This afternoon, Donald Rumsfeld hosted a handful of bloggers and new media wonks for a lunch discussion. Though purpose of the visit was to discuss Rumsfeld memoirs, Known and Unknown, he had no trouble diving into current events. When asked about the defense budget debate -a hot topic in Congress right now-, Rumsfeld said “in any organization there is going to be waste,” but “the defense budget is not what’s causing the deficit.”
Rumsfeld hit on expanding entitlements as the main driver of the deficit, noting “if anyone thinks you can balance he budget on the back of the defense budget. A) mathematically, it can’t be done and B) you’ll be sorry.” He dubbed the tendency of Congress to cyclically fund and defund the Defense Department a “bathtub effect,” where spending spikes in time of crisis, then drops to flatter levels. That’s strategy appears outwardly prudent, but as he noted, it drives up costs when the rubber hits the road (the post 9/11 spike, for example) and leaves us woefully unprepared for national emergencies.
The real issue, of course, isn’t about accounting -defense is a drop of water in the federal bucket- but rather readiness and posture. Rumsfeld, interestingly, used his controversial “you go to war with the Army you have” comment to illustrate this point, noting that the military available to him after 9/11 was not the product of decisions made by Bush administration officials, but rather decisions made by Rumsfeld during his first tenure as SECDEF during the Ford Administration (M1A1 tank procurement, for example).
Here there’s some consistency between current and former Secretaries of Defense. When pressed on overly ambitious plans to slash the defense budget, Bob Gates quipped: “that’s math, not strategy.”
