THE PRESIDENT’S PROPOSED $ 12.6 billion increase in defense spending is an illusion. To start, the increase amounts to little over $ 4 billion in new budget authority. The remaining $ 8 billion is a product of Defense Department accounting adjustments, delayed spending on other military programs, and unspecified cancellations of previous appropriations. Stripped of its packaging, the administration’s budget would hike defense spending for fiscal year 2000 by a mere 1.5 percent over last year’s budget projection for this year. In fact, when Clinton’s request for all defense-related programs (Defense Department and defense-related Energy Department activities) is compared with last year’s final budget authority for the same, the total represents a real, inflation-adjusted decline in defense spending.
Obviously, this is not even a modest step and will not correct the flagging state of America’s armed forces. Under this year’s budget, procurement spending will actually decline from the level projected in last year’s budget. For the fifth straight year, procurement will fall billions short of what the Joint Chiefs previously identified as necessary to keep modernization plans on track. Nor is there any increase for military research and development. To the contrary, spending on defense R&D continues to decline. And, as for readiness, the proposed 5 percent increase in funding hardly begins to repair the substantial and well-documented erosion in the military’s combat capabilities. According to the armed services themselves, the administration’s budget for fiscal year 2000 will leave the Army underfunded by $ 2.5 billion, the Navy and Air Force facing a $ 3 billion shortfall, and the Marine Corps with $ 870 million less than it needs to meet current requirements.
The picture doesn’t get any better in the years that follow. The vast majority of the proposed increase in defense spending that the administration is boasting about occurs only after the administration has left office. Whoever is elected in 2000 will have to fight the battles the Clinton administration only pretends to fight. Meanwhile, of the last three budgets Clinton will influence — 2000, 2001, 2002 — two will see real reductions in defense spending if his plan is adopted.
Any proposed increases, moreover, may well evaporate because of administration politics over Social Security reform and renegotiation of the balanced budget law. Under the law, current caps on discretionary federal spending make it virtually impossible to increase the sums allotted to defense. Unless the law is rewritten and the current surplus in federal revenues is made available for spending, there will be no increase in the Pentagon’s budget. Yet the White House and Secretary of Defense William Cohen have made it clear that the surplus will be off limits until Congress accepts some form of the administration’s plan for reforming Social Security. In short, if you’re in the Defense Department, don’t hold your breath waiting for new funds.
But even if one suspends disbelief for the moment and accepts the idea that the proposed increase for defense is serious, the administration’s numbers still fall short of what is needed to carry out the country’s declared military strategy and recapitalize its forces. Based on the underfunded programs identified by the heads of the services, unfunded operations in the Balkans and Persian Gulf, and cost-of-living adjustments for the military’s new retirement plan, the staff of the House Armed Services Committee has estimated that Clinton’s proposed $ 80 billion in new funds in the out-years may cover only half of what is needed. Having given the military short shrift since it came into office, the administration — aided and abetted by GOP budget hawks — has dug such a hole for the Pentagon that a far more substantial increase is necessary to get us out of the security predicament we find ourselves in today.
The bait and switch that the president has pulled off on the defense budget is best captured in his plans for a national missile defense. Worried that the issue was becoming politically salient with the warning from the Rumsfeld Commission report last fall and North Korean ballistic missile tests, Secretary Cohen made his announcement with fanfare the day after the State of the Union: The administration was now committed to building a national missile defense regardless of ABM Treaty restrictions and Russian objections. Yet buried in the president’s budget is the reality of the administration’s policy: an actual decline in money for national missile defense from last year’s budget, a rescission in the funds Congress added to missile defense in last year’s supplemental, and a decision to postpone deployment of any national system for two years later than it had originally promised.
Given the president’s record of cutting defense expenditures substantially every year since coming to office, his latest plan to increase defense dollars should be seen for what it is, a political sleight of hand. In key respects, the Clinton administration is following the example of the Carter administration — a late show of concern about the state of the armed forces generated in part by its own dubious stewardship in national security affairs and in part by the approach of a presidential campaign. But actually, this is unfair to the Carter administration: Its change of heart on security issues was serious, if belated, and its proposed increase in defense spending was real.
Gary Schmitt is the executive director of the Project for the New American Century.
