[lbo-talk] Kaplan: the surreal madness that is the US defense budget

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun May 17 01:02:36 PDT 2009


[Brought to you by the same people who think Social Security is bankrupting the country]

http://www.slate.com/id/2218407

Thursday, May 14, 2009, at 6:30 PM ET Slate.com

War stories: Military analysis.

Gates vs. Congress: Why do senators want to bust the budget for missile defense that doesn't work and a fighter plane we don't need?

By Fred Kaplan

Watching Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrangle about the Pentagon

budget with the House and Senate armed services committees this week

was a surreal experience. I've been covering these sorts of hearings

for 30 years, off and on, but never have the witness and his

interrogators--or at least some of them--seemed so jarringly out of

whack.

Gates was presenting what he called a "reform budget," reflecting the

lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasizing the needs of today

over the dubious musings of what might be needed 20 years from now, and

recognizing that money is far from limitless.

The legislators, especially some Republicans (and Joe Lieberman), were

wringing their hands as if Gates' budget--more than a half-trillion

dollars, not counting another $130 billion to sustain the two wars

we're fighting--amounted to a pittance and as if even slight cuts in

marginal weapons systems would plunge America into serious danger.

Take the secretary's exchange with Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of

Alabama. Sessions was worked up over cuts in the missile defense

program. Gates was cutting back the number of Alaska-based interceptors

from 44 to 30; he was canceling the multiple-kill vehicle and the

airborne laser. What, Sessions asked, is going on here?

Gates replied that he's supported missile defense ever since President

Reagan started the program back in 1983 but that the Pentagon had to

consider practicalities. The Alaska interceptors are good for one

thing--shooting down missiles launched from North Korea--and 30

interceptors are more than enough to deal with that (still

hypothetical) threat. The multiple-kill vehicle was designed during the

Cold War to ward off a huge attack by the Soviet Union. The policy for

the past eight years has been to counter small attacks by rogue nations

or terrorists, so a weapon designed to shoot down lots of missiles at

once isn't needed, even if it were to work (which, though he didn't say

so, is extremely unlikely). The airborne laser--a 747 airplane fitted

with a laser beam that would destroy enemy missiles as they blasted out

of their silos, before they entered outer space--has a basic conceptual

problem. First, we would have to buy 28 planes just to keep enough of

them in the air at one time. Second, to get within range of the enemy

missile bases, they'd have to loiter inside the airspace of, say, Iran

and North Korea--and that just isn't going to happen.

Finally, Gates was recommending a mere 10 percent cut in the

missile-defense program, from $10 billion to $9 billion. This was

hardly a slash job.

Sessions, clearly outgunned, grumbled that he was still "concerned"

about "the size" of the cut. (Lieberman and John McCain had expressed

the same concern during their question periods.)

Leave aside the issue of whether missile defense makes any sense or has

any hope of working. (I have serious doubts and think that, in any

case, the program could have been cut by a few billion more with no

harm done.) The salient fact is that Gates had scrutinized the program

and taken out elements that were plainly unnecessary or absurd.

Sessions was looking at the program as an abstraction and its

budget-figure as a symbolic show of strength. If this were anything

other than the defense budget, Sessions would be derided as a paragon

of senseless waste.

As Gates put it, a lot of the cuts he'd imposed were "kind of

no-brainers ... poster children for an acquisition program gone wrong."

The other contentious debate was over the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter

plane, which, to Gates and President Obama, is a textbook case of a

Cold War weapon that has no place in the 21^st-century arsenal. It is

telling that not a single F-22 has flown a combat mission in any of the

wars the United States has fought since the plane entered the fleet. It

might be useful in some future war, but Gates and others have

calculated 187 would be enough--especially since the smaller, cheaper

F-35 stealth plane is about to enter production, and Gates has in fact

boosted its budget.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., went to bat for the F-22. The plane might

not be needed now or against such foes as Iraqi and Afghan insurgents.

But Russia and China are developing advanced fighter planes and

surface-to-air missiles. U.S. Air Force generals have determined that

there is a "requirement" for 243 F-22s to maintain air superiority in

the coming decades. They could get by with 187 planes, but only at

"high risk."

Gates responded that these calculations might be true if the Air Force

had nothing but F-22s, but it will also have F-35s and probably still

some F-15s. The Navy will also have F-35s and F-18E/Fs, and both

services will have a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles--like the

Predator drones, which have proved very effective. Adm. Mike Mullen,

the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who testified alongside

Gates, went further: The F-35, he said, might well be the last manned

fighter plane. "We're in a time of transition in the future of

aviation," Mullen said. Just because the Air Force (or any other single

service) says it has a "requirement" does not mean that the overall

Defense Department has the same requirement.

The "requirements" game is an old one. When James Schlesinger was

defense secretary in the mid-1970s, he ordered the chief of naval

operations to calculate how many aircraft carriers the Navy would need

if it abandoned the mission of defending the Indian Ocean. At the time,

the Navy had 13 carriers, two of which were assigned to the Indian

Ocean. The chief put his staff to work. The answer they came up with:

13 carriers.

The point was clear. The Navy's fleet was, and is, built around

aircraft carriers. If you cut the carriers, you also had to cut a

proportionate number of destroyers, frigates, cruisers, the whole

works. So no matter how drastically the secretary of defense might

alter the Navy's mission, they would come up with some way to justify a

"requirement" of 13 carriers.

The same is true today of the Air Force--which is dominated by fighter

pilots--and its generals' desire for 243 F-22s. Any fewer F-22s than

that, and there's a danger that the centerpiece of the Air Force's

mission--the rationale for the size of its fleet--might shift to

something other than fighter planes. (Adm. Mullen's remark--that in the

near future there might be no more manned aircraft--only accentuates

their worry.)

In the coming weeks, the debate over the defense budget is bound to

intensify. Passions will flare. The fight may seem surreal, but that's

because it is unusually primordial; it's stripped down to basic

institutional interests. The battle, waged behind the scenes in the

Pentagon, is fiercer still in Congress, because there, it's conjoined

with the struggle for contracts and jobs. (It is no coincidence that

pieces of the F-22 are manufactured in 46 states; for more than a

half-century, the services have been subcontracting out their most

cherished weapons to as many congressional districts as possible in

order to maximize political support.)

<end excerpt>

Michael



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list