There’s been much gnashing of the teeth over the new defense budget, which is reported to top out at a towering $708 billion. The lamentations are premature. The budget won’t be finalized for an additional month, while the Quadrennial Defense Review —a force structuring roadmap— isn’t expected to be submitted until February. And it’s still unclear whether or not the White House will make good on its promise to end the practice of funding the CENTCOM AOR with wartime supplementals.
President Obama is in a tough spot here. His base —which predictably turns dogmatically budget conscious every time the topic of defense spending arises— is screaming bloody murder over “bloated” Pentagon resourcing, while muscular foreign-policy types want to know when the President plans on funding a new front in Yemen, putting missile defense back on track, and replacing graying weapon systems which are long past their shelf life. Thus budget will inevitably be both too fat and too skinny, optimized for neither the war on terror nor future peer/near peer threats, and assured to annoy both left and right.
This is why President Bush funded Iraq and Afghanistan with supplementals. It allowed for flexibility, which is critical when you’re talking about wartime logistics, and a certain level of transparency. Obama is trying to end that policy, while simultaneously tying way too much into the defense budget itself — START, the nuclear posture review, QDR, et al. That makes the document way too rigid, with little wiggle room left to meet rising threats (what if the next underwear bomber comes from an obscure cell in Indonesia or Tanzania? Or if Iran quickly fields a new IRBM?).
Don’t let shrieks of “the largest defense budget in history!” fool you. The nation is at war. Wars are expensive. If resourcing for Iraq and Afghanistan is tucked behind allowances for tanks, submarines, bullets, and bombs, the budget will inflate (currently to the tune of $128 billion, with another $33b on the way). That’s not a conspiracy, just common sense.
