The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

Is it that the Wrongologist has a hate case
for Messrs. McCain and Graham? Or could it be that they are simply WRONG again?
This time it is their posturing on the possible cuts to Military Spending.   One
fallout from the failure of the Super Committee is that the Pentagon will face additional cuts to its spending over the next decade of $600 billion.  So, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham woke
up to warn us that “these cuts represent a threat to the national security
interests of the United States”. Their good friend, Republican Representative
Buck McKeon, (R-CA) joined in by saying, “I will not be the Armed Services
Committee chairman who presides over the crippling of our military”; while DEFSEC, Leon Panetta, weighed in saying he sees
America becoming a “paper tiger”.

So What’s
Wrong? 

Gigantic cuts and a weakened
nation, right? So, how much will the defense budget decline over the next
decade? How vulnerable will we be?

The Budget will grow,
albeit in nominal terms. Prior to the Super Committee, the defense budget was due to
increase some 23% between 2012 and 2021. Now, according to analysis by Veronique
de Rugy, the
Pentagon will have to make do with a 16% boost. According to Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments, that means, adjusted for inflation,  funding would fall by 11% from
FY2012 to FY2013, then grow by slightly more than the rate of inflation for the
rest of the decade. His report indicates by the way, that “war funding is exempt from any Budget Caps“.  As Lawrence Korb says, the “sequestration will
return defense spending in real terms to its FY 2007 level, the next to last
year of the Bush administration, when no one was complaining about devastating
levels of spending.”

But these numbers have not
quieted Mr. Panetta, who said in a letter to McCain and Graham:  “We would be left with our smallest
ground force since 1940, the fewest ships since 1915 and the smallest Air Force
in its history.”  Almost.  America has the fewest ships since 1916, despite a 70% increase in defense
spending between 2001 and 2010. Now, is it that America’s military needs yet
more money, or has the nature of warfare changed and  has new technology made
our weapon systems more efficient?

Mr. Panetta says the Sequester plan
“invites aggression”, while Messrs McCain and Graham claim America
will face a “swift decline as the world’s leading military power”.
What Bloviating! America spends as much on defense as the next 17 countries combined (most of whom are American
allies). Our main military competitor, China, spends about 17% of the amount America
spends on defense. China’s numbers will continue to grow, but to give you a
sense of where China stands in relation to America, look at its big military
accomplishment from this year: the successful refurbishment of an old Soviet aircraft carrier, its first. We have 11 aircraft carriers, another in
construction, and one more in reserve.

We don’t have a small number of
ships and planes because we’re too cheap to buy more; we have them because
that’s what the Pentagon wants. Modern war makes a small number of super advanced
weapons systems more effective than yesterday’s hardware.

Some chicken hawks insist that we
should maintain the Pentagon budget as a percentage of GDP. Bill Kristol, for
example, claims that we should never allow defense spending to fall below 4
percent of GDP. WRONG!  Social Security for example, is
tied to population growth and living standards, so as those go up so will
outlays. But this doesn’t make much sense for national defense: The United States is no harder or easier to defend
when our economy grows, so it’s foolish to say that defense spending as a
percentage of GDP should remain constant. It should go up when we’re at war, or
when external threats are high for some reason, and it should go down in other
times.

Spending on cybersecurity (particularly given China’s constant cyber attacks) needs
to increase in the future, but it’s a tiny part of Pentagon spending. We’ll
continue to keep troops in the Middle East and elsewhere. We’ll continue our drone attacks
in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. But drones are relatively cheap. As scary as
terrorism might be, the fact is that it’s primarily an intelligence expense. On
a pure military basis, it’s simply not a big-ticket threat.

Can we afford to reduce defense
spending to 2007 levels? Of course we can. 
We might need to spend our money differently. Perhaps the Pentagon will
decide it would rather have a thousand more drones instead of a single
additional supercarrier group. That makes sense since the mission of supercarrier
groups is becoming fuzzier all the time in an era of primarily asymmetric
warfare.

Another fuzzy area is the cost of
privatizing the military. Many occupational specialties that were
traditionally filled in house such as food services, communications,
transportation, and security in large part no longer exist in the military, but
are instead hired out to private corporations at increased cost.  Privatization
has dramatically increased the cost of operations, and at times, may have degraded the quality of services to the troops.  BTW, U.S. Army recruiting ads
used to advertise 212 military occupational training opportunities.  Now
there are less than 100.

The Sequestration requires the
Pentagon to find additional cuts of about $50 billion per year in its budget. Post-expense
cuts, we will still have the most powerful military on the planet by a factor
of five or six. That should make everyone in the country except for Messrs McCain, Graham and Panetta feel
safe.

To pretend that these cuts would make
us virtually defenseless is to insult our collective intelligence. It is a foolish use of the dog whistle; it is both pandering and WRONG.