excerpts from an article by
David Wood
Chief Military Correspondent
Heritage.org propaganda on defense cuts
A bruising fight over defense spending looms on Capitol Hill, where newly arriving legislators, elected to slash government spending and the deficit, will confront the biggest budget mess in the federal government.
It'll be a wild melee, with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican, lashing the Pentagon bureaucracy to find its own deep cuts. He'll be pitted against some newly elected tea partiers determined to cut everywhere but defense, old-line congressional liberals and libertarians bent on scaling back U.S. military commitments abroad, and the surviving old dogs of both parties digging in with defense contractor lobbyists to protect corporate revenues and home-district jobs.
It is "absolutely possible '' to make smart cuts in defense spending, insists Todd Harrison, senior budget analyst of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. But it's "not likely,'' he adds.
"If you want to make smart decisions about spending defense dollars, those decisions have to be tied to a strategy, and for a deliberative body like Congress to do that, there has to be some consensus about what the strategy is. And I don't think we have that.''
But no matter what politicians said on the campaign trail, the defense budget is an almost irresistible target. Even adjusting for inflation, the
$712 billion Pentagon spending plan for 2011 now before Congress is the largest since World War II, including the budgets that paid for the wars in Korea and Vietnam. And that's without counting the cost of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given that amount of cash, "substantial cuts can be made without threatening our national security, without cutting essential funds for fighting terrorism, and without shirking our obligations as a nation to our brave troops,'' said a letter from a mostly Democratic group, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), to the deficit commission.
The blue-ribbon bipartisan study group was set up by President Obama to make recommendations next month on how to control federal spending and debt. It is expected to recommend reductions cuts in defense budgets.
Many fault the Pentagon, and the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for failing to set out a clear strategy and a prioritized list of what needs to be done, at what cost.
The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, released earlier this year, was supposed to do just that. Instead, critics said, it merely came up with a list of missions the military should undertake, without setting priorities or explaining the risks of not doing them.
Here's what happens when Congress goes to work on the defense budget without knowing the strategy.
The Pentagon has its heart set on the new Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), currently projected to cost $247 billion for a fleet of 2,400 aircraft. The planes would be a great help for a war with China, say, or Russia.
But for wars like Afghanistan, the airplane the JSF is supposed to replace, the venerable A-10 Warthog, is actually performing better. It flies lower and slower, has a huge gun and armor to protect the pilot . . . Each JSF costs $131 million – nine times the price of the A-10.
That illustrates the alarming reality of today's defense spending: the costs have gone up wildly, even as the military's planes, tanks and ships are getting older and shoddier. There are fewer of them, and they're being used twice as hard. The Air Force has shrunk from 4,200 fighters and attack aircraft in 1991 to 1,498 today.
And like the A-10 and the upgraded, 1970s-era F-15s and F-16s, these "legacy'' jets are being over-used in Afghanistan, and becoming more and more expensive to maintain. Same thing with the Navy, which today is able to put to sea fewer combat ships than at any time since 1946.
Budget scourge Tom Coburn, Republican senator from Oklahoma, took a hard look at defense spending earlier this year and came away staggered. "Despite the sacrifices, heroism and professionalism that our military personnel have shown in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's defenses have been decaying despite -- perhaps even because of – increasing budgets,'' he reported.
A second piece of bad news is that the largest, and fastest growing part of the defense budget is for "the troops'' -- pay, benefits like college tuition, tax-free bonuses, housing allowances and health insurance. Since 2001-- thanks to the generosity of Congress -- the Pentagon's personnel costs have gone up 46 percent (total manpower grew by 3.5 percent during that period). That doesn't include the uncontrolled costs of the military's health care ($50.7 billion a year) or its retirement system ($11 billion).
