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Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Washington Post Joins Hysterical Defense Budget Rhetoric From Winslow Wheeler

Straus Military Reform Project

November 7, 2011

 

Washington Post Joins Hysterical Defense Budget Rhetoric
Monday, November 7, the Washington Post editorial board published its take on the extreme rhetoric the country has been hearing on the defense budget since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta starting talking about the "doomsday mechanism" that would reduce defense spending.  Quoting the newer extreme rhetoric of several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defending their budget ambitions to the eager-to-listen House Armed services Committee, the Washington Post positioned itself foursquare in favor of hysterics.  It was with an editorial titled "Defense on the Rocks: Mandated spending cuts could decimate U.S. military might."  Find it below and at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/defense-on-the-rocks/2011/11/04/gIQAKQDctM_story.html (although at the web link they toned down the title with the more sympathetic "US Defense on the defensive.")

In response, consider three Power Point graphs.  Figure 1 below shows the DOD budget in current dollars since 1948 and looking forward to 2021. ("Current" dollars are the amounts actually and planned to be appropriated).  Note that even under the so-called "Doomsday Mechanism," the US ends up at a post-World War II high.  (Also shown is the first phase of the Debt Deal -- already agreed to by the Pentagon.)

Figure 2 below graph shows these dollars in DOD's so-called "constant" dollars that purport to remove the effects of inflation and show spending where all dollars have the same value -- normalized to the year 2012.  Note that the "Doomsday Mechanism" would not put defense spending near any of its previous valleys, but instead well above any of them and quite flush with money in historical terms. 
Note also that the Doomsday Mechanism would put the Pentagon at a level of spending significantly above the average annual spending during the Cold War, when we faced hundreds of Soviet divisions in Europe and a dogmatically hostile China and fought two major regional wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Finally, note Figure 3 that simply compares the 2009 DOD budget to that of China, Russia and some others (and all of them combined), according to publically available foreign defense budget data.

"Doomsday?"  "Defense on the Rocks?"  "Decimated?"  You be the judge. 

Clearly, politicians -- in and out of uniform -- are using extreme rhetoric to shape the budget battlefield, establish a new and poorly informed conventional wisdom, and scare off the opposition.  Just as clearly, it has worked with the Washington Post. 

There are problems in the Debt Deal that the Republicans and President Obama wrote last summer, and there are even pervasive problems in our defenses, but the levels of spending proposed under these scenarios are not any of them.


Washington Post's rhetoric follows:

Washington Post
November 7, 2011
Pg. 18
Defense On The Rocks
Mandated spending cuts could decimate U.S. military might.
Since the congressional supercommittee is reportedly at an impasse, let's hope its members have used some of their idle time to catch up with the testimony of the nation's military chiefs at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday. The chiefs were asked to assess what would be the consequences if $600 billion in across-the-board cuts were imposed on the defense budget - a sequestration currently required by law in the event the supercommittee fails to agree on a debt reduction plan or Congress fails to pass it.

Their answers were blunt: "Cuts of this magnitude would be catastrophic to the military," testified Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, a former Iraq commander. "My assessment is that the nation would incur an unacceptable level of strategic and operational risk."

"A severe and irreversible impact on the Navy's future," said Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, chief of naval operations.

"A Marine Corps below the end strength that's necessary to support even one major contingency," said Marine Commandant James Amos.

"Even the most thoroughly deliberated strategy may not be able to overcome dire consequences," said Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz.

True, the Pentagon brass are known for pushing hard for their funding. But they rarely speak in such apocalyptic tones - and there is good reason to take their warnings seriously. Under President Obama's budget plan, $465 billion is already due to be cut from military spending over the next decade, from an annual budget now of about $700 billion. That will already require a downsizing of the Army and Marines, the reduction or cancellation of more weapons systems and a shrinking of the Navy to its lowest size in decades. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a lifelong budget hawk, is rightly concerned that such cuts may go too far.

If the additional sequestration goes forward, the total reduction could come to $1 trillion. This, Gen. Odierno said, would "almost eliminate our modernizations programs" in the Army, including new armored vehicles. Adm. Greenert said it could force the two U.S. companies that build Navy ships out of business. The Air Force would have to retire some 1,000 aircraft. In all, about 1 million military and civilian jobs would be lost.

Some in Washington may believe the threatened cuts are a paper tiger, since they would not go into effect until 2013 and might be reversed before then. But it's not that simple: As Adm. Greenert explained, layoffs of personnel and suspensions of programs would have to begin in 2012 to reach the necessary spending level by the start of 2013.
In the meantime, a bad and even dangerous message would be sent to U.S. allies and adversaries. "We'll have those who attempt to exploit our vulnerabilities," Gen. Odierno said. "We might lose our credibility in terms of our ability to deter."

Congress set this bomb in place when it agreed in the summer that half of $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts would be assessed to defense if a debt reduction plan failed to pass this year. Now it has heard from senior commanders just how much damage its explosion would cause. It would be an unconscionable act of political irresponsibility to allow their predictions to come true.
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