You do the math on the defense budget and the QDR
Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 6:44PM EDITORIAL: “Still Shortchanging the Troops,” New York Times, 10 February 2006, p. A26.
One of the best editorials the NYT has ever produced, in my opinion. A killer from start to finish.
I will exerpt most and let it speak for itself. It mirrors a lot of my arguments from last Nov in Esquire and ever since in this blog:
It’s amazing how Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department can produce a $439 billion spending plan and still skimp on the one thing the American military desperately needs: expanded ground forces so the weakened and cannibalized Army can meet the requirements of Iraq without hurting its ability to respond to other threats.While the Pentagon intends to increase pay and recruitment bonuses, no part of its nearly 7 percent budget increase is aimed at raising overall troop strength. Instead, a large chunk of this nearly $30 billion bonanza goes to buying more new weapons and postponing overdue cuts in wasteful Air Force and Navy projects unrelated to fighting terrorism …
The budget and the four-year plan released with it read almost as if the current conflict had never happened and could never happen again. [BINGO!]
Instead of reallocating resources toward the real threats America faces, the military services continue to pour their money into fighting fictive suerpowers in the wild blue yonder and on and below the seven seas. Pentagon budgeters showed themselves so pathetically unable to restrain spending on expensive ships and planes that they actually cut back, rather than increased, the overall size of the Army over the next few years to pay for it.
It would cost about $4 billion to $5 billion a year to give the Army 30,000 more troops, the minimum it needs to check its alarming slide. Instead the Pentagon chose to begin the construction of two unneeded new stealth destroyers, which will end up costing $2 billion to $3 billion each.
It also decided to splurge on a new nuclear attack submarine for $2.6 billion and to shell out $5.5 billion for separate Navy and Air Force versions of new stealth fighter jets, plus another $5.5 billion for yet a third version that either can use …
Doesn’t get any more direct than that. Extremely well done.
Reader Comments (11)
"It would cost about $4 billion to $5 billion a year to give the Army 30,000 more troops, the minimum it needs to check its alarming slide."
Two points here - the Army is already operating above its legislatively authorized levels, so I am not sure what alarming slide the NYT is referring to.
And second, though the Army is operating above the statutory limit, it is also not at the full emergency level authorized.
So I guess the question is where would an additional 30,000 troops come from?
So I guess the question is where would an additional 30,000 troops come from?
From other like-minded nations - but attitudes are changing to "don't start the war unless you can win the peace." How about mending bridges in the Nato alliance, for starters. Following last week-end's security conference in Munich, it was reported There is no alternative to a close cooperation between Europe, Russia and the United States to secure global peace.
Congress is in command of the Treasury. If they desire to augment the numbers in our Army, they have the power to do so. When Carter proposed SALT II for ratification, the Senate rejected the treaty. In fact, I think the numbers were so low, that they would have embarassed Carter, so the treaty never formally was voted on.
So don't go laying this exclusively on Rumsfeld, if Congress wants Rumsfeld to have more troops, whether he desires them or not, they can impose their will upon the Pentagon.
And I hope they do so.
Have you ever specified the number of troops that you think it healthy for us to have? That would be interesting.
Numbers, IMO, are meaningless unless they are distributed across a future-useful MOS mix.
I think it would be infinitely easier to get 30K shooters pushed through than 30K public affairs types. I could be wrong, but it seems like the Congressional vibe is leaning more toward being "tough guys" rather than "nation builders".
There also seems to be a pervasive financial rationale for outsourcing the kind of specialities we're going to need into the future.
Tough political row to hoe on this one...
The mix is changing, and I wouldn't read the increase in SOCOM types to be more tough guys than nationbuilders. Most people think of Special Forces just as snake eaters, but PsyOps and Civil Affairs lives in SOCOM. Throughout the 80's, SF folks were in Central America doing much more of the CA work than trigger pulling work - literally building bridges.
People forget what Latin America was like not all that long ago. A bunch of tinpot dictatorships, lots of Yanqui go home, wars over football matches. Reagan's foreign policy team recognized that simply being anti-Communist wasn't enough, and promoted democracy. No, really, don't laugh, it's at odds with everything you've ever heard or read, but it's true. Remember how El Salvador or Nicaragua was going to be the "next Vietnam?" Taking down Noriega was the last nail in the coffin of "our S.O.B" policy in Latin America. And John Negroponte was a central figure in shaping that policy.
The point being that promoting democracy as US foreign policy, as part of our national security agenda, is not new, and even better, it works (I think CAFTA woould be a TPBM measure of effectiveness on that). And we have used the military to help promote that in non-shooting roles in the past, and that works, too. Sure, Latin America is not perfect, but it is significantly better than it was, and if the Muslim world were to make the same level of progress, that would be a very good thing.
Blaster:
To clarify– 30K SOCOM types would be more than fine with me. My fear is that with an election year coming, and with an electorate that is perhaps mal-informed on what SOCOM actually does (Clancy's book really opened my eyes), Congress will do what they do best...
Take the easy way out (i.e. tack on an additional 30K garden variety gravel agitators) and loudly proclaim their collective commitment to "victory".
I wish I could wax more optimistic regarding the state of vision in Washington, but I just can't when that vision hasn't even fully translated into specific campaign issues.
As for CAFTA, I'm with you. It's the product of a lot of hard and thankless work from the Reagan era. I don't know how well similar work would map to the Middle East, but I think it would be several steps in the right direction. On this at least I can share your optimism.
As I said before in this weblog - there is a lot of money and jobs at stake here for change to come quickly, as many hope. It will take IMHO decades for change to occur. The only way change can happen rapidly is if there is a Big Bang in the DoD bureacracy - some one needs to step up to congress especially. I think as the new leaders rise up from Iraq and Afganistan things will change at DoD. Although things did not change after Vietnam but got worse - where was the counter-insurgency training at our nations military academies. The Armed Forces pretended that Vietnam did not happen and went on their way to defend against the Soviets. May have been right - but now that has got to change.
Just my humble opinion.
Vinit Joshi
Comes back to my original comment - where would 30k more troops come from? Kerry talked about raising 40k more troops (in his divining, 2 more divisions, a combat division and a "support" division, clearly showing the emptiness of the rhetoric) and Congressional Democrats including Senator Clinton have at least introduced legislation to increase end strength by that much - good on them for the approach as at least at the point the rhetoric is not empty.
But the administration is not going to ask for the statutory level to be raised, and the Republicans aren't going to introduce it on their own, if there aren't 30k more soldiers to fill those legislatively mandated slots.
It isn't impossible to fix that - we had an Army of 785k (vice the current authorized 482k) volunteers in 1989 (with zero CAT4 enlistees), so it is doable - but it won't be cheap or easy. $4 or 5B sounds like pay and allowances and maybe personal equipment for another 30k soldiers, but I don't think it comes close to capturing the real cost of increasing the size of the Army by 8% in one year.
I think folks have siezed on Shinseki's 12 division mission v 10 division Army and run with that, the problem is that remaking the world is a 50 division mission, not a 12 division one.
the problem is that remaking the world is a 50 division mission, not a 12 division one.
You got that right. But I think to that end, 30K SOCOM (as opposed to a straight mix of combat and support) would be the best forward thinking expansion. SOCOM has, among other things, the capacity to build indigenous units, thereby lightening our share of the burden.
Sort of Special Operations "train the trainers" program focused on developing SysAdmin local militaries. Oringinal indigenous members could matriculate upward into command while bringing on and training newbies.
I may be completely wrong, but I see the new Iraqi Army as a SysAdmin organization being built along the lines of this model.
Best part is, SysAdmin armies aren't Leviathan equiped to cause trouble further down the road...
Oh, BTW blaster...
Where the 30K comes from might not be a big puzzle.
If you focus on enlarging SOCOM by 30K, you necessarily will draw from less elite units to get to the magic number. Since that is the case, you simply apply that theory downward.
So the infantryman moves to paratrooper, the paratrooper to Ranger, and so on.
That keeps the minimum physical and financial requirements for expansion at the lowest possible level. The basis for recruitment is a lot larger, and the financial incentives are a lot cheaper, at the 19-year old level.
Of course you still have to account for pay grade increases, administration, training and equipment all along the chain. I see the monetary issue as being more difficult than the manpower issue.
Maybe a plan to guarantee citizenship for a certain period of enlistment? Latin America has a lot of 19-year olds.
RVV - the question is where do 30k additional come from? They won't magically appear with a line item in legislation. "Dumbing the requirement down" won't do it, either, the Army has already increased the number of GED's allowed in.
If we want to change the size of the current force, we'll need to do something differently than we are now. Pay and allowances and personal equipment is going to be about 100k a head - if my math still serves me, that makes $3B right there. Going to be that again in training prior to arrival at the first unit. But in order to get them into that training, and receiving that pay, you have to get them in the door, which means a different recruiting model, and as Secretary Rumsfeld points out - if we want more, we'll have to pay more. If you want to increase pay to improve the attractiveness, you have to do it for everyone in uniform - that will add up very quickly with 1.5M. And then deploy the new folks...40% of the "$87B to rebuild Iraq" was pay and allowances - maybe that comes out a wash as you don't activate as many Guardsmen, maybe not.
Still, killing $20B in acquisition would still cover it, so maybe I've written myself into a corner here. And service for citizenship isn't a bad idea at all.