Ten years after the United States embarked on a war against terrorism in the rubble of the September 11 attacks, the country finds itself financially exhausted and facing hard strategic choices as it grapples with new budget realities. After spending heavily for a decade on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon now faces potential cuts of up to nearly $1 trillion over 10 years at a time when it sees rising competition from countries like China and a need to replace its fleet of aging planes and ships.
While some lawmakers are promising to act to avert the heaviest of the budget cuts, Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says postwar cost-cutting of 25 percent to 50 percent has been the norm since the Korean War. That means something has to give."Given the budget outlook we see in the coming years, it's simply not realistic for DoD (Department of Defense) to continue to do all of the things it does today with fewer and fewer resources," Harrison told a briefing this week on the impact of the September 11 attacks."This means we will need to make a number of strategic choices about how and where we plan to compete in the future," he said. "And these choices will have to be constrained by the resources available."
As the United States marks the 10th anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington, analysts say September 11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had a profound impact on the way the Pentagon fights and views the threats it is likely to face in the future."I think for the Department of Defense it (September 11) really was a watershed event," said Jim Thomas, another analyst with the CSBA. "I don't think it struck people immediately ... but as we look at the cumulative effect over the past decade, I think we can say in retrospect that it truly was."