Call it President Obama’s “conditional-surrender Pentagon budget” — and bad news for the US economy.
The 2012 Defense budget that Secretary Robert Gates unveiled last week calls for cuts of more than $178 billion — more than a quarter of today’s Pentagon spending. Some $100 million in cuts are coming now, including $35 billion from the Navy alone, with the other $78 billion slated for the next five years.
On the chopping block are the Marine Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and the Slamraam surface-to-air missile system, while the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will face more delays — which without a doubt will trigger cost overruns.
The official story is that Gates is implementing these cuts to prove that the Pentagon is serious about austerity at a time of heightened public concern about budget deficits.
Nonsense. Since the president took office, Gates and Obama have been looking for ways to hack out $300 billion from the Pentagon budget. A year ago, they canceled the F-22 Raptor fighter program and ordered cuts in funding for missile defense. Gates slated the Joint Forces Command in Virginia for closing and talked of forgoing replacement vessels for our carrier strike groups.
During his tenure, Gates has also sent a clear message to America’s defense industry: If you want new weapons contracts, don’t look for them here. That’s why most are rapidly expanding their sales overseas and one reason Northrop Grumman is selling its Newport News shipyard — the one place where we build nuclear carriers and subs.
The White House message to friends and foes has been clear: Being a superpower isn’t for us any more.
Liberal critics point out that Pentagon spending won’t actually go down. With personnel benefits and health-care costs rising 5 percent a year, it’ll go up — but by the most modest amount in almost a decade.
Others note that despite cuts in infrastructure and support personnel and weapons programs, funding for the Afghanistan war will continue as before. Yet that’s like driving the Lexus at high speed without bothering to change the oil or replace the brake and transmission fluid. We’re letting current war needs consume the resources for the future.
Yet building the military future is the best economic stimulus we have. Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly, my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, have calculated that building just one of the canceled F-22 Raptor fighters employs some 1,000 subcontractors and suppliers and 95,000 workers.
A modest 15 percent rise in the Pentagon’s outlays for procurement, research and operations would mean 300,000 jobs and $30 billion pumped into our manufacturing and engineering sector — with ripple effects throughout the economy, from technology spin-offs to new basic research grants for corporations and universities.
Think of our military buildup during World War II, which doubled our GNP. Think of the Internet, cellphones and GPS — all spin-offs from past military spending — and the point becomes obvious.
Of course, the Pentagon exists for an even more important reason: to defend the nation and maintain the strategic posture on which our alliances around the world depend.
On that front, this new budget assumes that carriers, tanks, armored vehicles like the EFV and the ships like USS New York that carry them into battle are all Cold War relics. So, it seems, are such “boots on the ground”-type forces as the Marines, which are slated to lose not only their EFV’s but some 20,000 personnel. (The Army will lose even more.)
In this view, flashier but also cheaper Predator Drones, robots, Navy SEAL teams and cyberwarfare are the military’s future, goes the claim.
But the focus on the hi-tech side of modern warfare mistakes the trunk for the elephant. The trunk makes him distinct, and he can’t function without it. But it’s the rest of him that makes him lord of the jungle.
That includes our Marines. The savage irony is that, just as Gates is slashing their numbers and taking away their vertical-take-off F-35s, they’re doing so well in Afghanistan he’s sending in another 1,400 of them.
Republicans in Congress must firmly reject this budget, and call Obama’s bluff. They must fight for our Marines, sailors and soldiers, and for the equipment they need to make us all safer, just as those forces fight for us. They’ll be fighting for our economic future, too.
Arthur Herman, an American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar, is writing a book on the Arsenal of Democracy.