PENTAGON CUTS: BOGUS?

Don’t be fooled by the dol­lar signs. Pentagon poobahs may say they’re trim­ming $30 bil­lion dol­lars from their bud­get over the next six years. But, chances are, those pro­gram cuts will be grown back, once Congress has its say and bureau­cratic iner­tia creeps in.
Late last week, while most of us were prepar­ing our hang­over reme­dies, Inside Defense did some damn fine report­ing, dig­ging up deputy defense sec­re­tary Paul Wolfowitz’s order to start par­ing back new weapons projects.
One of the pro­grams hard­est hit: the C-​​130J cargo plane — a faster, higher-​​flying, longer-​​lasting ver­sion of the air­craft cur­rently shut­tling sup­plies to Iraq. $5 bil­lion is sup­posed to be taken out of the pro­gram, as the Air Force’s pur­chase of the plane is ter­mi­nated, and the Marine Corps’ buys are ended early. But, in the end, that reduc­tion will “likely [be] reversed on Capitol Hill,” accord­ing to one Congressional source.
“This is a favorite cut that Congress always fixes,” adds GlobalSecurity​.org direc­tor John Pike.
Similarly, Wolfowitz’ pro­posal to roll back the $952 mil­lion pur­chase of a San Antonio-​​class amphibi­ous ship in 2008 likely won’t hap­pen, either. The LPD-​​17 — the Marines’ answer to an air­craft car­rier, basi­cally — has fre­quently got­ten more money from the Congress than the Pentagon orig­i­nally asked for. And that’ll prob­a­bly hap­pen again, Pike thinks. “They will just put the three units that are pro­posed for elim­i­na­tion back in the bud­get when the time arrives.“
In fact, of the $30 bil­lion in pro­posed cuts, only $5.9 bil­lion will come in the next fis­cal year, Inside Defense notes. That’s less than the $10 bil­lion in sav­ings the White House report­edly requested — and, as Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains, even those mod­est mea­sures won’t really kick in for years to come. The major reduc­tions only begin to take hold in fis­cal year 2009. By then, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion will be just about over. And there will have been plenty of time to restore the money that was allegedly taken out.
THERE’S MORE: “Vice Adm. (ret.) Arthur Cebrowski, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Transformation, has already sug­gested to Rumsfeld that he reject OMB’s [the White House’s Office of Management and Budget’s] call for reduc­tion on the grounds that it will crip­ple the military’s plan to become smaller, but harder hit­ting, through the intro­duc­tion of new tech­nol­ogy,” Aviation Week says. “The mil­i­tary hopes to cre­ate a back­lash from Rumsfeld, a ploy that may already have suc­ceeded with Cebrowski who is advis­ing the Defense sec­re­tary ‘to just say no.’”
AND MORE: The Pentagon is propos­ing a bunch of other big cuts $5 bil­lion from the hap­less mis­sile defense pro­gram, $1.2 bil­lion from the crash-​​prone V-​​22 Osprey rotor­craft, $5.3 bil­lion from the Virginia-​​class sub­ma­rine effort. But the roll­back that’s mostly likely to stick might be the one to the belea­guered F/​A-​​22 jet.
The $40 bil­lion stealth fighter pro­gram has been assailed for years as a Cold War relic. And one of the planes exploded dur­ing take­off late last month.
The Air Force orig­i­nally planned to buy 339 of the so-​​called “Raptors.” But that num­ber shrank to 277, as the cost-​​per-​​plane swelled. Now, the Pentagon is call­ing for a fur­ther cut, to 180 jets a sav­ings of $10.5 bil­lion. And it may not be the final trim. “The F/​A-​​22 buy could even­tu­ally drop to as few as 100 air­craft,” Aviation Week reports.
With so few planes, the Raptor’s mis­sion could change dra­mat­i­cally. Originally, the jet was viewed as a way to pro­vide American forces with every­day con­trol of the skies. But if there are only 100 or so Raptors in ser­vice, “that would make the F-​​22 more of a sil­ver bul­let, kick-​​down-​​the-​​door force rather than our every­day air supe­ri­or­ity fighter,” a Congressional source says.
AND MORE: Generals, politi­cians, and pun­dits across the polit­i­cal spec­trum have been call­ing for a big­ger Army, with more troops. But Phil Carter, to put it mildly, isn’t con­vinced.

I sup­pose, in a Pentagon bureaucrat’s Utopia where there were unlim­ited amounts of money to spend on man­power, machines and bureau­cracy, that would be great. But here in the real world, such pro­pos­als may not be pru­dent. Indeed, they may be quite daft, given our real resource con­straints…
It’s not as easy as sim­ply say­ing that we should cut expen­sive weapons sys­tems. Just like weapons sys­tems, sol­diers cost money too. Moreover, you don’t just pay for the sol­dier and his per­sonal equip­ment you pay for his fam­ily, their hous­ing, their med­ical care, their lead­er­ship, their train­ing base, their com­bat equip­ment (i.e. trucks and tanks), their train­ing, et cetera. When you con­sider an increase of this mag­ni­tude to the per­ma­nent end-​​strength of the mil­i­tary, you’ve got to take the long view of how much these increases will cost. And, per­haps more impor­tantly, you must con­sider qual­ity in addi­tion to quan­tity you can’t dilute the qual­ity of today’s force just to cre­ate more force struc­ture. If we fall into that trap, we will have regressed back to the WWI/​WWII attrition-​​based model of warfare.

January 3rd, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.