James Jay Carafano: Obama, Gates are gutting America’s defense industry

It isn’t easy to put U.S. defenses back on track after they’ve endured a season of neglect. Gen. William Snow found that out firsthand.

Snow’s job, when he arrived in Washington in the World War I era, was to direct the buildup of artillery for the Allied Expeditionary Force. He thought his office should have stationery reflecting the importance of the task. His request was rejected. Rather than fund this extravagance, it was suggested the general purchase a rubber stamp to mark his correspondence.

Snow had joined a War Department completely unprepared to fight a war. The Army hadn’t been used to buying much of anything since the Civil War. It had forgotten how.

Nor was there much to buy. The United States had virtually no defense industrial base. When America entered the war, Congress handed out unprecedented contracts for artillery, tanks and planes. The war was over before U.S. industry could deliver any of them. Doughboys went into battle riding British tanks, piloting French planes and firing artillery made by their allies.

America in 2009 is returning to the 19th century, a world where America will be incapable of producing the instruments needed to defend America. Worse, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ defense policies are pumping steroids into the speed of that decline.

Both houses of Congress have passed the defense authorization bill, giving their rubber stamp to dismantling the defense industrial base. Last week, President Barack Obama made a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars cheerleading the decision.

The White House has couched many of these defense cuts in rhetoric that makes them sound like smart business decisions — axing unneeded weapons and killing costly programs. We’ve seen massive cuts to everything from missile defense to how many ships and planes America needs.

The truth is that the administration is more interested in budget slashing than smart buying. And its ill-advised cuts are endangering operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The proof of this is simple. They are cutting programs and replacing them with ... nothing. The Pentagon plan is to simply ignore future needs or else push the decision to buy new equipment far into the future, when paying for new planes, combat vehicles, missile defenses and ships will be somebody else’s problem.

What Washington has not explained is how it’s going to sustain a defense industrial base when it doesn’t buy anything. Today, defense purchases account for about 10 percent of the nation’s industrial output. In a decade, that production could virtually vanish.

In fairness, Obama did not invent this problem. Washington has not seriously worried about the industrial base since the end of the Cold War. While Gates’ cuts have been trumpeted from the Pentagon’s E-Ring, folks forget that his predecessor, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, slashed about 100 procurement programs.

The problem is that neither administration really considered the effect of these decisions on the capacity of the American industrial base to support any future Pentagon strategy. A recent study by the Aerospace Industries Association found that some of our defense sectors were already on life support. Regardless of any strategy the Pentagon might pick, the industrial base for developing rotary-wing systems (like combat helicopters), long-range bombers and some space assets is now so crippled that companies would have a difficult time responding to new requirements, even if the military decided today that it wanted a lot more new stuff.

There is only one answer. The Pentagon should immediately start a sustained program of modernizing its military capabilities.

Otherwise, the defense industrial base is going to dry up and blow away. With it will go more than just high-paying jobs and technical innovation. We’ll be saying goodbye to America’s capacity to defend itself at a reasonable cost. And that’s simply unacceptable.

Examiner Columnist James Jay Carafano is a senior research fellow for national security at The Heritage Foundation