In many respects, the election-year debate over U.S. defense budgets has yet to start, for two reasons: The defense topline over the next decade is unknown, within a very wide range, and Congress, lobbyists and the rest of the Washington defense machine have yet to grasp that unprecedented changes, compromises and even sacrifices may be needed to balance the books without ending up with a “hollow force/.../”
Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, pointed out in a series of 2011 briefings that budget cuts start with the elimination of the next decade of planned increases. Moreover, even the nightmare of sequester only brings the budget down to 2007 levels, which was in real money terms an all-time record. So why the panic?
Harrison’s numbers yield three answers. First, sequester involves a steeply front-loaded cut in costs, whereas other proposals defer the pain into the future. Second, the cuts will bite deeply into procurement, probably at double the defense-wide rate of cuts. Third, poor execution on many R&D programs and wartime expediency mean that the relatively fat procurement budgets of the 2000s failed to recapitalize important elements of the force.