America can no longer afford all of its wars and military adventures abroad.
That’s the argument put forward by a nonpartisan budget analysis expressing concern over an apparent disconnect between the Defense Department, which has submitted its new budget for fiscal year 2015, and Congress, whose inability to balance a budget and agree on deficit levels has triggered automatic cuts that have slashed military spending to the bone and beyond.
America’s presence abroad is expensive and likely will become even more costly. NATO announced Friday it will deploy new forces to protect Eastern Europe from a Russian invasion as the country threatens Ukraine, while the U.S. and its NATO allies also announced plans for renewed attention on Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State group continues to lay siege. Troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan, though the current quagmire in Iraq may force the allied coalition to re-evaluate a “zero option” by 2016. And then there’s the so-called Asia-Pacific Rebalance, the ill-defined White House strategy that calls for 60 percent of the Navy’s assets to deploy to that part of the world in the coming decade.
The bottom line, quite literally, is that the Defense Department’s strategy calls for spending as much as $300 billion more than Congress has given it, according to a new analysis from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments on the Pentagon’s latest spending proposal. Barring new creativity in how the Pentagon deploys its forces abroad and takes care of them at home – or a new budget deal – President Barack Obama likely will be forced to reconsider scaling back his foreign policy plans.
“We’re at a fork in the road with this strategy-budget process,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the center who authored the report.
Forcing these new, tough decisions are existing plans to downsize the military, combined with the automatic budget caps known as sequestration that were mandated by Congress as punishment for its own inability to pass a budget. If left in place, sequestration will account for roughly $1 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade.
“If we’re going to have to live within these budget constraints, we could actually change out our strategy. We could adjust our strategy to something we could afford,” Harrison said during a briefing with reporters. He warned that no amount of strong military talk can hide budgetary weaknesses from America’s foes. “If you want to see what our real defense strategy is, you don’t read the documents. You look at the budget numbers."
Fighting Continues in Afghanistan
The U.S. spends $1.3 billion per week in Afghanistan. It remains unclear how much it is spending in Iraq – the Pentagon announced late last month that the cost since bombing runs against Islamic State fighters began in June averages out to roughly $7.5 million per day, though officials did not say whether that figure included increased weapons shipments to Iraqi security forces.
At the height of the Iraq War, the U.S. spent $600,000 per troop on the ground each year, offering some insight into how much a renewed military presence there might cost.
The president’s determination to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could add further complication to the budget mess. Since sequestration began in 2013, the military has tapped into its multibillion-dollar Overseas Contingency Operations fund, known as the OCO budget, to relieve some of the strain on its forces. This budget has largely funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in theory would shrink following the end of those conflicts.
However, the Pentagon may be relying on that fund for as much as $100 billion in future years, according to the center's analysis.
The Pentagon is going to have to come up with an honest assessment of what it can afford with the funds Congress has given it in an attempt to shock legislators into breaking the gridlock, Harrison says. Or it will need to create a new, narrower strategy for defending America at home and abroad that includes cuts and divesting itself of overseas security commitments.
“That’s going to be painful and uncomfortable, and people aren’t going to like it,” Harrison said