In Defense of the Realm

As Congress nears the cliff that the sequestration budget would require – that “if you don’t come up with an alternative budget plan, we are cutting the federal budget by $1.2 trillion, including $407 billion from the military” automatically that an embattled Congress imposed on itself – it is interesting to watch how our elected representatives are backpedaling. Facing a job cut that would add over 1 million workers to the unemployment rolls (depending on whose numbers you believe), decimating any semblance of a recovery, Congress is trying to figure out how to come back from the edge. It isn’t pretty.

Clearly, meat axe cuts are stupid and cause massive displacement on an unacceptably accelerated basis. Cutting the military isn’t about an instant solution, but a slow and deliberate reduction in annual military expenditures – particularly since the Iraq War is over and Afghanistan winding down – over time. We need to drop from spending well north of 40% of the world’s entire military budget to a more realistic 25-30% or less… slowly and in managed process. For nations that fall under our military umbrella, it’s time we started getting them to share some of the massive expense that we are paying… or the umbrella needs to fold. We have a fleet for every major body of water on earth, expensive aircraft carriers, submarines and a major supporting battle group. We have airbases in every corner of the world, and we have artillery, armor and infantry almost equally deployed.

But history has taught us a valuable lesson that our leaders seem to be ignoring. There comes a time when the cost of having such a powerful military presence actually begins to drain the society that pays for it, slowly pulling it down. Whether you look at ancient Sparta, Rome, the Ming Dynasty or the more recent military costs to the Soviet Union of fighting their own Afghan war that was the straw that broke their back, having too big of a military can so weaken the economic ability of the country that pays for it that collapse is accelerated. Further, having such a big military invites others to request its involvement and allows policy makers to resort to military solutions way too fast. Imagine if we could only fight major battles and wars with a draft-driven military how seldom we would be at war. We pull out and use our guns – with the resulting massive military expenditures – long before we should. The field is littered with the “unintended consequences” of our actions.

But the military is watching the looming storm with horror. Prized new weapons systems will be cancelled or put on hold. Many in the military will be denied the ability to re-up. Layoffs by the hundreds of thousands await communities all over the United States that depend on the ancillary revenues of have such installations in their midst. So the military is trying to salvage money wherever they can find it… even if they really should return unneeded funds or money that still sits in accounts after their underlying programs have been cancelled or abandoned.

Walter Pincus, writing for the August 6^th Washington Post, asks the tough question: “How can the Pentagon keep $2.5 billion left over from a canceled program sloshing around for ‘reinvestment by the Army’ when Capitol Hill and the White House are worried about Pentagon budget cuts and national security?... How does the Pentagon get to simply hold on to that money without greater scrutiny? … The food stamp program could not get away with that, nor could the WIC health and nutrition program for women, infants and children, both of which are facing deep cuts.

“That $2.5 billion was money the Army once planned to spend between 2013 and 2017 on its Autonomous Navigation System (ANS). The system, begun in 2003, was ‘to serve as the autonomous navigation system for as many as 13 unmanned vehicle types as part of the FCS [Future Combat System],’ according to a Government Accountability Office report released [August 2^nd].” Bottom line, “re-programming” military budgetary allocations have to be a Congressional prerequisite, not one relegated to command. It’s a tough world out there, but we really have to manage this process better.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our Congress has never been particularly good at understanding how to reconcile military priorities with our ability to pay for them.