The federal government is undergoing its tightest economic pinch since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Despite $2 trillion in emergency spending signed into law by President Trump, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell believes a full economic recovery is likely to stretch well into 2021. The budget deficit this year is already projected to reach $3.7 trillion, a number likely to rise as Congress debates another coronavirus-related spending bill.
As deficits increase and the mountain of national debt gets steeper, Pentagon officials and defense analysts in Washington are increasingly nervous about what the fiscal environment could mean for the U.S. defense budget. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has warned of a “reckoning” for his department, with many fearing a reversal of the Pentagon’s modernization projects.
The doom and gloom, however, is misplaced and grossly exaggerated.
The Pentagon will not only survive cost-cutting — if tailored properly, the U.S. military could actually come out of the exercise in a far healthier position. Defense policy in general could use a comprehensive review of what missions are truly important to our national security, which are second- and third-tier priorities, and which are total distractions.
Over the last two decades, policymakers in Washington have asked the military to execute tasks that have hobbled the joint force, diverted the attention of Pentagon strategists from more strategically important priorities, and driven out-of-control spending habits that will balloon the national debt to the same size as the U.S. economy. Nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost taxpayers more than $6 trillion, borrowed money that would have been better allocated toward filling the Strategic National Stockpile, rebuilding the nation’s highways and bridges, and defending infrastructure from the cyberattacks that Washington’s adversaries are increasingly relying on. Wars of choice rather than necessity have essentially entrapped U.S. service members into no-win situations they should never have been involved with from the beginning. And rather than acknowledging and correcting the mistakes of the past, multiple administrations have doubled down under the dangerous assumption that the U.S. military can solve the unsolvable.
U.S. troops have been ill-served by their policymakers, many of whom strongly (but naively) believe that every problem in the world can be resolved at the hands of the U.S. military.
Ultimately, the Pentagon doesn’t need more money. With a $762 billion budget in fiscal year 2020 (nearly 40% of the world’s total military spending), the United States has more than enough funding to defend the country. What the Pentagon needs is a defense strategy guided by realism and restraint, which would eliminate peripheral missions that have only exacerbated the debt problem.
In sum, the Pentagon must do what real-world families do every day: prioritize and make difficult financial decisions.
Some of those decisions aren’t even difficult. Withdrawing U.S. troops from the war in Afghanistan (a war that costs Washington $30 billion-$40 billion a year to sustain) would have the support of 73% of military veterans, many of whom fought on the front lines across multiple deployments. Ending U.S. involvement in the war would also be a late corrective to a counterterrorism mission that was frankly achieved in the first four or five months of the conflict.
The U.S. can also pare back in Europe — and in the process provide Washington’s European allies and partners with an incentive to take their own military modernization seriously. European governments continue to make short shrift of their own defense budgets, confident in the notion that the continent can depend on the U.S. military as its first line of defense. Pentagon programs like the European Deterrence Initiative, which largely duplicate NATO’s core deterrence function against Russia, makes the defense burden more difficult to implement and should be downsized or, ideally, eliminated.
The Pentagon should also stop pouring money into weapons systems and platforms that are outdated or losing their relevance in the 21st century. Defense Secretary Mark Esper acknowledged as much, arguing that his department needs “to move away from legacy [programs], and we need to invest those dollars into the future.” This is logical. In fact, the more resources spent on legacy systems, the less that can be devoted to modernizing the military for an era of competition between great powers.
There are two major lessons to take from the monthslong coronavirus crisis: Resources are finite, and U.S. priorities have been skewed for far too long. The U.S. cannot afford business as usual — particularly in the domain of foreign policy.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
