Non-Uq – Reinvestment Inevitable

No I/L – Cuts Redirected Elsewhere

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told senators Wednesday that the Pentagon will have to do “stupid things” if Congress doesn’t approve a $33 billion supplemental spending request by July 4. The military sought passage of the wartime spending bill before Memorial Day, but that slipped by, making the July 4 recess the next must-pass deadline. Funding for the Navy and Marine Corps will begin to run out in July, forcing the Pentagon to disrupt other programs. And by early to mid-August, the military may have to start furloughing civilians and might not be able to pay members of the active-duty military.

For the Defense Department to merely tread water, a good rule of thumb is that its inflation-adjusted budget must grow about 2 percent a year (roughly $10 billion annually, each and every year). Simply put, the costs of holding on to good people, providing them with health care and other benefits, keeping equipment functional, maintaining training regimes, and buying increasingly complex equipment tend to grow faster than inflation. This is, of course, no more an absolute rule than is Moore's law about changes in computing capacity. But like Moore's law, it tends to hold up remarkably well with time, especially when downsizing the Defense Department's force structure is not really an option, and it is not today. It is easiest to understand this by examining the four main categories of Pentagon spending: military personnel, operations and maintenance, procurement, and research and development. Regarding the first, there were times in the 1970s when we starved personnel accounts, but the result was a dispirited and "hollow" force. At a time of war, when we are asking so few troops to do so much for so long, this is not a viable option. In fact, over the years of the Bush presidency, personnel spending increased 100 percent. About 25 percent of that was due to the cumulative effects of inflation and another quarter to mobilizing reservists and enlarging the force. But the remaining half was real cost growth averaging 5 percent a year. Even if we slow the trend, we can't realistically end it. Operations and maintenance costs are always what budgeteers want to cut -- and always the area where they overestimate the potential for savings. This was the case in the 1990s; almost every year the Clinton administration hoped to economize on such expenses through new types of efficiencies, but almost every year it wound up needing to add to those accounts retroactively. Among defense budget specialists, the real debate is whether inflation-adjusted operations and maintenance costs per person grow at 2 percent annually or 3 percent or somewhere in between. Procurement and research and development are the chief areas in which Defense Secretary Robert Gates has sought savings in the proposals he announced in April. He has proposed cuts to programs including the F-22 fighter, the DDG-1000 destroyer, the Army's Future Combat System, the presidential helicopter fleet, the transformational communications satellite, aircraft carrier production runs, the airborne laser missile defense program and the next-generation bomber. These are solid proposals; he could make additional cuts to the V-22 Osprey and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programs, as well as existing nuclear weapons platforms.