Resourcing relevance

Between the two world wars, France chose to build an impregnable defense against the sort of invasions it suffered in 1870 and 1914. The Maginot Line was over 900 miles long, took 10 years and cost billions of francs to build. The Germans rendered it irrelevant in 1940 by driving their tanks around it.

The French experience taught us that a nation’s defense has to be predicated on the best intelligence on the enemy’s intentions, capabilities and strategies. Allies’ intentions and capabilities are also part of the equation.

Relevance is a mushy term. We don’t want forces that are merely relevant; we want them to have the strength and technological advantages to enable them to so dominate the battlefields — on land and sea, in the air and the cyber-realm — that they can win quickly, decisively and at the least cost of American lives.

One problem is that America has a lot of mushy allies. For example, the NATO treaty pledges the mutual defense of each member. In 2006, NATO members agreed to spend at least 2 percent of their respective gross domestic products on defense. Only Greece, the U.S. and the U.K. have done so. Typical are France (1.9 percent), Germany (1.3 percent) and Spain (0.9 percent). Our European strategy, based on the mutual defense pledge, is as hollow as our allies’ forces.

Other parts of our national strategy — and the missions we expect our forces to accomplish — are just as questionable. We are, as the North Korean cyberattack on Sony demonstrates, unprepared to defend our economy against such attacks. Our nuclear arsenal — reportedly reduced by about 85 percent (and still shrinking) from its Cold War maximum of about 31,000 warheads — may still be sufficient to deter Russia and China. But we have no strategy to deal with nations such as Iran that are clearly not susceptible to deterrence.

How much defense do we need, and how can we plan for the resources to ensure it?

Two schools of thought prevail today. The first is that of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who condemned our military leaders for their “next war-itis.” In his view, thinking ahead detracts from our ability to deal with current conflicts. The second is that of Hillary Clinton, whose admonition is that we must “empathize” with our enemies. Both, to be charitable, are disconnected from reality.

Because of President Obama’s decisions, as well as the congressional default under the Budget Control Act of 2012, we are going into a third year of defense spending cuts that will total $1 trillion over 10 years. The cuts are made in the worst way, across the board, without measuring the effects on our capabilities or our probable enemies’ intentions or capabilities.

Because our defense spending is being cut in that manner, a severe imbalance is growing between what we will need and what we will have (see Figure 1). Prepared by a former deputy Pentagon comptroller from the Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition Reports, this graphic demonstrates the imbalance between spending versus priorities.

As Figure 1 shows, the Air Force, Navy and Army are all sacrificing major weapon system budgets to fund the F-35 fighter. It is funded at more than two-and-a-half times the cost of all Army major defense acquisition programs, one-and-a-half times all Air Force MDAPs and 64 percent of all Navy MDAPs.

Are our military leaders, the president and Congress in agreement that the F-35 is so much more important than all our other major weapon systems? Evidently not. In an interview published last February, Gen. Michael Hostage — then commander of Air Combat Command — said that the F-35 would be irrelevant if it weren’t accompanied by the F-22 flying above to protect it. We stopped production of the F-22 at 187 aircraft, and plan to buy about 2,400 F-35s. The F-35 is planned to be our Maginot Line in the sky.

Other aspects of defense are faring as badly.

In their 2002 book, Unrestricted Warfare, Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote that the battlefield is “everywhere,” defining future unlimited wars in compelling terms. They forecast cyberwar attacks — far worse than North Korea’s against Sony Pictures — which could throw economies into chaos and military forces and strategies into disarray.

In March, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of United States Cyber Command, told Congress, “We are finding that we do not have the capacity to do everything we need to accomplish.” What Gen. Alexander said about our cyberwar capabilities is equally true of too many other defense requirements.

Our strategies are a concatenation of leftovers from the Cold War, attempts to deal with the terrorist threat since 9/11, President Obama’s stopgap measures in Iraq and Afghanistan and his supposed military shift to Asia. There is no strategy — far less a coherent one — to provide essential weapon systems, manning and skill levels.

The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review is supposed to match our strategies to our forces’ capabilities. But under President Obama, the budget process is reversed. The QDR serves only to paper over spending cuts already decided. In literal terms, the unguided budget is deciding our strategies and missions for us.

Instead of dealing with the fundamental issue of matching weapon systems to missions and strategies — and thereby ensuring battlefield dominance — Pentagon planners have been reduced to asking Congress to fill “unfunded requirements,” a list of spending items urgently needed in the short term. The CR-omnibus bill, passed hurriedly by Congress before it adjourned, included about $850 million to refuel the carrier USS George Washington, $1.5 billion for 15 EA-18G Growlers, and Army funds to modernize Patriot missiles and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. But the “Cromnibus” bill didn’t address critical problems such as the budget cuts that left the Navy without enough skilled shipyard workers to maintain the submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers necessary to maintain America’s relevance around the globe.

If the “unfunded requirements” hadn’t been funded by the CR-omnibus bill, spending cuts resulting from sequestration could have left the carrier George Washington in a shipyard indefinitely, or even mothballed. The EA-18Gs are needed to fill gaps in electronic warfare caused by retiring older aircraft and which aren’t — and may never be — filled by the F-35.

Because he has chosen not to spend our two greatest assets — time and money — with strategic wisdom, it is highly unlikely that any of these problems can be solved while President Obama is in office. They can be solved, but only if his successor chooses to invest them in a national strategy that can meet the threats we and our allies face, in the time our enemies permit us.

Jed Babbin, former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, is a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research and the author of several books including “In the Words of Our Enemies” and “The BDS War Against Israel.”