Bush Budget Stalls Transformation Drive

Details in the 2003 budget request from U.S. President George W. Bush include $38 billion for homeland security and an additional $48 billion for the Defense Department. This represents a 12 percent real increase above current spending and a dramatic 14 percent increase above the Cold War average spending — to fund a force structure that is one-third smaller than it was a decade ago.

It also marks the federal government’s return to deficit spending for the first time in four years.

U.S. military spending now is creeping toward $400 billion, and matches the combined military spending of the next 15 largest defense budgets in the world. What, then, will we get for our additional Pentagon dollars?

The administration has made clear that new funds will support military pay and benefits, increased research, and transformation. But a substantial portion will go toward more traditional priorities, such as supporting an outmoded force structure, and funding the development and procurement of staggeringly expensive Cold War-era weapons.

This is not to say that personnel benefits, developing new technologies and transforming the military to a force structured, trained and equipped to meet present and future threats to our national security, are not worthy of support. Quite the opposite is true. But there is a distinct and important difference between additional funds for new priorities, and simply throwing more money into the pot.

There are initiatives and technologies, such as improved intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, which will improve the military’s effectiveness in combating terrorism. And there are technologies, such as enhanced command and control, more capable unmanned aerial vehicles and increased transport, which will aid the services’ transformation plans.

But there are others, such as the F-22, the Crusader artillery system and national missile defense, which will do neither.

According to the Pentagon’s own figures, the per-unit cost of the F-22 has grown to $226 million, a 24 percent increase over just the preceding year. The Crusader, a program considered by many to be in serious trouble a year ago, is now a priority.

Missile defense, which despite the best efforts of its proponents to the contrary is no easier to justify in the light of the events of Sept. 11, received a 57 percent funding increase last year, and is likely to reach nearly $10 billion in the new budget, a further increase of 25 percent.

This is throwing good money after bad, and highlights the fact that the massive influx of new funding into the Defense Department’s budget likely will discourage, rather than encourage, what the Pentagon used to refer to as the Revolution in Military Affairs. Rather than requiring the services to make difficult yet critical choices, new funding will simply support the status quo.

In addition, true transformation is less a matter of equipment than an issue of force structure and doctrine. These are changes that require not so much new funding, as new thinking.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has raised this issue. While the Bush administration campaigned on a program of funding new research and development and transformation by terminating certain Cold War weapon systems, these initiatives met with stiff resistance from the Pentagon and Congress. By late summer, it was clear these efforts had failed. Yet by December, transformation was back on the table, along with bigger budgets.

The fact that homeland security has been given a special budget category outside the Pentagon budget further reflects an important point. When it comes to homeland defense, that is, protecting Americans from future terrorist attacks, the onus will fall not on the military, but on other federal and local agencies: the departments of Transportation and Justice, the U.S. Customs Service and local law enforcement, to name just a few.

We are forced to ask: Does the additional Pentagon funding buy us true security, or merely a false sense of security?

Obviously, the government never should be satisfied with misspending scarce taxpayers’ dollars. But it is one thing to waste the citizens’ money, and quite another to fail to adequately and properly provide for the nation’s security.

This issue is not one that will be washed away by the short-term flood of new funding, and must be addressed. The reality is, the administration’s call for additional funds has more to do with the environment created by the events of Sept. 11 than any great shift in our national security strategy. How long such spending will be politically sustainable remains to be seen, as the demand for new Pentagon spending competes with other federal priorities — tax cuts, domestic programs, protecting Social Security, even homeland defense requirements from other agencies such as the FBI.

But it seems highly unlikely, for both fiscal and ideological reasons, that we have returned to an era of long-term Cold War level budgets.

It is critical that we focus our spending on those initiatives that will enhance our security and prepare us to meet the challenges of the future, rather than continue to support outdated priorities of the past. And we must, and can, do so without squandering our national treasure.

As retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, former Air Force chief of staff, said at the time of last year’s budget request, “if we can’t defend this country for $300 billion a year we ought to get some new generals.”

By Christopher Hellman CDI Senior Analyst chellman@cdi.org and Rear Adm.(Ret.) Stephen H. Baker, USN CDI Senior Fellow sbaker@cdi.org

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