Aside from Charlie Sheen or Chuck Hagel, who would want to be
the next secretary of defense? The next occupant of the big office
in the Pentagon’s E-ring will have the worst job in town because
President Obama is doing to the Pentagon what he refuses to do to
any other part of the executive branch: he’s taken a machete to its
budget.
In February, Obama said that he wanted to take a scalpel,
not a machete, to discretionary spending. And in his hyperpartisan
budget speech on April 13, he made it clear that was true for every
part of the federal government with one exception: the Pentagon. He
demanded a new round of budget cuts worthy of the Queen of Hearts:
“sentence first, verdict after.”
In the April 13 speech, President Obama claimed that
Defense Secretary Bob Gates had already cut $400 billion from the
Pentagon’s budget in ten years and said that another $400 billion
in cuts should be added in that same period. It was the only real
cut in federal spending Obama proposed.
He said, “Over the last two years, Secretary Gates has
courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in
current and future spending. I believe we can do that again. We
need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and
effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s
missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. I intend
to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review,
and I will make specific decisions about spending after it’s
complete.”
This is Obama’s “Queen of Hearts” theory of defense
spending. He sets the amount of funding to be cut and then tells
the Pentagon to do a study to justify it.
Begin with the questionable claim that $400 billion in
“wasteful” spending (spread over ten years) has already been cut.
We don’t know if the $400 billion was wasteful because the cuts
were imposed before the Pentagon performed its “Quadrennial Defense
Review,” a statutorily-required study which is supposed to measure
our military forces against the threats they’re expected to meet
and then provide a budget to accomplish the missions. Obama and
Gates set the level of cuts and Gates then papered it over with a
QDR that justified the predetermined cuts.
Now the president wants to take the machete to the
Pentagon budget again. He wants the analysis to find an additional
$400 billion to cut from the Pentagon budget in the same ten years
and redefine our “role in a changing world.” It’s both necessary
and proper to make the analysis the president proposed. But, once
again, he’s set the amount to be cut before performing the
essential threat analysis.
Since 2008, as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Gates
has derided the idea that we will ever have to fight another
conventional war. He regularly condemns “next war-it is,” which he
defined as “…the propensity of much of the defense establishment to
be in favor of what might be needed in a future
conflict.”
Gates, in forcing the abandonment of “next war-itis,” has
imposed a change in American military thought and planning that
served us well since World War II.
That change is revolutionary and dangerous. We will no
longer plan for the future and invest in the tools of war we will
foreseeably need. The cuts Obama and Gates have already made will
result in a force that is shaped differently from the one we might
need were an enemy to disagree with Dr. Gates’ belief that we won’t
have to fight another conventional war. Or if American satellites
were attacked in space. Or if we were to suffer the kind of cyber
attacks that were made on Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia by
Putin’s Russia. Or if any number of other real threats were to be
realized.
To borrow Obama’s phrase, let’s be perfectly clear. Our
nation’s security and that of our allies is at risk because of the
cuts that have already been made in the absence of a realistic
analysis of the threats we face. We cannot afford another round of
“hope and change” at the Pentagon. The armed services need a budget
that enables them to meet and deter or defeat every serious
threat.
Instead of allowing Obama and Gates’ successor to go about
another round of random cuts, Republicans should do their own,
aimed at producing a defense version of Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” of
last year. That study should begin with an analysis of the threats
that must be met, derive from them the capabilities we need to meet
the threats, and from those capabilities define the budget to
ensure the Defense Department has the people and the assets to do
the job.
Every Pentagon study I’ve seen or been involved with
begins with a document called the “terms of reference” which
defines the job to be done. Because Obama has announced the result
he wants, his study will have terms of reference that are set to
justify the cuts.
Because Gates’ first round of cuts was made without the
essential analysis of the threats we face and the capabilities the
Pentagon must have to meet them, any new study should not assume
that they were correct.
The terms of reference for the Republican roadmap should
be these.
First, the threats we expect the Pentagon to deter or
defeat must be defined in clear terms. What are the intentions and
capabilities of our enemies today, and what do we expect of them
ten or twenty years in the future? How will we deal with terrorism
and the nations that sponsor it? Cyber war (and cyber espionage) is
one of the biggest threats we face. Our national security (and our
economy) are increasingly dependent on satellites. But those
satellites are orbiting undefended from kinetic or directed-energy
attack. Potential adversaries such as China are already testing
anti-satellite systems.
Once the threats are defined, they need to be compared to
what assets — people, weapons, defensive systems, satellites and
the rest — we have that are essential to deterring or defeating
them. Among those systems and people will be assets we don’t need
and old systems that need to be replaced. (And not only high-tech
weapons. One of the Marine heroes who fought in Fallujah, Iraq,
told me that in one gunfight, he had to shoot insurgents repeatedly
— one man more than seven times — before the bad guy went down.
Shouldn’t we be equipping the army and Marines with a better
rifle?)
The Pentagon’s budget should be based on buying what it
needs, cutting what it doesn’t and ensuring the means of deterring
or defeating the threats we foresee for the next decade and
beyond.
While doing their own defense review, Republicans should
hold hearings to define what Obama’s vision for “America’s
missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world” really
is. Call Secretary Gates in to testify on what the president
means.
Does Obama mean that we will, as the Libya intervention
indicates, devote our military power to conflicts in which we have
no strategic interest? Does he mean, as his slow-rolling of
ballistic missile defense shows, that we will not protect ourselves
from that threat? Do Obama’s actions prove his conviction that
America should not maintain its role as a superpower? Do Obama and
Gates really believe that “next war-itis” is a mental
disorder?
Everything we can derive from Obama’s actions compels that
each of those questions must be answered in the positive. The
president says he wants to “win” the future. How can that be done
if we don’t first secure it?
