Introducing Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick on the battleship USS Wisconsin was meant as a tribute to Ryan’s home state. But the symbolism was fortuitous. The choice of Ryan sends a clear and distinct message to our armed forces: After four years of cuts, help is on the way.
The only time Ryan wore a uniform was in the Boy Scouts, and he doesn’t sit on the House Armed Services Committee. The issues he’s most identified with are Medicare and the budget. But as Budget Committee chair, he’s made it very clear he understands the challenges of adequately funding our military — and the strategic and geopolitical consequences if we don’t.
Indeed, with Democrats and President Obama poised to let automatic sequestration decimate the Pentagon budget, Ryan and Romney are the best hope our armed services, and security, have.
The Obama era has been four years of continuous bleed of defense programs, more than $487 billion worth. Meanwhile, war-fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have gobbled up billions of defense dollars that couldn’t go to replace outdated weapons and equipment, or prepare for future conflicts. If the autopilot “sequestration” cuts kick in next year, there goes another $1.2 trillion over the next decade. That’s a slash nearly equal to two entire years of defense spending.
As many as 200,000 service personnel would be forced to retire. We’d be looking at our smallest Air Force ever, the smallest Navy since 1916 and the smallest Army since 1940.
That’s a formula for disaster — and Rep. Ryan knows it. “The unmistakable fact is,” he wrote in the introduction to his 2012 budget proposal, “that the president has chosen to subordinate national-security strategy to his other spending priorities” — meaning more and more entitlements.
Passed by the House last March, that budget’s a sharp contrast to the president’s unilateral-disarmament mentality. It puts back $214 billion of the Obama cuts, and roughly restores 50 cents of every dollar the president planned to cut in future.
Critics note that top Pentagon brass were offended that Ryan said he felt they weren’t being entirely truthful with him and Congress about the full impact of the Obama cuts. “I guess he’s calling us, collectively, liars,” harrumphed Gen. Martin Dempsey.
That’s a good sign for a Romney-Ryan administration. What drove Ryan’s criticism was his conviction that our military has to be free to devise a “strategy-driven budget, not a budget-driven strategy,” as he put it — something he feared doesn’t happen at the Obama Pentagon.
It’s a crucial distinction. Forcing military planners to fit their mission to available resources is the surest way to put America and its allies in a vulnerable position. We saw that before World War II, and then on the eve of Korea.
It happened again after Vietnam (until the Reagan defense build-up corrected our strategic posture vis-a-vis the Soviet Union), and again in the 1990s, when the Clinton “peace dividend” cuts left us with an Army that couldn’t put enough boots on the ground to win the peace in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yes, the Pentagon needs reform. Bureaucratic waste and cost overruns now eat up some $300 billion for major weapons programs, and counting. But the combination of Ryan’s budgetary savvy and Romney’s vast private-sector experience could change that — reinventing how the government buys its weapons and equipment.
Our military is still using a procurement process devised for technologies of the 1960s, not the 21st century. It takes the Army 16 years to field a new weapons system, even though the technology is changing every three or four years — and six years of those delays are due directly to red tape.
Paul Ryan knows that it’s a more dangerous world than ever out there. “The United States is a nation with global interests,” he’s written, “and protecting those interests requires a strong, modern, capable military.”
His place on the GOP ticket is a pledge that Washington-as-usual won’t be allowed to drive our military off the fiscal cliff, and that fixing the budget deficit won’t come at the expense of our men and women in uniform — or our national security.
Arthur Herman’s new book is “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two.”