WASHINGTON - While the Pentagon emerged as the big winner on Monday among US
government agencies in next year's budget sweepstakes, its failure to choose
among the threats it says it must defend the country against may prove costly
in the long run, both financially and operationally, according to analysts in
the capital.
Although a major part of the proposed 7% increase in the Department of
Defense's (DoD) budget to US$440 billion is
designed to boost its counter-insurgency and unconventional warfare
capabilities for the "war on terror", the budget also includes significantly
more money for the development and procurement of expensive new weapons systems
to cope with potential future threats, particularly China.
The costs of doing both, however, are putting a major strain on the US Treasury
at a time when popular social spending is being cut back in the face of an
anticipated record federal deficit next year.
"Rather than making some hard decisions about future weapons systems, the DoD
has essentially deferred to long-standing service interests," said Carl
Conetta, director of the Boston-based Project on Defense Alternatives, in
reference to pet weapons projects of the different branches of the military.
William Hartung, a senior defense analyst at the World Policy Institute in New
York, warned: "I think there's going to be a reckoning because, with the budget
deficit, the rebuilding of New Orleans, the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, the
fact that [President George W] Bush wants to keep his tax cuts, something is
going to have to give in the Pentagon budget over the next few years,"
Under Bush's proposed 2007 budget, the DoD will be allocated more than $440
billion, an amount that does not include an additional $120 billion the
administration plans to spend on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
through next year.
Indeed, the Pentagon's 2007 budget may exceed the combined military spending of
all other countries next year. In 2004, the last year for which statistics were
available, Washington accounted for 47% of global military expenditures of just
over $1 trillion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute.
The new budget request, which followed last week's release of the Pentagon's
Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a planning document that is supposed to show
how strategic priorities are aligned with the agency's planned budgets and
assets, calls for a 15% increase in the number of Special Forces to some 66,000
by 2011.
The Special Forces, which have been used for a variety of missions in the "war
on terror", including intelligence collection, covert action and the training
of foreign security troops, will also be backed up by major investments in
relatively new weapons systems that have proved effective in both gathering
intelligence and in carrying out missile attacks against suspected terrorists
and insurgents.
These new systems include unmanned surveillance aircraft, and the Pentagon is
requesting $11.6 billion for several hundred of these drones over the next four
years.
Along with the Special Forces, the Pentagon is also to increase by a third the
number of personnel specialized in psychological operations and civil affairs
in the "war on terror", which the QDR rebaptized last week as the "Long War"
(see US digs in for
'Long War').
At the same time, however, the Pentagon has no plans to add some 30,000 troops
to the army, as authorized last year by a Congress that has grown increasingly
concerned that US land forces have been overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Consistent with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's passion for "military
transformation", the DoD plans instead invest $6.6 billion in 2007 in enhancing
the army's flexibility and ability to intervene quickly in global hot spots.
While boosting the military's counter-terror and counter-insurgency
capabilities, the Pentagon said it had no plans to drop big-ticket weapons
systems that even its strongest proponents concede are less relevant to its
Long War.
Of these, the most important - and most controversial - are the Joint Strike
Fighter jet and the F-22 stealth fighter jet, as well as a new destroyer for
the navy and the accelerated development of a deep-strike aircraft by 2018.
These systems, as well as other advanced aircraft and warships the Pentagon
hopes to buy, are seen as directed primarily at China as the most credible
"rival" to US military power over the next two decades or so. The new QDR calls
explicitly for a sharp increase in the number of naval vessels, including
aircraft carriers, deployed to the Pacific over the next four years "to support
engagement, presence and deterrence".
The budget also calls for a 20% increase in funding for the Bush
administration's Star Wars program to destroy ballistic missiles before they
hit their target - to $10.4 billion in 2007 - despite the lack of any
discernible progress in developing a viable system.
"Despite many promises, they haven't come up yet with a single device that
could work under realistic conditions," said Hartung. "The program has been a
disaster.
"Most of these programs have nothing to do with the kinds of threats that we
face today," he said. "Some argue that we'll need these systems in the future,
if China builds up to a rival, but you can argue that current US forces are
adequate for anything that China can build up in the next 10-20 years."
Indeed, sustaining these weapons systems will likely become more difficult over
the coming years, not only because they do not correspond to any clear and
present threat similar to that allegedly posed by Islamist terrorism, but also
because they are so expensive.
Indeed, Steven Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessment, predicted that if past procurement overruns are any guide,
sustaining planned weapons programs will require increases in the defense
budget of more than $75 billion a year.
"The defense budget is already high by historical standards, and further
increases may be difficult to sustain in growing concerns about the federal
deficit," he said. "Unfortunately, the latest QDR would do little to improve
the affordability of DoD's long-term plans."
In many ways, both the QDR and the proposed defense budget represent a major
setback to Rumsfeld's plans to wean the military off of its dependence on the
expensive conventional weapons of the Cold War and transform it into a lighter,
more flexible, lethal and expeditionary force.
"I think it's primarily because Rumsfeld didn't have the bureaucratic skills to
get it done," said the World Policy Institute's Hartung. "The services and
contractors are a powerful lobbying force."
Conetta noted: "The new emphasis on irregular conflicts and counter-insurgency
operations on the one hand and potential future conventional conflicts are
pulling the military in two directions."
"Instead of making the tough decisions, including the possibility of planning
for an entirely new military 20-25 years down the road that relies far less on
fighters and destroyers and carriers, he's decided that we're going to buy all
those systems, even though by that time they may be obsolete."
