.
Holding the Line is not a consensus document; it is intended to be provocative, not definitive. It offers disparate views. But all the authors agree that the president and Congress have a responsibility to hold the line on the defense budget. That can be done only by taking on entrenched interests in the Pentagon, in Congress, in think tanks, and in defense industries.
There is evidence that the Bush administration understands that the two-war business needs to be jettisoned. It has hinted that it will do so in its Quadrennial Defense Review, which may be completed by the time this magazine is out. But for months there have been indications of fierce skirmishes within the Pentagon and between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush's budget watchdogs.
Defense hawks have long said that Defense Department budgets should rise $50 billion to $100 billion a year above Clinton-era levels. Before leaving office, Clinton proposed $310 billion for fiscal 2002. Based on campaign promises, the hawks expected the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush team to up that to around $350 billion, with much more coming for fiscal 2003. But as of mid-July, Rumsfeld had agreed to go along with President Bush in asking for only $18 billion more in fiscal 2002.
Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz should resign, said the conservative Weekly Standard in reaction to Rumsfeld's apparent backtracking. “That may be the best service they could perform for their country, for it may be the only way to focus the attention of the American people—and the Bush administration—on the impending evisceration of the American military.”
When asked about the Weekly Standard editorial in a July 16 hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Rumsfeld said: “Mr. Congressman, the country has known we've been underfunding the defense budget year after year after year. This is nothing new. I just arrived. I walk in, walk in the front door, turn around, look under every rock, and every one of them says, ‘We need $3 billion more. We need $6 billion more here. We need $5 billion more there.’ You can't do it all in one year. It is not possible.”
Cindy Williams and her colleagues would surely agree. You cannot reform the Defense Department in a year. But you can start. The question is, do Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have the intention and the guts to engage in true reform? Or will they simply add missions and pour in many more billions in the coming years?
The John A. Simpson Memorial Fund
The Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago has established a memorial fund in honor of the late John A. Simpson, who was a group leader in the Manhattan Project and one of the principal founders of the Bulletin. The fund will support an annual lecture on the subject of science and public policy.
Contributions to the
John A. Simpson Memorial Fund, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
In late May, President Bush said he was “committed to building a future force that is defined less by size and more by mobility and swiftness, one that is easier to deploy and sustain, one that relies more heavily on stealth, precision weaponry, and information technologies.”
While Williams and her colleagues may have been heartened by that statement, the generals and admirals at the Pentagon were probably less admiring of it. Since the defense reorganization of 1947, when the air force was carved out of the army, they have been prepared to die, at least figuratively, to protect the prerogatives of their respective services. The one-third rule has been sacred.
“Duplication, obsolete construction projects, obsolete techniques and policies, overlapping in the armed services operations and organizations must go by the boards,” Hap Arnold, who led the Army Air Forces in World War II, wrote in 1949, after he retired.
“Let us give the people of the United States the best, the most efficient, the most modernly equipped armed forces possible, using as determining factors, our foreign policy, and the capabilities and limitations of our probable enemies.”
Presumably, every general and admiral who has read those or similar words agrees. As long as their service gets its third.