Instead of the increases proposed by both major presidential candidates, military spending needs to be brought into line with current world conditions.
Editor's note: Editors are invited to direct their readers to a unique interactive web site hosted by the Global Beat Syndicate where they can make their own defense-policy decisions and see the impact their choices would have on the military budget. By choosing between three options in a series of eight issues, readers can build their own defense budget and compare their choices to those of the major presidential candidates. Editors are encouraged to provide a link the site at http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/defensebudget/ from the text and their own web sites. News organizations may also post this page on their own site. Reprint and other questions may be directed to Paul Tooher.
NEW YORK -- A decade ago when the Cold War ended, many U.S. military leaders were worried that the defense budget would be slashed dramatically.
General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993, expressed the concerns of many of his colleagues when he said he feared that there would be a stampede by members of Congress arguing that, since there was not a threat, there would be no need for a large military, and since we did not need so many guns, we could start shifting money to such things as schools or housing or crime prevention.
Gen. Powell need not have been concerned. The defense budget for the current fiscal year calls for spending more than 90 percent of what we spent on average during the Cold War, even after taking inflation into account. That's more than is spent by all of our adversaries or potential adversaries combined, and more than this nation spent at the end of the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford or Carter administrations.
Meanwhile, the presidential candidates for both major parties are promising to spend even more money on the military. Vice President Al Gore has promised that, if elected. he will increase defense spending by $127 billion over the next decade. Texas Gov. George W. Bush has outlined a program that would necessitate an increase in the defense budget by about $20 billion a year over the same period.
How is this possible? Why do defense budgets keep growing so rapidly? Has the threat increased? Are our adversaries or potential adversaries increasing their defense budgets? Are our allies reducing their spending?
In fact, the exact opposite is true.
Whether one considers the aging and poorly equipped military forces of North Korea and Iraq, the greatly diminished Russian military or the relatively insignificant Chinese strategic forces, it's difficult to find an adversary today that matches the threat presented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War period.
In truth, the main reason that political leaders from both parties continue to advocate and approve ever larger expenditures on defense is that they have bought into a number of serious misleading assumptions or half truths about the current state of our military.
Among the most glaring myths are:
While this statement is true as far as it goes, it says more about the tremendous growth of our economy since World War II, as well as the rising cost of health care and the aging of our population, than it does about our national security situation.
The fact of the matter is that since the end of World War II, the Chiefs have never been satisfied. Even in the halcyon days of the Reagan buildup, when the defense budget doubled in four years, the nation's military leaders complained about the gap which they then estimated to be about $500 billion.
The fact is that this $60 billion figure allows the U.S. military to engage in an arms race with itself. It assumes, for example, that the current generation of tactical aircraft must be replaced with newer, more sophisticated and much more expensive fighter jets, even though the current aircraft are already the best in the world. Similarly, the Pentagon claims it needs a new generation of submarines, even though the current generation are the best in the world with many years of useful life left.
The fact is that, in last year's fiscal budget, real operations-and-maintenance spending per capita was 10 percent higher than it was at the height of the Reagan build-up. Moreover, it is not clear that spending more money will actually increase readiness. In the first Reagan administration, despite the largest peacetime buildup in history, readiness rates for Army and Air Force units actually dropped between 1980 and 1984.
(Readers can design their own defense budget, see the impact of various policy decisions and compare their choices to the policies of the major political candidates by visiting a interactive web site at http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/defensebudget/).
None of this is to suggest that the military does not face challenges. Indeed it does. But these challenges cannot be dealt with by throwing more and more money at the Pentagon.
If anything, the majority of the problems faced by the military today are self-inflicted and can be traced to the leadership's refusal to adjust to changing world conditions. For example, in the last decade, the Department of Defense conducted three major reviews of its strategy and force structure. Yet, despite these reviews conducted under three difference secretaries, the force of 2000 is structurally little different than it was a decade ago. Although the force is somewhat smaller, it is in essence a "Cold War-lite" force.
While this may be understandable from a bureaucratic and political view, the fact of the matter is that it has given this nation the worst of all possible worlds. Not only do we spend more than is necessary on defense, we get far less than we should from what we spend. A true bottom up review that resulted in a realistic budget would give us a more effective defense at a greatly reduced cost.
Dr. Lawrence Korb is a former assistant secretary of defense
and is currently director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.