Sequestration may not be the worst-case scenario for Pentagon budgets — defense spending could drop even lower in the next decade, a new report argues.
The report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) says that the budget caps under sequestration may be the high ceiling for defense spending in the next decade, if the current military drawdown follows historical trends.
The report, released Thursday, says that a Pentagon budget drop to $415 billion in 2021 using current dollars — a number much lower than the sequestration budget caps — would follow the drawdowns after Vietnam and the Cold War.
That scenario would fly in the face of current efforts from lawmakers and Pentagon officials to reverse the cuts under the sequester, where the sequestration budget caps are seen as the low-point for Pentagon spending.
“There’s a lot of people looking at this thinking this is the floor — surely we’ll do no worse than sequestration,” CSBA’s Todd Harrison, who authored the report, told reporters Wednesday.
“Compared to previous budget cycles, this doesn’t look right to me. I think the sequester level budget caps might actually be a ceiling, not a floor, for the defense budget,” he said.
Harrison said he wasn’t predicting that his dire budget scenario was going to happen, and he noted there were differences between the current and previous drawdowns suggesting defense spending may not drop so far.
There were significant build-ups in both military equipment and personnel during Vietnam and the Cold War, for instance, which did not happen in the last decade. As a result, the current military is smaller, older and more expensive compared to previous budget cycles.
But a quick end to the drawdown with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down was also unlikely, Harrison said.
“The idea this drawdown would be over in four years — that’s inconsistent with history,” he said.
Part of the reason sequestration could be a ceiling is that the worst has already happened: Sequestration cut $30 billion from the 2013 Pentagon budget, and it would cut another $20 billion this year. After that, defense spending would slowly rise again.
Harrison suggested that the budget could drop even lower than sequester because if Congress doesn’t see a direct impact from the cuts, lawmakers may continue to target the Pentagon in order to reduce discretionary spending.
“If they don’t see the effects, and more members of Congress think this is not so bad, little by little, year by year, that’s one way it could happen,” Harrison said. “And that has happened to a certain extent in previous drawdowns.”
Under the report’s scenario where the budget decreases to $415 billion, the military’s end strength would drop from 1.5 million servicemembers to 1 million. Harrison said that would be the smallest active-duty force since 1940 but is consistent with prior drawdowns.
The procurement budget, which has already been reduced by 31 percent since 2008 with war funding included, would fall by another third to $62 billion.
That’s the same floor for procurement that was hit in both the Vietnam and Cold War drawdowns when looking at current-year dollars.
“This would be catastrophic, if you will, for a lot of procurement programs,” Harrison said, saying it would lead to major cancellations. “There would be lot of glass on the floor at the end of this. It would break a lot of things.”
Asked how that scenario could occur when the Pentagon is committed to expensive programs like the F-35, Harrison said the projection was merely following history.
“How is that conceivable? Because we’ve done it in the past,” he said. “It’s a possibility because we’ve done that in the past."