Jewish World Review Feb. 9, 2005 / 30 Shevat, 5765

Pentagon is about to be transformed into a slaughterhouse for sacred cows

By Jack Kelly

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Bush has presented what — barring shooting wars with Iran, Syria or North Korea — almost certainly will be the largest defense budget of his presidency. It calls for spending $419 billion, 4.8 percent more than last year, 41 percent more than his first budget proposal in 2001.

The budget doesn't include the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will be covered in an $80 billion supplemental appropriation later this year.

When the supplemental is added to the President's budget, total defense spending, in inflation-adjusted dollars, will be about 15 percent higher than the average for defense spending during the Cold War, said Steven Kosiak, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Congress almost certainly will approve both the budget request and the supplemental this year without much alteration, Kosiak said. But congressional attitudes will change in the years to come if President Bush is reasonably successful in capping domestic spending, and/or concern about budget deficits rises. Almost all the budget cuts made in the late 1980s and early 1990s were made in defense, he noted.

Defense spending is higher now in substantial part because of cuts made during the Clinton administration. Pentagon leaders are trying not only to fight a war, but to recoup spending on modern weapons deferred during the Clinton years.

Military leaders customarily make unrealistic spending plans, assuming, against all evidence, that they'll get well in the out years. With congressional and public attitudes likely soon to turn sharply south, bitter choices need to be made.

Retired Marine Col. Robert Work, now a colleague of Kosiak's at CSBA, said this year's is a "holding budget. It postpones all the hard decisions on procurement to the latter part of the future year defense plan. We won't know what they'll be until after the QDR."

The Quadrennial Defense Review is an examination of defense strategy that occurs in the first year of a presidential term. Normally, the military services hold most of the card in these reviews, because the defense secretary and his aides customarily are new at their jobs, so they defer to what the services say they need, said Work, who was an aide to the Secretary of the Navy during the last QDR.

But this year, he said, a "perfect storm" is brewing. Donald Rumsfeld has been through a QDR before, as has most of his management team. And the war on terror has revealed a quite different enemy from the one the military was planning to fight.

From the end of the Cold War until the insurgency in Iraq, military planning has focused on being able to fight two regional conventional conflicts at the same time. The military planned to smash the enemy quickly — chiefly through air power — and then go home.

But the insurgency in Iraq shows there are no quick exits in the war on terror, and today's enemies are unwilling to concentrate in places and ways that make them easy to smash. Rumsfeld wants to reorient defense planning and force structure on the assumptions that an attack on the U.S. homeland — possibly with nuclear weapons — is the central threat, and that the global war on terror is not going to end anytime soon.

There are powerful hints of this reorientation in this year's budget. It contains $9.5 billion for items pertaining to homeland security, items that didn't appear in the defense budget at all before 9/11.

Special Operations Command — which contains commandos from the Army, Navy and Air Force — will grow by 200 civilians and 1,200 military personnel. The Army and Marine Corps are adding combat units, while the Navy and Air Force are shedding some sailors and airmen.

Spending for unmanned systems like the Predator drone and "transitional" weapons like the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship and the Army's Future Combat System received increases, while traditional Navy shipbuilding and Air Force aircraft procurement took major hits.

These hits were taken while the defense budget was growing substantially. There will be more and deeper cuts when defense budgets stabilize, or go down. The Pentagon is about to be transformed into a slaughterhouse for sacred cows. The bleating will be heard to high heaven.