A few weeks ago, there was a fight between the Pentagon and the Obama administration.  George Bush forecast that the Pentagon would need about $527 billion next year, and the Obama people - being fresh on the job - thought that they wouldn’t mess with that number.

But the Pentagon thought they might be able to slip one by the goalie, and requested - against the Bush administration’s wishes - $584 billion from the new White House.  This request - like all budding DoD budgets - is compiled by the individual services and then submitted to the Office of the SecDef (OSD) for review, before being passed along to Congress.

The problem is that the Secretary’s office doesn’t have the time or manpower to go through the services’ request efficiently.  This shortage of people and time causes the OSD to fiddle here and there, but more or less grant the services what they want.

On this morning’s panel, Russell Rumbaugh outlined this problem and offered a solution - empower the Secretary!  Involve OSD in the budgetary process from the get-go; don’t let it just react to what the services ask for, but beef up the analysts in OSD and get them working with the services to jointly craft a budget that weighs the individual services’ requests against one another.

According to Gordon Adams, the departure point for curbing defense spending is the top line.  If you restrict the top line, you force hard choices down below.  As it stands now, there’s no sense of discipline in DoD because, thanks to the war-funding emergency supplemental process, the Bush administration didn’t force the services.

This makes sense to me - good discussion came out of this morning’s panel, but if you’re going to start somewhere, this is it.

The following is the latest in our series from fellows in the Truman National Security Project.  Jordan Tama writes:

President Obama announced today that he intends to gradually withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq between now and August 2010, reducing the number of troops in the country from 142,000 to 35-50,000. That residual force will have three missions: training and advising Iraqi security forces, protecting American civilian personnel, and conducting counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda and other militants. Under Obama’s plan, all remaining troops will leave Iraq by the end of 2011—in accord with an existing U.S.-Iraq agreement.

Some Democrats are criticizing the plan for leaving too many troops in Iraq for too long. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commented: “I don’t know what the justification is for 50,000. I would think a third of that, maybe 20,000 [would be sufficient].” Leading Senate Democrats also said they didn’t think such a sizable force needed to remain in Iraq after the summer of 2010.

But Obama’s plan gets it exactly right. After the tremendous progress we have made in Iraq over the past two years, it would be foolhardy to pull out nearly all of our troops precipitously and put that progress at risk. Iraqi security forces remain a work in progress, and need our support—both for training and to assist them in difficult combat missions. Without sufficient U.S. troops to provide that support during the next three years, a security vacuum could emerge that enables sectarian violence to become widespread once again.

As the military begins its withdrawal, Democrats should also acknowledge the remarkable success of the counterinsurgency strategy pursued by the U.S. since the beginning of 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

Rep. John Spratt talked about a “attitudinal change” in defense spending at PPI’s DoD budget event on Friday, noting three keys to forcing a bureaucratic shift in Defense spending - that we’re in a tighter fiscal environment, that we need to keep some long-range perspective, and that Democrats and Republicans need to work together.

While they might seem obvious to restate, there’s value to senior members of Congress acknowledging them and setting them out as goals.

Rep. Spratt was pleased by SecDef Gates’ inclination to discuss real trade-offs in defense, but here’s a key that Rep. Spratt highlighted that’s an essential, often unnoticed, non-negotiable part of the Pentagon’s budget:  while weapons systems deservedly get much of the defense-spending scrutiny, personnel costs are the far-greater chunk of the pie.

Using today’s dollars, Rep. Spratt noted that it cost an average of $30k per soldier in the US military in 1955.  In 2006, it was $120k.  There are approximately 1.4 million servicemen and women in the three major military services, and to that, add the president’s campaign pledge to beef up the services by approximately 100,000 more.

In other words, that’s $180 billion out of a $663 billion Defense budget (including Iraq and Afghanistan) before you buy the first hammer or drop of gasoline.

Obama’s defense budget hinted at some sort of personnel reform, saying the budget will continue, “to support, care for, and compensate military professionals commensurate with their service while seeking reforms that will improve service and protect a benefit package that is sustainable and affordable.”

Is this code for a long-term effort to reform military personnel benefits?  It’s a political nightmare because it opens Obama up to charges (whether fair or not) that he would be shafting America’s soldiers.  Of course, Democrats have actually done more to care for military members and their families than the Bush administration ever did (read: GI Bill, Walter Reed), but would that provide enough political cover for this necessary debate if the DoD budget is going to get back under control?

I’ve just walked in from our morning event on DoD budgeting.  I’m trying to sort through all the notes I’ve scribbled, but should have some sort of re-cap up in a few.

I have an op-ed piece on defense spending in the Newark Star Ledger today.  A few excerpts follow below, but you can read the whole thing here.

If you want to learn more on DoD’s new budget, then come on down!  Tomorrow morning, 830AM, Rayburn B-338 on Capitol Hill for our event on defense spending, featuring Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) and Gordon Adams of American University, among others.  See the invite here.

Freedom isn’t free, but it’s not as expensive as the conservatives want you to believe. This week, the Obama administration and the Pentagon agreed to a $537 billion budget for America’s military in 2010. It’s a record-setting number, but one that is unlikely to satisfy a conservative opposition dying to paint the new president as “weak on defense.”

It’s time to shift the terms of the debate. …

The new national security landscape is dotted with dramatically different adversaries who lurk in the shadows, and cannot be deterred by bloating the nation’s defense budget.

Consider the evidence: Despite a $307 billion defense budget in 2001, nineteen madmen brought the country to its knees that September with an attack that cost no more than one Wall Street executive’s now-capped annual salary. Or that by some estimates, the United States has spent $1 trillion in Iraq with questionable benefits for long-term American security. Or that the United States spends more money on its military than the rest of the world combined.

Now more than ever, America’s security is much more complex… [C]onservatives are likely to continue dragging out the same old political rhetoric that links America’s strength to our military spending, distracting from the larger debate about how to actually keep the country safe. It’s time to get past political gamesmanship, cut through the pork, and invest in efforts that make the United States strong, rather than just making the nation’s defense budget big.

DoDBuzz’s Colin Clark speculates that Obama has already missed his chance to enact real change at the Pentagon:

The reason is simple: it is often said in Washington that people are policy. Not changing the people leaves you without the surge of energy and ideas that comes with every new administration.

Interviews with a range of Pentagon watchers — liberals, malcontents and professional influencers — over the last three weeks suggest that Obama made a major strategic mistake in keeping Bill Gates and most of the Bush administration’s appointees for the crucial early days of the administration.

I disagree. 

In the waning days of the Bush administration, and before Gates knew he’d be asked to remain in the Obama administration, the SecDef started hitting all the right notes:  talking about increasing the civilian capacities of American power, cutting unneeded weapons systems, and de-militarizingUS foreign policy.  These priorities matched with Obama’s, who asked Gates to stay.   

I’d argue that Obama’s retention of Gates was due to three factors:  1. Gates represented continuity - a steady, respected hand at DoD in the midst of two major military deployments; and 2. Gates’ priorities aligned with Obama’s. 

These lead to #3. Read the rest of this entry »