A better use for the defense budget cuts

Lawrence Korb etal have proposed that the defense budget cuts proposed be used to help our veterans return to what was once thought of as an American middle class. Here is their proposal as to how specific cuts can be used to help veterans.

Korb again

I've posted several articles prompted by the work of Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan.  He's expressed much common sense about how we can cut our ginormous defense budget. His latest one tackles compensation for the military.

Compensation for an individual in the military, is supposed to reflect the average salaries of civilian workers with comparable educational backgrounds. Well, it doesn't; a military person receives $15,000 more a year. Eliminating this differential would save us $6 billion a year.

Those who retire after 20 years service receive half-pay for the rest of their lives.  If the average soldier entered the service is his twenties, he still has twenty or more years in which to work. Couple his regular pay with his pension and you have a pretty good income.  For a brief time the pension was reduced to 40%, but the military leaders were able to get this policy overthrown.  A more reasonable pension plan would save substantially.

The medical insurance plan, Tricare, is a great one for the retiree: $460 a year for a family plan. How much are you paying? You're lucky if it's $460 a month. How much could we save with a more reasonable plan?

Will Panetta and company look at compensation costs?

The Pentagon Needs Better Management

Lawrence Korb believes strongly that we need a good, experienced, strong Deputy Defense Secretary, who is really a COO. He harks back to such deputy secretaries as Charles Wilson (under Ike) and David Packard (under Nixon) as the kind of deputy we need; these were people who had relevant experience managing huge organizations. Korb contrasts these with recent deputies, such as Wolfowitz, who had no experience with huge organizations. The deputies Korb favors were able to cut spending while improving security.

The recent deputies have managed in a world where an audit is impossible; the Pentagon may be able to be audited in 2017. They have played games to hide expenditures in the war budgets. And, they have been unwilling to penalize contractors for cost overruns.

Here's a little tidbit about the quality of recent management: "the number of generals and admirals is now higher than it was in 1971, when the military was twice as large as it is today and when commands, such as the Joint Forces Command, duplicated the work of others".

Korb closes with a comparison:

"At the end of Eisenhower's first term, the defense budget was $380 billion in today's dollars; at Nixon's, it was $398 billion; and at George H.W. Bush's, it was $435 billion. At George W. Bush's, it was $478 billion and at the end of Barack Obama's, the baseline budget will be no less than $475 billion and probably closer to $525 billion."

Why can't the Pentagon budget be substantially cut?

I doubt that the committee charged to 'solve' our budget problems by November 23 will come to any meaningful conclusions. So, some cuts will automatically be made. Pentagon supporters are worried about this. However, both liberal and conservative think tanks have proposed plans that claim to support cuts from $800 billion to $1.2 trillion without damaging our military preparedness.

One argument the supporters make is that the 21st century wars have seen us wear out our equipment. It will cost a lot to replace and modernize equipment. However, from FY2001 to FY2010 the army spent $1 trillion to replace or upgrade its armored vehicles and the Air Force and navy met their modernization goals.

Lawrence Korb had a good summation of the situation in a recent NY Times letter:

Since we are unlikely to use nuclear weapons, our arsenal can be slashed from the current level of 5,000 to 311, as recommended by some Air Force strategists. Since we are withdrawing troops from the Middle East and are unlikely to need large armies there anytime soon, the size of our ground forces can be cut back by 100,000 to pre-9/11 levels. Since the cold war ended 20 years ago, the 80,000 troops still in Europe can be reduced to 20,000. Since the military increasingly relies on unmanned planes and precision guided munitions, the number of carriers and Air Force fighters can be reduced by 25 percent.

Finally, health care premiums for working-age military retirees can be doubled without breaking faith. In 1995, premiums were set at $460 a year for a family and never raised until a $60 increase this year.

Looking Backwards and Forwards

Lawrence Korb etal have tried a somewhat different tack in arguing for cuts in our defense spending. They look at how previous presidents have managed to trim the defense budget despite being in as difficult circumstances as Obama is now in.

First, they remind us that the defense budget is now at the same level (in inflation-adjusted dollars) as it was in WWII when we had an army of 12,000,000 and were fighting on three continents. It is now more than our budgets during the Cold War, about $250 billion more annually.

Korb & Co.'s proposal is modest in that it seeks to bring the proposed budget down by $100 billion so that it is at the same level as under Reagan, the Cold Warrior. It would require $250 - $300 billion to bring the budget to the level under Eisenhower.

Here is their proposal to cut the budget by $133 billion through 2015:

•  Roll back post-September 11 efforts to grow the ground forces and reduce the number of civilian DOD personnel concomitant with the reduction in military end strength ($39.16 billion through 2015).
•  Reduce active-duty troops in Europe and Asia by one-third ($42.5 billion through 2015).
•  Cancel the V-22 Osprey program ($9.15 billion through 2015).
•  Reform military health care ($42 billion through 2015).
•  Limit procurement of the Virginia-class submarine and DDG-51 destroyer to one per year, and limit procurement of the littoral combat ship to two vessels per year ($20.04 billion through 2015).
•  Cut procurement of the Navy and Marine F-35 Joint Strike Fighter variants ($16.43 billion through 2015).
•  Institute an across-the-board reduction in research, development, test, and evaluation funding ($40 billion through 2015).
•  Reform the military pay system as the 10th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation recommends ($13.75 billion through 2015).
•  Cancel procurement of the CVN-80 aircraft carrier and retire two existing carrier battle groups and associated air wings ($7.74 billion).
•  Cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 311 operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons ($33.72 billion).

 We are spending too much on defense. We must smarten up.

Meet the Deadline

We've signed an agreement with Iraq to remove all of our troops by the end of this year. Will George W. Obama honor that agreement? He and Mr. Gates are pushing Maliki to keep our soldiers there. Lawrence Korb thinks this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:

• the Iraqis don't want us
• if we stay, it's likely that Maliki will go
• the Iraqi army is strong enough to  handle the insurgents.

I'm not sure that I agree with this last point, but I think the odds of our leaders pushing for us to stay there are very high.

Pakistan

Ben Arnoldy thinks it’s almost impossible for the Taliban to succeed in Pakistan.

• The geography is against them. If they move away from the Frontier they become more exposed. “If you have 100 truckloads of Taliban on the Peshawar Highway, all you need is two helicopter gunships" to wipe them out, says Rifaat Hussain, a military expert at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

• They will have trouble once they move to non-Pashtun areas as well as wealthier and more modern areas of Pakistan


• They are outgunned. 5000 Taliban vs. 500,000 Army soldiers.


• They are hated by the people they have ‘conquered’.

But, they have been able to infiltrate major Pakistani cities where they have bombed themselves and others into oblivion.

Arnoldy concludes with this warning: “In other words, the real threat isn't the Taliban occupying urban territory. It's their ability to attract followers and sow chaos. One reason given for the conversions: US meddling. "The mujahideen are not the products of the madrasas," says Syed Yousef Shah, who heads one of the largest religious schools. "They are the product of American actions." He argues that the militants attack because of its cooperation with America and its intervention in the region. "A person whose house is destroyed by a drone attack and sees his parents and his brothers dead, what will he do? A suicide attack demands no lecture."

Yet, Lawrence Korb etal think the problem won’t be solved only in Pakistan by Pakistanis. We’ve got to get deeply involved. They recommend:

1. Build on recent regional and international diplomatic initiatives such as the trilateral U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan talks and the Friends of Pakistan forum.

2. Initiate a comprehensive diplomatic engagement with a broad range of Pakistani institutions and actors.

3. Formulate and sign a bilateral strategic framework agreement with Pakistan

4. Strengthen the police and judicial component of counterterrorism assistance.

5. Increase assistance for internally displaced persons.

6. Enhance efforts to keep Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal safe and secure.

7. Launch a comprehensive effort to advance Pakistani civilian government capacity and expertise in coordination with proposed bilateral development assistance increases.

8. Include careful oversight and accounting mechanisms in assistance legislation.

9. Reform the leading institutions of U.S. diplomacy and foreign development assistance.

10. Engage with Congress and the American people on the importance of Pakistan.

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• Suicide bombers target luxury hotel in Pakistan (telegraph.co.uk)

Advice for the Defense Department

Lawrence Korb and others have advice for President-Elect Obama with regard to our military forces. As readers will know, I've quoted Korb often as, despite his being Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense, he makes a lot of sense to me.

Looking at the Defense Department alone, why Obama wants this job is beyond me - two wars going on, real difficulties maintaining a volunteer army, unbelievable cost overruns, accusations of torture, etc. But Korb etal have great faith in the second level command and assert that the major problem may be the retention of these officers.

Korb argues that, despite the fact that we are spending more money on defense than at any time since WWII, we do not have a better military. Moreover, this largesse has enabled DOD to avoid having to make choices; they can have it all. "Sound strategy and military policy requires choices about organizational structure, resources, training, and other important issues."

Somewhat surprisingly, Korb is not recommending cuts in the budget overall. He does think that we have to spend our money on 21st century issues and, by cutting back on weapons designed for 20th century warfare, we can save enough money to pay for new capabilities.

Korb really pushes the idea of 'people, not hardware' being the sine qua non of the 21st century military. He wants to increase the size of the force but without the lowering of standards we have seen over the past few years. And, of course, we need people who can actually manage DOD.

Dollars Up, Threats Down

Lawrence Korb has argued that the money we spent on missile defense is largely wasted. Now Joseph Cirincione has some numbers supporting that position. The number of long-range missiles held by Russia and China has decreased 71% in the past twenty years. The number of medium-range missiles has gone down even more, 80%. And short-range missiles are largely Scud types, which were never very reliable in their heyday.

It's been three months....

...since my last posting based on the work of Lawrence Korb, a deputy secretary of defense under Reagan. He spoke before the House Committee on Armed Services today about the state of our armed services. Korb doesn't think that the state is very good. Regular troops and the Guard and Reserves are over-worked. Mercenaries are now performing combat tasks for us.

What has been forgotten is that the volunteer Army was not intended to fight a long war. The only way a long war can be fought is with a draft, but Korb believes a better course for now is a planned, withdrawal over 10 to 12 months.

Korb repeats the advice he has given elsewhere:

• We need more troops engaged in peacekeeping and counter-insurgency affairs
• We need fewer Cold War era weapons systems
• We need to really open the military to all of our people - gay and women.

As usual, much food for thought.

Still Pushing

Lawrence Korb and Caroline Wadhams had an op-ed in the Boston Globe yesterday. It advanced the same argument they made back in the Fall - we need to focus more on Afghanistan. Their argument is summed up in this quote from the op-ed:

The Bush administration is in this position because it has forgotten the answers to several key questions. Where did the Sept. 11 attacks originate? Where is Al Qaeda's key leadership currently located? Which US military mission is authorized by the United Nations and NATO? In which theater are more than half of the troops supplied by other nations? In which theater are US casualties lower than its partners? Which country's people want the United States to stay and help? Finally, in which theater does the United States have a greater chance of succeeding?

They also point out the stupidity of having six times as many troops in Afghanistan and spending in Afghanistan a small fraction of that which we are spending in Iraq. And they ask the question of why all the Western troops are nor under a single command.

Life in today's military

Just about every quarter Lawrence Korb comes out with a trenchant article for the Center for American Progress. This quarter's article is about the quality of military life. The quality of life is not very good, but I won't repeat what Korb and Sean Duggan write. Just go here for a summary.

Succeeding in Afghanistan

We tend to be focused almost exclusively on Iraq, but Lawrence Korb and Caroline Wadhams think that Afghanistan is at least, if not more, important and, surprisingly, is a war that we can win, if you define 'winning' as ousting Al Qaeda and building a stable, secure country. Afghanistan has a number of advantages over Iraq:

• The government represents the people and is supported by a majority.
• We actually have allies in Afghanistan who number almost half of the total troops there.
• There is little, if any, sectarianism.
• Polls seem to show support for us and against the Taliban.

I'm not as sure as Korb and Wadhams of the effectiveness of the NATO forces that are there; one gets the impression that they are not overly effective or that there are enough of them there.

Clearly, things have gotten worse there over the past couple of years, but the authors feel that we can succeed if we change our approach and start paying attention to the country by increasing our support. Specifically, they urge us to

• Increase the number of troops (including moving some from Iraq) and make sure there is enough equipment for all the troops.
• Increase our assistance in reconstruction tasks, but make sure we have an inspector general as focused as Stuart Bowen is with Iraq.
• Figure out a better way to interdict narcotics trafficking, one which does not penalize the farmers.
• Get more involved in shutting down the Pakistan strongholds of the Taliban, but not to the point of invasion.
• Help to improve the government.

These are sound ideas, but I doubt our leaders will do anything, as they are fixated on Iraq.

Immediate withdrawal? No

But a major withdrawal from Iraq within a year makes a lot of sense to the Center for American Progress. We would extract the vast majority of our troops in a phased 'redeployment' and leave about 10,000 in northern Iraq and some Marines to protect the embassy. There would be help nearby: a brigade and airmen in Kuwait, the navy and Marines in the Persian Gulf.

One of the authors is Lawrence Korb, who has produced a number of provocative articles over the past year or so.

90% for offense

In most situations where one is in a fight, you consider your offense and your defense. When you become more mature, you consider ways to prevent fights. Is there a reason why our country cannot act as mature adult?

The security budget of the United States should be made up of these three parts - offense (the military), defense (Homeland Security) and prevention (diplomacy). We currently spend 90% of our security budget on offense. a lot of it on exotic weapons systems for which,"GAO's reviews of weapons over three decades have found consistent cost increases, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls." Yet, we continue to propose these budget-breaking systems with little regard to the need for defense and prevention.

Lawrence Korb and Miriam Pemberton have once more produced a Unified Security Budget that challenges the conventional Pentagon budget process and asks Congress to look at all three components of our security - offense, defense and prevention.

Maybe some year this will happen.

Surging to Disaster

There are several articles on the web arguing against increasing the number of troops in Iraq. This article by Lawrence Korb and Max Bergmann is short and to the point.

Here's some of the $5 billion

A few weeks ago I wrote about Lawrence Korb's contentions that the Defense Department wastes $5 billion annually. Well, the latest GAO reports show some places where that money is being wasted:

• DOD or any of its agencies cannot pass an independent audit. (Read that again.)
• Intellectual property rights are not obtained for many projects. This is especially harmful and costly for multi-year projects, some of which can last for decades. Not having the IP rights means it becomes very difficult and costly to make changes.
• Work began on the F-22A, the Air Force's next generation fighter, in 1986. Since then, "the Air Force has added new requirements, more than doubled the length of the acquisition schedule, cut purchase quantities by more than 75% and increased total acquisition unit costs by more than 100%".
• The GAO has been pointing out problems in DOD's supply chain management since 1990. DOD still does not have an effective plan for managing the supply chain. As a result, supplying our troops properly is at risk, plus our money is not being spent wisely.
• GAO employees were able to buy body armor, guided missile mounts, radar test sets, antennae and other sensitive military equipment at liquidation sales. Note that the GAO employees posed as private citizens. Some of these items are currently being bought new by the military; GAO was able to buy them at a fraction of the cost.
• DOD has received $430 billion for the global war on terror. They have trouble recording costs and matching costs to appropriations. As a result, planning for future needs is a real problem.

Today is DOD day

Maybe I shouldn't have gone to the Sensible Priorities web site because I have another DOD post. Their latest publication is by Lawrence Korb and it's about the defense budget. I'd never read anything by Korb prior to my recent post. I knew he was part of Reagan's Cabinet; he was Assistant Secretary of Defense. So, I thought he'd be an ultra-conservative. I was wrong; he's a fiscal conservative who makes a sound argument for cutting the defense budget.

Korb claims that we could cut DOD's budget by $60 billion a year and still be very well protected. He uses data and conclusions from analyses done by CBO, GAO and the Unified Security Budget Task Force. As you know, I'm not a military man, but his arguments make sense to me.

He reviews six areas where significant cuts can be made:

• Nuclear Forces - we have 6000 operational nuclear weapons, far more than we need as a deterrent. Cutting back to 1000 would save $14 billion.
• Ballistic Missile Defense - it has yet to be shown to work. Cutting it back to basic research would save $8 billion.
• New Weapons - most of them are designed for the Cold War (which ended in 1990) and are of no use in today's wars. All have seen escalating costs on the order of two to three times original estimates. Possible savings: $28 billion.
• Space-based Offensive Weapons - have no advantage. Possible savings: $5 billion.
• R&D and Test and Evaluation - this is largely being spent on new weapons which are irrelevant today. Another $5 billion saved if cut back.
• Poor Management - running things right would save at least $5 billion a year.

A Sensible Idea

Miriam Pemberton and Lawrence Korb at Foreign Policy in Focus have a rather simple idea with regards to the fiscal side of our defense budget. Do not call it a 'defense' budget; it's really a security budget that should look at our offensive (mainly the military), defensive (homeland security) and prevention (primarily international affairs) efforts as a unit.

It is their contention that we spend too much money on defense as compared to the other components of our security; their estimate is 8 to 1 in favor of defense. In their opinion we could and should abandon military programs that no longer are relevant to the threats of today and tomorrow and put that money into defensive and prevention efforts. An obvious example: kill the missile defense system and put the money into port security.