Don't Believe Spending Cut Rumors

[Idealism]

Before the presidential election, reports began to circulate that the Pentagon was planning to propose a defense spending increase of roughly $450 billion over five years. That's in addition to the increases in the base budget already laid out in the 2009 Future Years Defense Plan.

The services have been laying the groundwork for the request for several months. Earlier this year, briefing slides showing $60 billion to $80 billion per year in new expenditures started making the rounds inside the Beltway, supported by a public campaign by conservative think tanks and politicians to establish a floor on defense spending at 4 percent of GDP.

The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.

They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending.

Let us be clear: There is no indication that the president-elect intends to cut defense spending, and indeed, during his campaign he promised to increase the size of the ground forces, which makes an increase in spending almost inevitable. As with any transition, there will be some adjustments to specific programs, but cutting individual weapon systems is not and has never been synonymous with cutting spending overall.

There are so many things wrong with this emerging process that it is hard to address the issue concisely. Promoting overspending on defense in order to forestall popular social spending is undemocratic - it creates a false tension between national security and other public policy goals.

The informal alliance between the services and conservative think tanks threatens to further politicize the military. The abuse of national security arguments to win political arguments is both morally suspect and threatens the security of the nation by delinking strategic assessment from public policy.

Ultimately, the most dangerous aspect of this development is the threat posed to civil-military relations. We went through a similar process eight years ago, and the results were painful and unsatisfactory.

In the mid-1990s, congressional Republicans, concerned that the Clinton administration was allowing the Department of Defense to run on inertia, mandated the Pentagon produce a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The 1997 QDR did nothing to stanch concerns. Indeed, it was eviscerated as an empty bureaucratic document by another congressional mandated review, the National Defense Panel (NDP).

The reaction was swift. For the 2001 QDR, the role of the NDP was gutted. From being a public review of the QDR after issued, the NDP became an internal advisory panel to help shape the QDR. More significantly, the services became much more active in trying to shape the next QDR to bind the next administration while working on making alliances on Capitol Hill.

Starting in 1998, the services were working with powerful congressional players to create a document and a process that would block external criticism and also bind the next administration.

The roots of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's dicey relations with the uniformed military stemmed from his refusal to accept a fait accompli in the form of a QDR largely drafted without his input. The consequences of the rift were severe. After 9/11, when the United States found itself at war first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, Rumsfeld was quick to reject military advice and perhaps too willing to accept suggestions from self-interested amateurs and pundits from outside.

The roots of this rest in the inappropriate conduct of the services from 1998 to 2001, when they sought essentially to shake off key elements of civilian oversight.

And now, we see the past as prologue. The services have not learned the lessons of 2001. They are trying to limit civilian control by conspiring to lock in the new administration. No good can come of this. Either the incoming administration will assert itself and as a result cause tremendous tension with the services, or it will roll over and cause irreparable harm to the concept of civilian control over the military.

There is a way to avoid this potential train wreck. Instead of focusing tactically on individual systems, the services should be acting strategically and building a cooperative relationship with the incoming administration. Instead of trying to constrain and marginalize the civilian leadership, the services should engage and try to convince the new team. Mutual respect will go much further than tired inside-the-Beltway tactics and Pentagon games.

Bernard Finel is a senior fellow at the American Security Project and lead author of "Are We Winning? Measuring Progress in the Struggle Against Violent Jihadism."

Link: http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3823105&c=FEA&s=COM