Our Navy’s aircraft carriers are under attack — not from Chinese or Iranian missiles, it seems, but from Washington’s impasse over sequestration.
Last week the USS Abraham Lincoln, a 100,000-ton Nimitz-class carrier, stayed in port rather than head for the Persian Gulf as planned, with the Pentagon blaming looming budget cuts under sequestration. Now the Lincoln’s sister ship, USS Harry S Truman, can’t sail for the Middle East — because sequestration “puts at risk our ability to effectively fulfill all our missions,” says Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel; because the administration is playing with our national security in order to scare-monger the public, say Republicans.
Actually, both sides are missing the point — and this phony clash over the carriers gets in the way of seeing why sequestration is really going to hurt our nation’s defense.
The truth is maintaining a Nimitz-class carrier on mission at sea costs about $2 million a day, when you add up the cost of paying and feeding 3,360 or so officers and crew, aircraft fuel and ship maintenance, plus an average of 18 plane launches-and-recoveries a day at $80,000 a pop.
That’s chicken feed by Pentagon standards, even under the sequestration knife — some $50 billion this next year, out of a budget of $500 billion plus.
The real danger that looms isn’t the dollars the Pentagon loses for operations, but the money not spent on future weapons systems and readiness for future conflicts.
That’s because these cuts — and future ones of nearly 10 percent a year — come out of a budget that already has vulnerabilities that even some defense analysts haven’t noticed.
Realize first that, though military outlays rose after 9/11 during the George W. Bush years, that was top-heavy in spending on manpower, present operations and maintenance — keeping planes in the air and ships like Abraham Lincoln at sea — and light on future forces.
This, in contrast to past build-ups as under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s (or even during the Vietnam War), when much of that increased spending went into bulking up our power on land, sea and air with new facilities and new weapons (like the first Nimitz class carriers) that made us ready for future conflicts as well as current ones.
The last decade’s War on Terror reversed that process. Money for R&D and procurement of future systems dropped to its lowest percentage of the Pentagon budget since the end of World War II.
Yes, the cost of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was carried on a separate “contingency” budget — but the services also shifted a lot of their readiness costs to that budget, for fear of leaving forces stateside under-funded.
Now that contingency budget is gone (or will be once our last troops are out of Afghanistan in 2014), and those dollars going for maintenance and force readiness will be gone, too. All those will have to come out of a baseline budget that’ll be shrinking by 10 percent a year. Otherwise we really won’t have the cash to send carriers to sea.
So the squeeze will be on the Pentagon’s accounts for procurement and R&D, where new weapons and technologies are born and bought as the old ones age and retire. According to a study done for Banque Credit Suisse, meeting the demands of sequestration could shrink those accounts by as much as 38 percent.
That will mean almost four out of every 10 dollars we spend now on making our military stronger in the future — already at historic lows — won’t be there.
As we’re all learning, the future doesn’t have much of a constituency in Washington. But our men and women in uniform should.
Of course, money isn’t the only answer. The Pentagon’s acquisition system is in dire need of serious reform, so that we can get more value for every dollar spent. And after winding down two wars, record deficits and a little or no-growth economy make defense cuts inevitable.
But it’s time the president stop playing games with our carriers, so he and the Congress can start looking for ways to prevent a bleak future for our forces.
Because if we can’t defend ourselves and our interests, there’s no one else who will.
Arthur Herman’s latest book is “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.”