Some attacks come out of nowhere. Others arrive with plenty of warning. The 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA), also known as the sequester, was one of the latter. But for a long time the Pentagon ignored it, assuming that the cuts to defence spending it contained would never happen.
Those cuts—$500 billion over the next nine years, on top of $487 billion already under way—were designed to be so painful that they would force Republicans to do a budget deal with Barack Obama to avoid them. But it turns out that Republicans hate taxes even more than they love the armed forces. No deal was reached. On March 1st the sequester began/.../
Whatever happens, America will remain the world’s pre-eminent military power, accounting for around 40% of global defence spending. Its allies will account for much of the rest. That said, if the sequester continues, it will be far from business as usual.
During previous wars, America vastly increased the number of men in uniform. During the current build-up, its forces barely grew at all, notes Todd Harrison of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a think-tank. “Rather than getting larger and more expensive over the past decade, the military just grew more expensive,” he says. That makes it much harder for the Pentagon to save money by shedding soldiers, as in the past.
Pay and benefits for each active-duty service member grew by 57% in real terms between 2001 and 2012, or 4.2% annually, says Mr Harrison. Overall personnel costs rose by 59% after inflation, even as the number of people employed rose by only 3%. What the Pentagon calls “operational and maintenance” costs per active-duty warrior also grew by 34% in real terms. This reflects a big rise in the number of civilian support staff and a failure to trim excess infrastructure (the Pentagon reckons it has 20% more bases than it needs).
If growth in these two areas continued unchecked, Mr Harrison calculates that by 2024 they would gobble up the entire defence budget. Even when budgets were growing, swelling personnel costs left less money available for buying new weapons and developing new technologies/.../
The CSBA’s Mark Gunzinger wants the next review to explain clearly what forces America will need to meet the challenges identified by the president’s new strategic guidance, published last year. Above all, that means being able to project power against foes with sophisticated “anti-access/area denial” weapons, (ie, those that might prevent American forces from going where they want, such as anti-ship missiles). The potential foes in question are China and, to a lesser extent, Iran.
Mr Gunzinger remarks that previous reviews have avoided radical change by simply adding missions rather than setting priorities. Admiral Gary Roughead (a former chief of naval operations) and Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution, a think-tank, say that part of the problem is that the Pentagon traditionally asks for equal budget shares for the army, the navy, the air force and the marines. That may foster inter-service harmony, they say, but it will leave America with an “overcapacity for land warfare and an undercapacity for emerging air, maritime and cyber challenges”.
In May the CSBA brought together teams from three other think-tanks—CSIS, the American Enterprise Institute and the Centre for a New American Security—to explore how to find the savings required by the sequester. All four concluded that only large reductions in personnel, primarily ground forces, were necessary. Three think-tanks recommended cuts in the active-duty army of around 75,000; the CSIS’s Mr Murdock called for cuts of 163,000 (albeit with a bigger reserve) because “that’s where the money is”. All four were willing to take some medium-term risks with readiness and the early retirement of ageing weapons systems in order to keep up spending on promising new technologies. Their priorities were cyber- and electronic warfare, long-range attack drones capable of penetrating sophisticated air defences, space systems hardened to withstand attack, and special forces.
Some hoped that sequestration might force the Pentagon and Congress to embrace change. But few expected this to happen. As Mr Murdock grumbles, “The system hasn’t had the internal fortitude to do it…for the last 20 years.” The sequester need not be a disaster for America’s armed forces. But it could be.