Typically, when the White House submits a defense budget request to Congress, lawmakers respond with a considerable list of amendments and tweaks. The executive and legislative branches often have different ideas about what the Department of Defense should be focusing on, what kinds of weapons systems the military should purchase, and which areas of the world defense planners should view as a priority.
Rarely, however, does the entire exercise result in budget cutting. Congress is far more likely to give the White House what it asks for than to push for a reduction. In February, the Trump administration unveiled a $740 billion Pentagon budget request. The Senate and House Armed Services Committees have since swiftly passed their own versions of the National Defense Authorization Act with the same top-line figure. While there were strong disagreements about policies and procedures, the top-line number was a point of agreement.
The United States, however, can’t afford to proceed with business as usual. The country is experiencing its most turbulent financial period since the 2008 to 2009 Great Recession. With millions of people out of work, lawmakers have passed nearly $3 trillion in economic stabilization funds to limit the damage from economic closures related to the coronavirus, and Congress is in the beginning stages of crafting a bill that could amount to another $1 trillion. The budget deficit has tripled over the first nine months of the 2020 fiscal year. The national debt is now at an astounding $26.5 trillion, the highest in U.S. history.
With the U.S. withstanding near-unprecedented budgetary strain, the Pentagon can no longer be treated as a sacred cow, immune to cost-cutting or reevaluation. It is simply unsustainable for Washington to continue maintaining defense budgets that are higher today than what they were during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Reagan Era defense buildup.
Fortunately, there are ways for U.S. defense planners to prune a bloated defense budget without sacrificing the U.S. military’s technological edge and superiority. A symposium published by Defense Priorities this week offers a long list of recommendations on how to perform such a task responsibly and effectively.
Cut the Army and reinvest in the Navy: The Navy has drawn the short straw over the last two decades, forced to work with largely flat budgets at a time when Washington was squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on land-based counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year’s proposed Navy shipbuilding budget is the smallest in five years. China, meanwhile, is modernizing its own navy at a rapid pace. Shifting six of the Army’s 13 armored brigade combat teams into the reserve component and decreasing the U.S. Army’s strength in Europe will save billions in unneeded costs and provide the Navy with additional resources to retain its dominance.
Think big on cuts: Washington’s idea of a solution to a problem is often to throw more money at it. But in the realm of foreign policy, this approach has served the U.S. poorly. Indeed, more money can often fuel bad decisions, which in turn exacerbate the very strategic drift that has proven so expensive and geopolitically counterproductive to Washington. Austerity, in contrast, forces policymakers to prioritize, refocus minds on what programs and weapons platforms are truly necessary to defend national security, and determine which policies have lost their worth.
Get out of tertiary conflicts: If U.S. policymakers are looking for some quick savings, they can put an end to unsolvable wars and near-permanent security assistance missions that cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars each year. The war in Afghanistan is now in its 19th year, costing a combined $1 trillion to $2 trillion and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties. Despite this large expenditure in resources, violence in Afghanistan is as high as it has ever been, and the Afghan government is all but totally reliant on foreign donors. U.S. training and advising in Iraq and Syria have been far more successful in eliminating ISIS’s territorial caliphate, yet U.S. troops remain in both nations at considerable risk to their personal safety 16 months later. Getting the U.S. military out of these high-risk missions will give the Pentagon a desperately needed break in kinetic operations and allow Washington to reallocate funds to rebuilding the Army and modernizing the Navy and Air Force.
It is time for the U.S. to make tough but necessary choices. A broad, comprehensive review of the U.S. defense budget is not only urgent during these extremely challenging fiscal times — it’s also a strategic imperative.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
