Whom the military is defending 20 years after the end of the Cold War is a separate question, and not one answered by Panetta or the Obama administration’s rhetorical blasts against the next round of budget cuts – the so-called sequestration that is set for next January. “Sequestration would be a doubling of the cuts,” Panetta warned last month. “That would require they take place through a meat axe approach that would hollow out the force and do severe damage to our national defense for generations.”
That’s not how it looks from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank that closely monitors the Pentagon budget wars. In a backgrounder released today, appropriately titled, “$trategy in A Year of Fiscal Uncertainty,” they showed that sequestration’s additional $500 billion in cuts over the next decade would only draw the Pentagon’s base budget down 12 percent below current levels in inflation-adjusted dollars. If one throws in the expected drawdown in troops committed to Afghanistan and Iraq, the total reduction in military spending is about 30 percent.
The CSBA’s paper put that in historical perspective. After the end of the Cold War (post 1991), the military’s budget in inflation-adjusted dollars fell about 32 percent over the next decade. At the end of the Vietnam War, it fell by 25 percent over seven years before starting to rise again under President Ronald Reagan, who was determined to spend the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” into oblivion. At the end of the Korean War, it fell by over 50 percent as President Dwight D. Eisenhower shifted the military’s priorities from preparing for land wars to preparing for a nuclear confrontation.
“The failure to plan for future reductions is a major flaw in the (latest) Pentagon plan,” said Todd Harrison, who authored the CSBA paper. “If this decline is anything like what we’ve seen in previous defense cycles, there are more cuts to come.”
The major problem with the sequestration cuts, Harrison said, was that they were front loaded with a sharp decline in the early years and then a gradual leveling off over the decade. A better strategy, he suggested, would be to even out the cuts. A 2.2 percent reduction in inflation-adjusted dollars each year over the next decade would meet the budget reduction goals of the Budget Control Act.
A well-structured gradual build-down would also allow the Pentagon to shift its priorities to new threats such as cyber attacks on U.S. infrastructure, a rogue state like Iran building nuclear weapons, or an increasingly assertive China. “If nuclear weapons were the industrial age method of instant catastrophic destruction, then cyber weapons are the information age equivalent of instant catastrophic destruction,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon planner and president of CSBA. He cited a computer attack on the nation’s electricity grid. “How do you counter that?”