I just wrote this memo on personnel spending and the military.  Here’s the gist:

It’s not surprising that weapons systems draw all the attention when defense spending reform comes up. They translate into jobs that defense contractors spread cunningly across the nation’s states and congressional districts. But the “guns versus butter” debates between liberals and conservatives miss a key point. It’s not just weapons that drive defense spending through the roof — it’s the people, too.

According to its official budget, the Defense Department will spend $533.8 billion in 2010 in the following categories:

• Personnel: $136 billion
• Operations & Maintenance: $185.7 billion
• Weapons Procurement: $107.4 billion
• Research & Development for Weapons and Technology: $78.6 billion
• Other: $26.1 billion

The personnel figure, however, doesn’t come close to capturing what America is really spending on defense personnel. According to PPI’s calculations, the real price tag is much bigger: $301.1 billion each year, 121 percent higher than the Pentagon’s figure. In other words, if you want major savings in defense spending, cutting weapons systems and the ever-elusive “waste, fraud and abuse” won’t take you far enough.

In a February address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama promised to “cut Cold War weapons systems we don’t use.” By signing today’s $680billion defense authorization bill, it’s remarkable at how well he succeeded.

Trimmed from the budget are more F-22s fighter jets, VH-71 presidential helicopters, and Air Force search-and-rescue helicopters.  In short, we own an acceptable quantity and/or quality of these systems to achieve their stated missions, freeing money money that could more efficiently be spent elsewhere.  The simple message comes down to this:  In the middle of two major military deployments, spending on weapons we don’t need makes America weaker because we’re short-changing those involved in our current fights.

The president has made a solid first step in breaking the iron triangle of defense contractors, congress, and the Pentagon.  However, the war is hardly over.  If you want to dunk your head in a buck of cold water, read Winslow Wheeler’s reality check- he quite compellingly argues that:

In 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year. Despite that, I see signs that we might be on the cusp of a change for the better.

This past week, as the Senate debated the Department of Defense (DOD) appropriations bill, a tiny bipartisan group of senators stood up to fix an important part of the gigantic mess in our defenses. This minuscule bunch lost at every turn when the votes were counted, but for the first time I can remember, senators revealed previously unrecognized aspects of their colleagues’ appalling pork-mongering — and took action against it. In the process, a few supremely powerful senators who have been corrupting the process were exposed as contemptible frauds. Now, if only the press would notice.

The issue at hand is a new tactic in budgetary slight-of-hand.  Sens. Inouye (D-HI) and Cochran (R-MS) have lead a group of Senators in raiding the “Operations and Maintenance” account - a little-noticed fund that pays for things like pilot training and basic equipment up-keep - to pay for home-state weapons projects that even the military says it doesn’t want.

Reforming the weapons acquisition culture is like turning an aircraft carrier 180 degrees.  The White House and Secretary Gates have started, but the next several Pentagon budgets will show us where we really are.

While we’re talking about me in the meeeedja (as a certain rappa from Staines would say), I went on FoxNews last week and absolutely tore up this poor girl from the Heritage Foundation.  She was obviously ill-equipped to deal with my superior intellect.

Conservatives absolutely love European missile defense.  Why?  My theory is that it brings them to a happy place, one full of stuffed dolls of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and plastic Millenium Falcons.  Yup, the European missile defense program was a vestige of the Cold War, when conservatives’ gripon national security strategy was tightest.  Why else would the Bush administration have worked so hard to ensure that we had invested so much in the system that it’d be dang near impossible to back away?

So you’ll forgive them if they’re not exactly ready to give it up.  Take House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), for example:

The Administration’s misguided action will cause our eastern European allies to question our commitment to their people and security, while heightening concerns in Israel. The European deployment is the only system that can protect both the U.S. and Europe against the common threat of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them.

Yet Cantor’s statement is just the latest example of how out-of-touch Republicans are with America’s national security needs in the 21st century.

I know it can be counter-intuitive to claim that we’re making America stronger by removing a missile shield.  At first glance, it doesn’t make obvious sense.

The most important thing to remember is that we’re actually improving our missile defense capabilities.  Instead of the land-based, costly, behind-schedule, outmoded system in Europe, the Obama administration is set to emphasize a more accurate, cheaper, near-term, next wave sea-based system.  When comparing the two, think of the choice this way:

If you were going to buy a security system for your house, would you rather spend $1000 on a system that catches 50 percent of the criminals and doesn’t start working until next year, or one that costs $800, catches 80 percent, and starts working next week?

The choice seems easy, right?  Though greatly simplyfied, it isn’t terribly different from the obvious choice the White House just made on the unanimous recommendation from the Defense establishment.

Diplomatically, the choice is also a win-win for a stronger American security.  While the conservative cabal excessively worry about upsetting our Eastern European allies while groveling to Russia.  Take House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH):

“Scrapping the US missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic does little more than empower Russia and Iran at the expense of our allies in Europe,”

Or does it?  While it’s true that there may be some bruised egos in Warsaw and Prague, our relationships with our Eastern European allies is steadfast.  How can I be so confident?  Look no further that the NATO Treaty’s article 5, which states that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all.  That’s the very same article that NATO invoked in the wake of 9/11.

Even better, guess who’s a member of NATO?  If you said Poland and the Czech Repbulic, DING DING, Vanna has some lovely gifts for you.

Furthermore, moving missile defense to a sea-based element removes an unnecessary thorn in the side of US-Russia relations, and helps put Russia in our corner when negotiating with Iran.  Russia’s help isn’t guaranteed, but if it’s possible to have Russia pressure Iran with no adverse effects on our national security, then it’s a no-brainer.

Just like this entire situation:  Conservatives need to wake up to the fact that the Cold War is over and America’s national security needs in 2009 are very different from just twenty years ago.

On July 21, the Senate killed funding for extra F-22s.  This was a huge victory for the White House, and could prove to be the first chink in the armor of the Iron Triangle of defense contractors, the Pentagon, and Congress.  Or was it?

If you need a refresher, here’s how the Iron Triangle works:  Congress controls the power of the purse, and each year crafts a defense spending bill to send to the White House.  Defense contractors spread their offices, warehouses, and factories into as many Congressional districts as possible.  Their presence creates local jobs.  The military services know Congress will eagerly fund any defense project that keeps factories humming, so they request amounts of hardware in excess of what may be necessary for national security.  Contractors keep pressure on Congress through campaign contributions to make sure the services’ requests are funded.

The result is wasteful spending - Congress funds weapons in the name of local employment, and campaign contributions, and not according to our national security needs.

That’s why killing funding for the F-22 looked like such a solid win:  Speaking to a joint session of Congress in February, the President said he would veto any spending bill that continued to buy Cold War weapons systems - like the F-22 - that we didn’t need.  The White House and Pentagon kept up the pressure: we already owned 187 of the plane, we weren’t using them in Iraq or Afghanistan, even the military said it didn’t need any more.  The trick was convincing Congress not to fund more of them in a time of high unemployment.

But was the F-22 a harbinger of the defense acquisition’s future, or a hollow victory as standard weapons acquisition process continues unabated?  Writing in Defense News, Winslow Wheeler fears the latter:

Get out your pen, Mr. President; the porkers in Congress have slathered up the 2010 defense appropriations bill. Your veto threats have not fazed them in the slightest. …

The Obama administration won a titanic victory over pork in the Senate on July 21 with a lopsided 58-40 vote to kill the F-22. Reading the tea leaves, the chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., took money for the plane out of his bill. Surely, Congress’ porkers got the message; their day is done, right? Not hardly.

Murtha and the House added a lot more than the initial batch of three C-17s to get that ball rolling. They added $560 million for the second F-35 engine; $400 million to start buying the presidential helicopter (with the stove); $80 million to save the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (from Murtha’s district); and they added 1,116 other earmarks costing $2.75 billion. The Senate Appropriations Committee even made it clear the president’s F-22 victory was a way station, not an end, to the program; the committee endorsed spending, sure to be high, to modify the F-22 to enable foreign sales. Not exactly chastened, are they?

Not a peep of opposition from the president. Complete surrender. Obama is not standing in the way of pork and waste in defense bills - he is enabling it. He has a chance to get serious when the Senate takes up its version later this month. But so far, it looks like he doesn’t want to stand behind his own rhetoric and put up a real fight.

So the problems roll on.  If the F-22 is a symbolic win, then how do we reform the acquisition system to address these problems at their core?  As luck would have it, Jordan Tama wrote in Memos to the New President for the PPI on just this topic.  He proposed a weapons reform commission styled after the de-politicized Base Realignment And Closure commission to address the weapons purchasing problem because:

[E]ven a reform-minded president and secretary of defense cannot overhaul the acquisition process successfully without some buy-in from the military services and Congress. A commission’s prestigious and diverse membership, careful deliberative process, and persistent advocacy for its proposals can build support for reform among the key constituencies that are part of the acquisition process.

Think the F-22 is gone and buried?  No chance:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee is urging the Air Force to develop an F-22 Raptor model for export as the Defense Department winds down its demand for the stealthy jet fighter, Reuters reported late Thursday. The Pentagon’s decision to stop purchasing the fighter after the next fiscal year has been controversial in Congress since contractors building and supplying the F-22 have facilities in most states and provide jobs. Japan, Israel and Australia have shown interest in the F-22, but a 1998 law banning the jet’s export to protect its technology would have to be lifted or circumvented.

This is a nifty way to keep jobs in Senators’ states while - theoretically - not burdening the American tax payer with a plane we can’t really use.  Here’s the real question:  how much does it cost to develop the export model?  And is that out-weighed by the number we can sell abroad?

Last week, in the midst of the debate over whether to purchase more F-22 fighter jets, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) absurdly suggested that we needed to purchase the maligned plane to defend against our ally, India. You read that correctly.  Quickly clarified by his staff, Senator Cornyn clarified that he meant China, not India.

Wow. Even Cornyn’s clarification is a head-scratcher, both for its style and substance.

First, the Texan Senator shown stunningly poor timing.  He fingered China as America’s greatest national threat just asits Vice Premier Wang Qishan arrived in Washington this week to discuss the relationship that President Obama has said will shape the 21st century in a new era of “sustained cooperation, not confrontation.”

This cooperation that makes large-scale military confrontation almost unfathomable.  Love it or hate it, with $1.5 trillion in US securities currently owned by Beijing, the United States and China are sharing the world’s economic driver’s seat for the foreseeable future.  Because of our ever-increasing co-dependence, the financial tidal wave that would follow any military confrontation is almost unthinkable–if China stops buying American Treasury bills, the US would effectively go bankrupt.  And then a bankrupt America can’t buy Chinese goods.

Or to put it another way, the bankers will stop a war before the generals start one.

Second, Cornyn grossly misunderstands the strategic military landscape.  While it is true that China’s military poses the greatest challenge to American firepower, it’s important to put China’s capabilities in context: think Washington Generals vs. the Harlem Globetrotters.  A Sino-American war twenty years would look like that game too — China’s military spending and technological advancement - while formidable and increasing - won’t catch up to the US for about two decades even if DC didn’t spend another dime on military hardware.

The Chinese of course know this, which is why they’ve shifted away from a militiary-on-military paradigm, as detailed nicely in Andrew Krepinevich’s recent Foreign Affairs article.  China’s military strategy is focused on “area denial”, which acknowledges the shortcomings in its firepower and seeks instead to limit American access to strategic locations, thereby driving up the cost of any American offensive.

Any way you slice it, Cornyn’s strange justification for the F-22 just doesn’t pass muster.

It’s 2009, and today’s enemies don’t have the nice, neat answers that conservatives would like.  When they wake up to today’s reality, it will be a good morning for American security.