Are proponents of a robust American military seeing their worst nightmares come true?
The military will need to come up with $60 billion in savings over the next five years to pay for new priorities to be set by the Defense secretary, a top Pentagon official said Tuesday.
The order from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is based on an assumption that there will be no real growth in defense budgets over the next five years, a radical departure for a department whose budgets have increased more than 80 percent since 2001.
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One of the driving factors so far in the evaluation is the prospect that defense budgets largely will be static in fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2015, said David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources.
The military has to cut $60 billion because the money is needed to fill gaps in Iraq and Afghanistan such as “lack of rotary wing lift; persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; civil affairs personnel; and intratheater airlift.”
In plain language, our wars require additional funds that our military is being denied. This has the recognizable whiff of an Obamaesque “false choice” to it. “No longer are we faced with the false choice of paying for a capable military or losing our ability to win wars.” Like all Obama’s false choices, this is actually a real one. And once again, the administration is choosing wrong.
Ochmanek said there is “no low-hanging fruit” to get rid of to reallocate our way out of current shortfalls. The military is down to the essentials as it is.
Back in April, when Gates first announced his defense-restructuring plan, Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmidt wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop.” We’re now past the opening bid.
This news comes at a time when suspect regimes are raising their military budgets to unprecedented heights. In 2008, China increased military spending by 17.6 percent, a $59 billion outlay — almost exactly the figure we just asked our military to get rid of. This year, China’s military budget is expected to go to $70 billion. Russia’s defense budget rose by a whopping 34 percent in 2009. Our allies, despite endless discussion of a multipolar world, still depend on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting. The New York Times reports today, “Two days from now, there will no longer be any other nations with troops in Iraq — no ‘multi’ in the Multi-National Force.” A poll in yesterday’s edition of the Independent “suggests most people now believe British troops should be pulled out of Afghanistan.”
Ochmanek spoke of the “level of pain” that cuts would inflict. Well, as problematic countries approach American levels of military spending and America in turn follows Europe down the path of least resistance, the stage is set for a dangerous power shift that the free world will be unable to right. Pretty painful.
