Rumsfeld came out and said it: He’s not sacrificing any of his modernization plans just because there’s a war going on.
“We, simply, as an institution, have to not stop doing what we were doing and start doing something new,” he told reporters yesterday, introducing the Defense Department’s budget for fiscal year 2007.
But some analysts aren’t so sure that Rummy is being straight up about how he pays for his new gear. Steven Kosiak, with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, thinks there’s a “significant mismatch” between the Pentagon’s “modernization plans and [its] projected funding levels. The new budget “would do little to improve the affordability.”
Moreover, some of the proposed shifts in priorities such as the accelerated fielding of a new long-range strike aircraft (in 2018 rather than 2037) are likely to be dependent, for their implementation, on the willingness and ability of a future administration to make offsetting cuts in other DoD priorities. The QDR and FY 2007 budget request have, for the most part, deferred these difficult choices.
But that’s not all. In addition to the gazillion dollar excuse me, $439.3 billion main Defense budget, there’s also an extra $120 bill that’s supposed to go to supporting the fights over in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kosiak is pretty sure a big chunk of that cash is going somewhere else. Some of it is going to fund an Army reorganization into smaller, more deployable units. Then there’s this:
In early 2005, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that sustaining US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan at essentially todays level would require about $85 billion in FY 2006. This suggests that the administrations proposed $120 billion in emergency funding for military operations in FY 2006 may be too high by as $35 billion.
Rummy has pulled this kind of stunt before — dipping into the Army’s payroll, and then forcing Congress to make up the difference in a war-funding bill. But I was half-hoping that this time around, he’d act like a man, and really say how much he was spending on his transformation projects. Oh, well.
UPDATE 02/08/06 11:56 AM: “Many of the spending priorities in President Bush’s proposed $439.3 billion defense budget conflict with the military requirements outlined in a new long-range plan drawn up by Pentagon officials,” Knight-Ridder’s Bob Cox reports.
Once again, experts say, the budget drawn up by the Pentagon’s top civilian and military leader’s calls for massive spending on new high-tech fighter jets, warships and missile defense systems at the expense of bolstering American soldiers’ capability to prevail in the low-tech conflicts they’re now engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, released Friday, identifies a wide range of problems the military must be prepared to deal with. It calls for enhancing the ability of U.S. forces to conduct a low intensity, “long war” against terrorists in far flung locations, improve the military’s homeland security capabilities, and prepare for a possible all-out with an emerging power like China.
It’s the latter scenario, which the military foresees fighting with F-22 fighter jets and new high-tech warships built by Lockheed Martin, that gets the biggest investment in the 2007 budget Bush submitted to Congress on Monday…
“The words in the QDR don’t seem to bear much resemblance to the numbers in the ‘07 spending request,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute defense think tank.
UPDATE 1:16 PM: The new budget kicks the Defense Department’s new laser-based communications satellites to the curb, Reuters notes. The Armchair Generalist looks at the counter-WMD programs. (Here’s some background.) Defense Industry Daily has a massive round-up of budget-related links.
UPDATE 1:28 PM: Despite Sen. Robert Byrd’s observation that the Pentagon’s budget amounts to “$439 for every minute since Jesus Christ was born,” many Senators are worried that Rummy & Co. aren’t spending enough, Defense News reports. Shockingly, that’s particularly true of guys like Joe Lieberman, who have big weapon-building facilities in their states.
Something’s gotta go, and maybe it’ll be the F-22 (soon to be superseded by top secret Skunk Works prototype).
The DoD needs to start shifting more and more jobs to civilians to reduce the amount of government workers, and in the long run, government benefits etc.; and more bases should be consolidated and people let go. Carlton Meyer has (or used to have) a list of possible savings, including some force redeployments, closing of obsolete headquarters and so forth.
Rumsfeld knows full well it’s easier to get a bigger bucket of water than wring it out of a towel, even one as big and wet as the DoD (of course, around 40% of the DoD’s budget is human resources like payroll and healthcare, which for the moment remains untouchable)
what do you expect from our misbegotten chicken hawk republican polititions. if it does not benifit big business and the wealthy, it is not needed or necesary.
Charles — 40%!!! are you sure about that…that seems rediculously high.
And any links or info on the “supposed” top secret jet better then the F-22A
I’ve never heard that.
oh and “d.l. greening” — I often wonder if liberals and left wing can even talk without bush bashing spewing our of there ignorant mouths.
Regarding new F-22: If I actually knew about it, it wouldn’t be top secret anymore. During the Cold War Americans didn’t know about the U-2 until it was blasted out of the sky.
For the DoD number, it appears to be a seriously flawed figure (which I will retract now). In 2003, about 93.9 million out of 365 million of Discretionary Budget Authority (discounting supplementals) went to personnel. Emergency and Non-Emergency Supplementals is the 72 million that Kerry “voted for before [he] voted against it”. The calculation pegs the 2003 figure as only 25%.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/defense.htmlhttp://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/defense.html
Good Afternoon Folks,
Nothing like the fiction of a QDR to lively things up a little. A few items not quite mentioned but should be.
The Navy currently has a fleet of 261 ship according to non-pentagon sources not the 281 the CNO Mullens claim to have. Of course there could be a ghost fleet some where, but I doubt it.
I think the Admiral is just repeating what he has been scripted for and didn’t bother to count ships. When interested parties finally get around to counting boats and the Admiral come up short he can always plead he was just following orders. After all we know that CNO’s are not paid to count boats.
To expand the U.S. Navy to 315 ships with only a net gain of two ships a year, Admiral Mullens figures, none of us will be around to see 315 ships again. That is unless you count the “Rubber Duckie” Zodiacs as comissioned ships of the U.S. Navy.
DD51’s are being build at a pace that the last one will yet to be build when the first of the class is being retired from service. The net loss to the submarine fleet of new boats vs. boats retired is such that by 2020 the U.S. will have no submarines.
An interesting point regarding submarines is that right now there is no “next generation” of submarines in the drawing and design stage of development. That is a first since the Navy started buying submarines with the U.S.S. Holland.
Found out why the big rush for the F-22. The F-15’s are no longer considered by the USAF to be combat capable. The reason being “…cracks and metal fatigue, they are flown only under speed restrictions for fear of losing their vertical fins…” It appears that this “problem” shows up after about fifteen years of service, the average age of an F-15C is now eighteen years old.
The F-15 will still be ok to bring down and air liner now and then though.
The fix is known but is way to expensive, the problem is a design flaw not really material weakness. To fix the problem the back half of the airframe would have to be rebuilt. The hedge right now is the current budget has been to reopened the F-15 line in St. Louis and to keep it open till at least 2009, all depending on the F-22 buys.
So the next time we read where two Euro Fighters jumping a couple of F-15’s and bettering them we have a reason or when the Indian build SU-27’s kick F-15 bu** again.
The U.S. Army is so confident in the FCS that it spent almost a $100Million last calender year to reopen the Abrams and Bradley lines and the current budget includes 100 more Strykers, you know the Interm Fughting Vehicle. To pay for all this the administration wants to cut another 30K troops from the Army.
A future Army might look like a motor pool full of new Armored Vehicles but no soldiers to crew them.
Is this a great country or what?
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Yay, a overmechanized force. I can see the motive behind the push for robots.
It’s difficult to see the need for new equipment in time of peace and when you’re a superpower, but history tells tales of woe, of those who were armed with tankettes when the enemy had panzers. Or people who expected to fight in static war when they got hit with blitz war (and lost with better equipment).
Rummy was going to “skip the next generation” and go with the next-next generation of gear. That was fine with most of us. It is unlikely that we are going to war against a major power anytime soon, so it would seem fruitless to keep having four of every class of new generation of ship.
For example is our sub force. We have a bunch of LA class. Then SeaWolf during the Cold War, program terminating with…what was it, two subs? Then the Virginia, terminating with a unknown number of ships. It is silly to increment so quickly and have so few of each ship, when we should be testing technologies and then building en masse once we are, quote, “ready”. Otherwise funding every generation of military system would give us a jalopy of weapons of varying “Generation” cycle.
I would like to see their justification for all of this money. I would like to see the rundown of how each dollar is spent.
I think we are going on 300+ billion for the war in Iraq. I would like to see how that money was spent.
Example:
10 billion for small arms and ammunition.
40 billion for total air transport flights — 111,000 total flights.
30 billion for sea transport operations — 2500 total transports.
15 billion for rockets.
9 billion for guided missiles.
And then an average cost per item. If you spent 9 billion on guided missiles and you have exhausted 4000 missiles in operation, what is the total cost of each weapon.
I would really like some insight into all of this because to me it seems like a conspiracy and all of this money is getting dumped somewhere. Or we are way overcharging ourselves and someone is making massive PROFIT.