Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey: Cutting military spending is politically unpopular, but more dollars don’t make a better Army
... In his farewell article in last fall’s Foreign Affairs and in his welcome-back testimony to the House and Senate in January, [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates decried a defense budget riddled with “baroque” and irrelevant weapons at unaffordable cost. He warned, “the spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing.”
This is important, perhaps prophetic, rhetoric. But if, like Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance,” Gates’s ringing words remain untainted by action, they will simply mask festering problems. If, on the other hand, he decides to act, his first task must be to control the root of the evil, the money.
To understand, we need only to look at what we’ve spent and the forces those dollars have bought. According to Defense Department budget plans and records, at over $670 billion for 2009, we will be spending more on the Pentagon than at any point since 1946. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Pentagon budget is higher today than at its peaks for either Korea or Vietnam—though both of those were far larger than our current wars.
This significantly expanded budget only buys us dramatically shriveled forces. The major combat units that make up our Army, Navy, and Air Force are at their lowest ebb since 1946.
Specifically, at just over ten Army division equivalents, we have the smallest combat Army in the last 60 years, at the highest budget since the end of World War II. For past modern conflicts, there were major Army expansions, but for Iraq and Afghanistan, a very modest plan to add 60,000 soldiers for new combat formations has not even begun to show up in Army records, though the $100+ billion cost has.
Similarly, we now have a smaller Navy, under 300 combat ships, than at any point since 1946, but the Navy’s budget is now above the historic norm for the post-World War II era. In the same way, the number of wings of fighters and tactical bombers in the Air Force has collapsed from 61 in 1957 to just ten today. The budget? Also well above the historic norm.
The five-year plan Gates dropped on Obama’s doorstep continues this shrinkage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leaving us with key weapons that are older and scarcer than ever.
Symptoms of our unpreparedness abound: tank drivers get fewer training miles today than they did during the readiness-cutting Clinton administration. Fighter pilots get fewer training hours in the air than during the hollow defense years of the Carter administration. And the latest public readiness ratings reveal that not one major Army combat unit in the U.S. was rated fully ready to go to war—not even the ones sent to battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More money has not solved these problems. Quite the contrary: it enables the Pentagon and the Congress to make them worse. ...
Read entire article at American Conservative
This is important, perhaps prophetic, rhetoric. But if, like Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance,” Gates’s ringing words remain untainted by action, they will simply mask festering problems. If, on the other hand, he decides to act, his first task must be to control the root of the evil, the money.
To understand, we need only to look at what we’ve spent and the forces those dollars have bought. According to Defense Department budget plans and records, at over $670 billion for 2009, we will be spending more on the Pentagon than at any point since 1946. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Pentagon budget is higher today than at its peaks for either Korea or Vietnam—though both of those were far larger than our current wars.
This significantly expanded budget only buys us dramatically shriveled forces. The major combat units that make up our Army, Navy, and Air Force are at their lowest ebb since 1946.
Specifically, at just over ten Army division equivalents, we have the smallest combat Army in the last 60 years, at the highest budget since the end of World War II. For past modern conflicts, there were major Army expansions, but for Iraq and Afghanistan, a very modest plan to add 60,000 soldiers for new combat formations has not even begun to show up in Army records, though the $100+ billion cost has.
Similarly, we now have a smaller Navy, under 300 combat ships, than at any point since 1946, but the Navy’s budget is now above the historic norm for the post-World War II era. In the same way, the number of wings of fighters and tactical bombers in the Air Force has collapsed from 61 in 1957 to just ten today. The budget? Also well above the historic norm.
The five-year plan Gates dropped on Obama’s doorstep continues this shrinkage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leaving us with key weapons that are older and scarcer than ever.
Symptoms of our unpreparedness abound: tank drivers get fewer training miles today than they did during the readiness-cutting Clinton administration. Fighter pilots get fewer training hours in the air than during the hollow defense years of the Carter administration. And the latest public readiness ratings reveal that not one major Army combat unit in the U.S. was rated fully ready to go to war—not even the ones sent to battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More money has not solved these problems. Quite the contrary: it enables the Pentagon and the Congress to make them worse. ...