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WORD COUNT
617
MAY 6, 2008
THE NEW
DEFENSE BUDGET: COMMON SENSE AT LAST – by Jack Shanahan
During the
2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama pledged to go through the American
defense budget “line by line” to eliminate wasteful programs. In his
first address to Congress, President Barack Obama announced he would
“reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era
weapons systems we don't use.”
Mr. Obama
retained Robert Gates, a Republican holdover with a reform agenda, as
secretary of defense with the implicit promise that he could provide the
new president with bipartisan cover. In April, Mr. Gates lived up to his
record and Mr. Obama lived up to his promise.
On April
6, Secretary Gates announced a new Pentagon budget that slowed or put an
end to a slew of weapons programs that were greatly exceeding their cost
and long outlasting their usefulness. He halted production of the Air
Force’s prized F-22 Raptor fighter, a plane that has survived since its
design to fight the Soviets. We have spent $65 billion to buy just 187
planes — many fewer than the 700 originally promised.
He scaled
back the most pie-in-the-sky components of the Army’s Future Combat
Systems (FCS), promising to focus more on MRAP armored vehicles that
have saved lives in Iraq. He announced the end of the Navy’s stealth
DDG-1000 destroyer, an expensive overkill for the modern threats of
land-based insurgencies or even sea-based pirates. And Gates sent the
unproven and outlandish pieces of missile defense back to the drawing
board in favor of theater missile defense technologies.
This
announcement came just days after a new government audit revealed that
cost overruns on some of the Pentagon’s biggest weapons programs
approached $300 billion.
Although
these budget reforms were quite modest in scale, they were monumental in
political scope. Almost immediately, the president and Secretary Gates
were attacked from members of both parties for their plan to “cut”
defense, even though the new budget represented a $20 billion baseline
increase.
One of the
most vicious lines came from Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who accused
President Obama of cutting funding for “our troops in the field during
an ongoing war.”
Setting
aside the big misnomer that cutting stealth destroyers and battle robots
somehow affects the troops, Inhofe didn’t bother to note that billions
were being redirected to personnel and support for combat operations in
Afghanistan. But the ability of politicians like Inhofe to get traction
from such charges is part of the reason these wasteful weapons programs
endure.
Lockheed
Martin and builders of the F-22 have spread production of the plane
across 46 states, enlisting friendly members of Congress along the way.
In the weeks leading up to Secretary Gates’ announcement, Boeing had
deployed 100 lobbyists to Congress to push back on the program cuts. And
the biggest talk against the president’s budget came from congressional
representatives with big defense contractor constituencies.
Inhofe,
for example, represents the BAE plant in Elgin, Okla., where a major
part of the Army’s FCS program is assembled.
Absent
from all this overheated rhetoric is a discussion about why these
programs are needed in the first place, other than to subsidize a
defense industry that can’t survive a government audit. Every dollar we
waste on an unnecessary futuristic weapon, even if we don’t divert it to
domestic spending, is money that could support the two wars we are
currently fighting. The fact that the web of lobbyists, contractors, and
pork-laden congressional representatives would argue otherwise is a
demonstration of putting the needs of the nation behind the needs of the
next election.
The Obama
defense budget is a step in the right direction, as the president’s
former opponent Sen. John McCain said. But the special interests lined
up against him will ensure that any step forward will be uphill.
--
Vice
Admiral Jack Shanahan (ret.) is the former commander of the U.S. Second
Fleet.
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