Update - October 11, 2000

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STOP THROWING MONEY AT THE PENTAGON

An Arms Trade Resource Center Commentary
By William D. Hartung

New York, October 11^th - As Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush prepare to square off tonight in the second of three presidential debates, there is a growing chorus of concern among informed observers about the lack of debate on U.S. foreign and military policy. Issues of war and peace have taken a back seat to detailed claims and counter-claims regarding the candidates' dueling proposals on domestic matters such as Social Security, education, tax cuts, and prescription drug benefits.

Hopefully the narrow domestic focus of the presidential campaign will change tonight, with the Mideast peace process hanging by a thread and a new democrat leader, Vojislav Kostunica, moving to consolidate power in the former Yugoslavia. But one thing that is unlikely to change without a major public outcry is the troubling lack of discussion of our nation's military budget priorities.

So far, Al Gore and George Bush have been competing to see who can throw more money at the Pentagon, not questioning whether we have the right strategy and the right weaponry to defend the country. If elected, Gore has promised to add $100 billion to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, while George W. Bush plans to add "only" $45 billion over that same time frame.

On the surface, increasing the military budget may seem like the "safer" course. After all, who wants to risk spending too little to defend the nation? But the truth is, the major candidates' uncritical drive to boost military spending without reforming the Pentagon or revising our military strategy is dangerously irresponsible. Absent major reform, we will end up spending more for weapons we don't need, even as we underfund requirements for peacekeeping and peace enforcement which will remain the most frequent missions of U.S. forces for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, initiatives that would make the world a far safer place -- like moving ahead with the post-Cold War reductions in global nuclear weapons which have been on hold for much of the Clinton/Gore era -- will take a back seat, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The failure to address genuine issues of national defense represents a calculated political decision by both parties. Gore and Lieberman want to ward off traditional Republican charges that Democrats are somehow "soft on defense." Bush and Cheney want to galvanize their conservative base by promising to spend more on questionable but popular schemes like a souped-up, "Star Wars II" missile defense system.

Neither of these approaches leaves much room for a nuanced discussion of the big questions, like "what are the most likely threats to our security?" or "what are the most cost effective means to defend our nation?"

To make matters worse, the presidential debates are taking place against a backdrop of near hysteria over an alleged crisis of "readiness" in our armed forces which has been fueled by conservatives on Capitol Hill, working in cooperation with key military leaders and the nation's largest weapons contractors.

The latest and most blatant example of the military-industrial complex's attempt to grab the lion's share of the budget surplus were the highly politicized hearings held by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) earlier this month, during which the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were encouraged to march up to Capitol Hill and read off their new, improved budgetary wish lists. And impressive lists they were, calling for an additional $50 billion per year for the Pentagon, mostly to finance new purchases of Cold War relics like the F-22 fighter plane for the Air Force, the Comanche helicopter for the Army, and a new batch of combat ships for the Navy.

Never mind that these weapons were designed to fight a Soviet empire that no longer exists, or that the current generation of U.S. weaponry is far superior to anything our most likely adversaries are able to field. The Pentagon's insatiable appetite for shiny new weaponry must be fed, or we'll be woefully unprepared for the next war. Or at least that's what the new age hawks who are currently dominating the national security debate in Washington would like us to believe.

One of the most absurd examples of the attitude that you can never spend too much on the Pentagon is an advertisement by a conservative outfit called the Coalition for America's National Security (USA Today, October 9, 2000, page 9A) which proposes a "four percent solution" to our alleged military readiness problem. The four percent they're talking about is raising our current military budget up to four percent of our Gross Domestic Product. Far from a modest increase, this approach would entail a boost in Pentagon spending of $100 billion per year, a 25% increase from current spending levels.

The Coalition's ads may or may not persuade the public of our urgent need to undertake a record increase in military spending. But the men (and they are mostly men) who are crying wolf about our alleged lack of military preparedness definitely scored a public relations coup in late September when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released a report which suggested that it will cost an average of $340 billion annually -- tens of billions of dollars per year more than current allocations -- to keep U.S. forces at their present size and carry out the Pentagon's proposed weapons modernization plans. This sounds impressive, but as budget analyst Christopher Hellman of the Center for Defense Information has rightly pointed out, "the CBO gives the right answer, but to the wrong question." The Pentagon does not have enough money to carry out its current plans, but the plans themselves make no sense.

Rather than preparing for the possibility of one major regional conflict plus peacekeeping duties, the U.S. military is still operating under Cold War plans that call for maintaining a capability to wage two major regional conflicts simultaneously, without any help from our allies. As former Reagan Pentagon official Lawrence Korb of the Council on Foreign Relations has documented in a recent report, a more realistic strategy that focused on one major war plus peacekeeping and relied on current generation weapons designs instead of costly and unnecessary new systems could provide a superior defense of the United States and its interests for about $60 billion less than our current $311 billion per year budget.

We are not suffering from a lack of Pentagon spending. We are suffering from a lack of realistic planning about how best to defend the country in the post-Cold War era. As Senate Armed Services Committee member Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has pointed out, we are now spending twenty-two times as much on our military forces as the combined military budgets of all of the Pentagon's designated adversaries, the so-called 'rogue states' of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Cuba.

As Charles Knight and Carl Conetta of the Commonwealth Institute have noted, U.S. troop deployments in places like Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor that have been cited by George W. Bush as evidence that our military is dangerously "overstretched" in fact involve only about 12 percent of our total armed forces, which they assert is "a level of employment that would not incapacitate an efficient military establishment." The real problem, Knight and Conetta suggest, is that "neither the Pentagon's tool kit nor its way of conducting business fits today's problems."

Unfortunately, the Pentagon isn't our only national security institution that is in need of serious reform.

As Senator John McCain has pointed out repeatedly, Congress, which is supposed to share responsibility with the President for shaping our national security policies, has degenerated into a swamp of pork barrel politics and special interest intrigue, routinely adding $4 to $10 billion per year to the military budget for weapons systems that the Pentagon and the military services have not even requested. Inevitably, these unneeded systems are built in the states and districts of key members of the armed services and appropriations committees who are more interested in defending their piece of the Pentagon budget pie than they are in developing an effective approach to defending our nation.

There has also been a bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill, shamelessly spearheaded by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, to prevent the Pentagon from closing unneeded military bases, thereby robbing the military services of billions of dollars per year that could be devoted to military pay or weapons modernization efforts.

As for the weapons industry, the great efficiencies that were promised in the early 1990s when the Clinton administration used billions in taxpayer funds to help defray the costs of the mergers that created military mega-firms like Lockheed Martin (a combination of Lockheed and Martin Marietta), Boeing (which has absorbed military aircraft maker McDonnell Douglas), and Raytheon (which bought military units from Hughes and Texas Instruments) have failed to materialize. All three of these 'lumbering behemoths of the apocalypse' have been plagued by cost overruns and poor quality control, and they have devoted far more time and effort to lobbying for big ticket systems like the F-22 fighter and big initiatives like National Missile Defense than they have to delivering affordable systems that meet basic performance standards.

The truth of the matter is, the Pentagon and the weapons industry are fat and happy, and they're not going to change their scandalously wasteful ways without strong presidential leadership. Instead of worrying about being perceived as "soft on defense," perhaps Al Gore and George W. Bush should be more worried about being "soft on defense contractors" or "soft on Pentagon bureaucrats."

We need a leader who can reinvent the Pentagon and reshape our nation's military strategy to meet the drastically different requirements of this new era in global affairs. We have seen no indication yet that Al Gore or George W. Bush is even interested in addressing this challenge, much less whether they have the character and competence to accomplish the task. In the few weeks left before the election, it would behoove all of us to start asking both candidates some hard questions on defense priorities, before their mindless bidding war to pump up the Pentagon gets totally out of control.

William D. Hartung is the President's Fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University and the military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Interhemispheric Resource Center.

RESOURCES:

For a copy of Dr. Lawrence J. Korb's report, "A Realistic Defense Budget for the New Millennium," consult the web page of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, at www.businessleaders.org. For additional perspective, consult John Hillen and Lawrence Korb, editors, "Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy: Four Alternatives Presented As Presidential Speeches," available on the web site of the Council on Foreign Relations at www.cfr.org.

For detailed analyses and critiques of current U.S. spending and strategy, see the work of Carl Conetta and Charles Knight on the web site of the Commonwealth Institute, at www.comw.org/pda. Other good sources include Christopher Hellman's regular commentaries and fact sheets on military issues, available on the Center for Defense Information's home page at www.cdi.org. For blow-by-blow budget analysis and longer-term critiques, see the Council for a Livable World's web page, at www.clw.org, and last but not least, the web page of the Center on Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, at www.csbaonline.org.

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