Tale of Two Programs

Modernizing two legs of the nuclear Triad at the same time, as we’re doing between a new bomber authorization and existing plans to replace the Ohio class of ballistic missile subs, is a significant investment.  With such a tight strategic relationship, the fiscal connection between these two programs is inescapable.  It’s not constant, however, and yesterday marked another in a series of important developments for the two.

Last summer, then-Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead laid out the conventional wisdom for keeping priority on the SSBN(X) sub when I asked him about friction with the bomber.  His answer: survivability, stealth, and service life.  Service-life was potentially the most interesting because it’s relatively fixed – refueling its tank, a nuclear core, is very expensive, and water pressurization from diving and surfacing limits the life of a hull.  Contrary to Roughead’s logic, however, it was the SSBN(X) that the Pentagon slipped by two years yesterday.

Meanwhile, the bomber has become DOD’s banner program this year.  It was the only investment referenced by name in the January 5th strategy review, and Congress opted to increase its FY12 research money by 51%.  This happened despite Roughead’s logic for focusing on the sub, and despite an Obama administration decision in FY10 to cancel the previous bomber upgrade program.

Raising the priority on the bomber didn’t take it off the table altogether, though.  Seemingly out of nowhere, Gen. Schwartz testified before the House Armed Services Committee last November that the Air Force will “not to certify [the bomber’s nuclear mission] immediately. And the reason is that we're trying to control costs.”

So let’s run the tally.  Still two programs, and still a good bit of simultaneity.  If we look a decade out, this plan pushes the SSBN(X) procurement event closer to the bomber’s.  But most won’t look a decade out, so this helps escape the appearance simultaneity even if not the fact. 

The bigger change – even if not the intended change – is to the mission, nuclear deterrence.  Deputy Secretary Ash Carter went out of his way to emphasize that the SSBN(X) slip “is not a strategic decision; this is a managerial decision.”  In its own peculiar way, that makes sense.  These two programs seem to have ended up side-by-side in the budget for managerial reasons – namely Air Force and Navy equities – so it’s fitting that their relationship would evolve in the same way.  But there still is strategic consequence, even if it’s unintended.  The next generation for one leg of the Triad isn’t going to be certified immediately, and the replacement program for another leg of the Triad has been delayed. 

In a story full of twists, this is the latest, but probably not the last.

State of State

While Secretary Panetta was preparing his budget rollout at the Pentagon yesterday, across town Secretary Clinton was busy holding her own Town Hall Meeting to address the overall state of affairs at the State Department, and in particular, to provide an update on the implementation of the first QDDR:

We are doing everything we can to work smarter by improving our approaches to planning, procurement, and personnel… Now as obvious as it may seem to all of us here today, we now set our goals before we determine funding rather than doing everything all at once, and we’re simplifying those processes to relieve unnecessary burdens. 

To be sure, much progress has been made in terms of strategy and budgeting. But BFAD’s original assessment—that the QDDR calls for strategic planning, but is not yet a strategic planning document—holds true. As our own Gordon Adams and Rebecca Williams wrote last year:

While making strides in defining the process, the QDDR did not change the institutional arrangement that separates the strategic planning office (in the Bureau of Resource Management reporting to the Undersecretary for Management), from the Policy Planning office (reporting to S), from the budget offices.  The challenge of integrating the processes remains to be dealt with in the QDDR implementation stage.  A lot of effort will be needed to make it work.  In addition, the budget processes remain separated, managed by three distinct offices (assistance, management overhead, and personnel) and there is not much guidance in the QDDR on how these three come together under a process guided by strategic planning.

Clinton expressed hope that Congress would help institutionalize the QDDR this year by including legislation in State’s authorization or appropriations bills that would ensure that the new strategic planning process endures beyond her tenure at the State Department. Changing legislation is a big deal, and hopefully in that effort, we can see some of the more far-reaching changes Adams and Williams called for.

The FY 2013 Defense Budget….and Beyond: Promising, but Dangerous

Leon Panetta rolled out this afternoon some of the first details on the new FY 2013 defense budget, the first one since FY 1998 to actually decline in nominal terms (though FY 2011 and FY 2012 were “real” cuts, as they did not keep up with inflation).

The Secretary didn’t have much choice about the base budget for FY 2013; the 2011 Budget Control Act pretty much froze the fiscal options and the base budget request stays within that framework, as Congress intended.  While Congress may mix and match the details, many of which are still to come, they cannot quarrel with the cap, so the total is unlikely to change.

There is some promise, and some danger, in the longer-term plan the Secretary unveiled, however. 

The promise is the indication that the big ship DOD is slowly turning toward the future, though the strategic framework for that shift remains to be filled in. some of that shift looks a bit like what my colleague Matt Leatherman and I wrote a year ago in Foreign Affairs.

  Reducing ground forces is something that needs to happen and always does at the end of war(s). US ground forces remain globally superior and are globally deployable, unlike those of any other country.    There is a reason, however, that the Constitution calls for Congress to raise and support armies,” but “to provide and maintain a navy.  Ground forces are easier to raise and historic uneasiness about a large standing army remains.  Moreover, with over 500,000 reserve and guard forces (well used the past ten years), the capacity to “go active” is large.

Moreover, the expeditionary capability that has thrived in the past decade – the Special Forces – are slated to grow, matching the sense that rapid, small missions are the more likely use of our military, rather than regime-change, stabilization/occupation, nation-building missions like Iraq and Afghanistan.  Major stabilization (and related sizeable COIN) mission seem to be fading, which is a good thing.  What is unanswered, is where and why all these Special Forces need to be used; that debate remains to be had.

The Navy and the Air Force thrive, relatively.  These are much harder to reconstitute.  What is less clear is why the number of carriers is magic at 11.  With two major theaters for deployment (Gulf and Pacific) and a global dominance in overall naval forces and battle groups, the Secretary could have gone further.  But at the root of naval forces is the reality that the US has been a naval power for over 100 years and is likely to remain so.  Air power has less of a history, and is not as clearly tied to strategic goals (I will leave the “anti-access” issue for another day.)

The danger is that the long term budget trajectory the Secretary forecast is unrealistically high.  Trimming (and it is “trimming”) $487 billion from a large defense plan over the next decade leaves Pentagon planners with the unrealistic expectation that, after the current and next year, budget growth will return, barely at the rate of inflation.  That expectation will lead to unrealistic planning for the future: the out-years of this budget are completely at risk.

Sequester will not happen (though we will hear a great fracas about it over the next ten months).  It never has in any meaningful way, and the threat is more useful than the actual implementation.

But defense budgets will come down deeper than the Secretary thinks.  They will come down because Washington is going to have to find about $4 trillion in spending and revenue changes over the next ten years if the nation’s debt is to stabilize at 60% of GDP.  To find those cuts, everything, including defense, will still be on the table, even after this budget.  And defense budgets will come down because they always do after combat (or “cold combat” in the case of the 1990s), in fact, at a rate of about 30% in constant dollars over ten years.

The Panetta budget does not get close to that; his “cuts” are roughly 8% of projected defense budgets.  Even if one generously offered to include projected war funding as part of the baseline (and there is no real baseline for wars after FY 2013), the new slope for defense looks like just over 20% of the projected budgets.

A lack of fiscal realism could have harmful consequences for long-term planning.  That said, the Secretary’s announcement is a step in a different, more realistic direction, with more to come than he thinks.

Not Yet the Meat

As we ready for the FY13 budget, it’s worth reviewing where we’re at now: year 3 of flat budgets.  Which means when you factor in inflation the defense budget has already been declining for two years.    

It seems like this year is the big year because the rhetoric hasn't kept up with the reality.  We’ve long pointed out that the President’s FY12 request wasn’t a real number.  Neither was the FY11 request: by the time the CR fight was done, FY11 was held at the FY10 level, 3% less than the request. And the final FY12 appropriations extended that same level another year.  So the reality is three years of DoD at about $530B.  

Those flat budgets mean savings from defense are actually ahead of the big savings proposed by the debt commissions.  Both the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Commission and the Rivlin-Domenici BPC Commission froze FY12 at FY11 levels, but since both were looking for savings from FY12 on, they assumed FY11 would grow from FY10.  In reality, we’ve already been reaping “savings” from defense for two years.  

Yet even with some savings already pocketed, we’re still cutting mainly the fat from the defense budget.  Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hoss Cartwright, in what is likely to be an oft-cited quote, implied that this year's cuts aren’t yet making the services change their plans:  “Achieving the $487 billion in cuts was sufficiently doable that it didn't require really hard decisions.”  To illustrate his point, when savings are coming—as is rumored—from multi-year contracts for destroyers, subs, and V-22s or from pushing the purchase of JSFs to outside the FYDP, we aren’t yet seeing hard decisions being made.

A cut in ground force endstrength may be the first sign of actual change, although how big a change is still dependent on how those cuts are implemented.  As we prepare for the roll-out, its worth remembering on one hand that this isn’t that big of a cut from last year or the year before that or the year before that and, on the other, that we haven’t yet seen the hard choices.  We aren’t cutting meat yet.

It's Economics!

Our own Matt Leatherman, appeared on CTV January 5th to discuss what the new strategy means for our security. Addressing concerns that tougher strategic and spending discipline means less security, he reiterated that one of our bigger challenges is economic.  As he pointed out, January 5^th marked more than one important event:

England’s Defense Minister came and met with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to reiterate that its economics and debt that is the biggest threat for the two countries.

Philip Hammond, the UK official, also made his point publicly in comments at the Atlantic Council.  And French Gen. Stéphane Abrial of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation shared a similar sentiment in a recent appearance on This Week in Defense News.  Both of their countries have already had to reckon with this reality – a helpful reminder that, while it’s easy to fixate on only military considerations when thinking about military strategy, strategy still wears a dollar sign.

Thinking Strategically?

In a recent press conference at the Pentagon, President Obama announced a new strategic vision for the role of the military in the 21st century, meant to align with proposed defense spending cuts over the next decade and to meet the new set of challenges to American national security.  In response to the announcement, BFAD’s Russell Rumbaugh noted on CNN.com that:

We would have a better defense – at any spending level – if we actually made budget decisions based on strategy rather than by letting institutional concerns determine what makes up the budget.

Rumbaugh still is skeptical about the impact of this strategy, though, given how defense budgeting actually works.

The topline is determined largely by external events – like our economy and fiscal crises. But the budget that meets that topline is determined largely by the institutions within the Pentagon.

Although strategy documents are nice, it’s important to remember that it’s still institutional actors that drive the budgeting process.

264,000 Trucks

Bet you didn’t know that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is an English major.  Well, he is – and he’s prepared to talk semantics just as easily as the strength of our armor.

Speaking earlier this month at Duke, where he earned an MA in English, Dempsey confirmed that “we’ve taken that [two-war construct] language” out of the strategy but maintained that “the nation needs a military that can do multiple things at the same time.”  Then, with the linguistic finesse only an English student can have, Dempsey explained that dropping the two-war construct without foregoing our ability to multitask frees the Department from the “tyranny of language.” 

So we had this two-war construct that said: Thou must fight two wars simultaneously… Remember now, tyranny of language, so not much wiggle room.. By the time you were done with the accounting rules, the Army ended up with – and I’m not making this number up – 264,000 trucks. And you might say, that’s absurd; how did you end up with 264,000 trucks? …It was a mathematical drill.

Dempsey seems to be talking about saving money – a leading motive behind this strategy – by changing how the military builds its force around planning scenarios, not by limiting the scenarios themselves.  Formulas would interfere less with our military’s dynamism as a result – a tremendous benefit if it worked.  We may need an enormous fleet of trucks in Afghanistan, for instance, but wouldn’t need them in North Korea even if conflict broke out right now since we would fight predominantly with air and naval forces there.  No need to double-order trucks.

But will the distinction that Dempsey’s found make a difference in the real world?  The military services build our defense budget – are they going to have the breadth of perspective to scale back their role in particular scenarios so that we can generate a joint economy of force?  Remember, the truck count ended up at 264,000 not just because of the math but because the Army liked the idea of having 264,000 trucks.  If the Army still wants 264,000 trucks, what keeps it from getting them?

Victory?

Bob Gates had a knack for pith.  In one memorable instance, he declared that “health-care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.”  As soon as a statutory freeze on enrollment fees expired, the Pentagon went at this problem with a small – but symbolic – fee increase for working-age military retirees.  The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that President Obama signed last month acknowledges this token fee increase and, for future years, it ties increases in working-age retirees’ enrollment fees at the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for retirement pay (see §701). 

But health care inflation outpaces standard COLAs by a long shot, so this tweak in the NDAA is not going to stop TRICARE from consuming more and more of the defense budget.  Still, enrollment fees were unchanged for sixteen straight years (1995 – 2011), and raising them by any percentage at all means that the bites will be smaller.

Taken together, the Pentagon is in a less bad position than it has been but is now statutorily prohibited from improving it (e.g., pegging working age retirees’ enrollment fees to health care inflation).

If you can spend it...

The strategic guidance released last week affirmed one, and only one, hardware investment by name: the strategic bomber.  (See .pdf page 11.)  That’s a clear indication of priority – but why?

Despite being just a year old, this isn’t the first head-scratcher on its record.  Last July Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA), ranking member of the House Appropriations committee, offered this explanation for the panel’s decision to fund the newly-requested bomber at 51% above the Pentagon’s budget submission ($297 million vice $197 million):

Our committee held hearings with the Air Force and found, from a lot of dialogue with the three companies that are competing, that we might be able to accelerate this bomber replacement program if we could get an additional $100 million.

Conspicuously unaddressed, of course, was a rationale for why we need a bomber replacement program at all.  Yet the House’s plus-up won the day in conference, with the manager’s report explaining the change in two words: “Program Increase.” (See .pdf page 249.)  And the strategic guidance offered no better clues, simply binning the jet as part of our program to overcome anti-access/area-denial tactics.

These are no mean oversights.  OMB terminated a bomber program in FY10 precisely because “the current fleet is performing well… [and] current aircraft will be able to meet the threats expected in the foreseeable future.”

A random and single fiscal allusion in a studiously non-budgetary strategy document?  A mysterious 51% increase?   Taken separately, it’d sound like the regular hem-and-haw of political posturing – especially when the program in question got cut just two years ago.  But it isn’t.  The program not only is surviving, it beat the spread at both major decision points.

Clearly some motivation is propelling the bomber program forward even in this austere budget environment.  Given OMB’s FY10 position, that motivation probably isn’t just the future strategic environment.  But, absent a justification that rebuts OMB, debate about a new bomber is likely to sharpen.  More to follow – will we finally get a real defense of this program in Secretary Panetta’s budget briefing on January 26^th?

A Missed Opportunity?

With everyone in Washington spun up in the recent defense strategy rollout and imminent cuts, BFAD wanted to take a step back to shed some light on an underreported omission in the omnibus 2012 spending bill: the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD). On December 16, 2011, the State Department quietly posted the following message on the Commission’s website:

The U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, the Government’s only body dedicated to overseeing and promoting Government activities that intend to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics, has not been reauthorized by the Congress. As a result, the Commission concluded its business on December 16, 2011, and the office has been closed.

Originally established in 1948 under the Smith-Mundt Act and reauthorized in 2007, the ACPD Charter required reauthorization by Congress after October 1, 2010. However, thanks to the continuing resolution that funded operations in FY11, the Commission was able to stay in business until now. Seven members who were nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, served on the Commission without compensation. The ACPD’s only permanent staff was the executive director, who was assisted by a military detailee and two interns. These Commission members and the bare-bones staff conducted the important business of overseeing all US public diplomacy efforts with an operating budget of only $135,065 in FY11 according to the State Department’s website.

Following the news of the Commission’s demise, reports surfaced on the Public Diplomacy Council blog that the decision not to reauthorize was part of a deliberate Senate strategy to cut programs that were too small to be effective. Certainly there is little room for inefficiencies during times of budget austerity, but what is dramatic about the ACPD’s termination is that it comes on the heels of “countless studies, articles, and opinion pieces [that] have announced that US strategic communication and public diplomacy are in crisis and are inadequate to meet current demand.” According to a 2009 Rand report that collected and reviewed these studies, there was a clear consensus among the various recommendations calling for greater leadership and coordination across departments and agencies.

Maybe the ACPD was too understaffed and under-resourced to be effective in that role. But what if the Commission was a missed opportunity to provide much needed oversight and government-wide coordination for public diplomacy and strategic communication?

Two Questions

The new defense strategy justifies cuts to the Army's endstrength with strategic rationales:  we won't size our forces to do stability operations anymore and we'll focus more on Asia-Pacific, a region where air and sea power are the primary capabilities.  But, as I said at CNN.com, such a strategic justification would allow for even greater cuts than we've heard about so far.  Two key questions will help us determine how much the new strategy will shape the Army’s force structure.

Will the one-third rule break down and the Army lose some of its base budget share? That would correspond with a reduced role in the new strategy, but service shares have been one of the most stable attributes of the defense budget for the last 50 years and the Army went out of its way to say it expected those shares to remain that way.  Still, if the defense budget is supposed to reflect strategic realities, we should see some change. 

Will the Army cut BCTs to reflect the endstrength decrease?  When Secretary Gates capped the Army’s BCT growth at 45, he explicitly justified it by saying, “This will ensure that we have better-manned units ready to deploy, and help put an end to the routine use of stop loss. This step will also lower the risk of hollowing the force.”  Last fall, there were rumors that the Army would cut BCTs to meet the budget cuts, although it was suggested that was a worst-case scenario.  Our own Gordon Adams and Matt Leatherman have argued there are plenty of back office jobs to be cut throughout the military.  But if Army endstrength is going down by 15%, it seems like its primary force structure should decline too to avoid that hollowing Gates worried about.

These questions may well not be answered affirmatively.  If they aren’t, though, it’ll be more an indicator of how much our defense budget outcomes are driven by internal processes than a shortcoming of the strategy. 

Only The First Shoe

Even as Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey hit the Sunday morning talk show circuit last weekend to defend the new defense strategic guidance, not everyone was convinced by the Obama Administration’s insistence that strategy is driving the Pentagon’s spending decisions. As BFAD’s own Gordon Adams told Reuters, "This is a classic resource-driven strategy document. That's not a criticism, that's just a reality. It's inevitable. Strategy always wears a dollar sign.”

To underscore this point, it’s worth stating the obvious: The entire strategic review process was explicitly undertaken and publicly unveiled to accommodate the defense savings required by Congress. Secretary Panetta explained on Sunday morning:

We're coming out of a decade of war. We're facing a huge budget crisis in this country. The Congress said to us that we have to reduce the defense budget by $487 billion. And I think the question isn't whether we're going to do this, the question is how.

But the defense builddown isn’t likely stop at $500 billion. As Gordon Adams told the Washington Post, additional cuts can be expected as Congress attempts to outmaneuver the sequester. "That's inevitable," he said. "Only one shoe has fallen here. There's another shoe to fall."  

Grading Against an Unknown Future

Nathaniel Sledge has a good critique of my procurement report in this month’s National Defense.  His article reflects the most frequent criticism of the report:  sure, we bought newer, better stuff, but it was the wrong stuff.  

Sledge rightfully points out I never explicitly define modernization.  In the report, I use an implicit definition of modernization as stuff newer and better than we had when the decade began.  That definition is unlikely to satisfy Sledge, however, because he wants a much narrower one: new stuff that is the right stuff for what our military will do in the future.   

He’s not alone in thinking a “right stuff” definition is the better definition of modernization.  In its most extreme form, the argument dismisses all of what we bought in the last decade and ends up making the seemingly factual statement “we did not modernize.” 

There are two responses to this statement, which seems to contradict my report on the basis of facts.  The first is to better define what the facts are. Taking Sledge’s criticism into account, it would be best if we could use somebody else’s definition of modernization.  Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be an official definition of modernization, nor an official or doctrinal definition of its related term, “recapitalization.”  So for lack of a better option, let’s use a joint AT&L/Comptroller report’s definition of recapitalization from 2008: 

A recapitalization results in a type designation change, capability upgrades, and additional service life.

By that standard, we clearly recapitalized in the last decade.  To use just one example: the Abrams tank got a designation change, M1A1 to M1A2 SEP; clear capability upgrades with a stronger engine and new situational awareness; and additional service life.  All three components were true for almost all of the procured systems of the last decade.  My report demonstrates we used the procurement funding of the last decade to buy newer, better stuff.  Those are facts—uncontested facts. 

To his credit, Sledge doesn’t deny those facts.  He is careful to note we did buy newer, better stuff, but argues it’s the wrong stuff.  That brings us to the second response: to better frame the debate.  Sledge wants to use the term “modernization” to mean something more than just newer, better; to use it to describe “appropriateness” for what our military will do in the future.  But here we flounder on a much bigger problem.  What will our military do in the future? 

That is an unsettled question.  There are many different opinions, all based on reasonable understandings of history, technological developments, and geo-strategic trends.  Moreover, the question cannot be definitively answered.  We won’t know what our military does in the future until the future has become the past.  

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate what our military will do and therefore what to buy.  At the end of the day, we have to make decisions on imperfect information.  We have to prepare for the future before it is in the past.  In my report’s closing sentence, I explicitly acknowledged the need for debate: 

Even as the debate of what we should buy rightfully continues, we should not dismiss what we have already bought.

But we confuse the debate if we cloak our arguments about how to prepare for the future in language like “we didn’t modernize.” Such a statement sounds like a statement of fact about the past.  It is not.  It is a statement of opinion because it is based on an opinion about what the future will be like.  I tried to better inform the debate by clarifying what actual facts were created by our last decade’s procurement funding.  To do so, I avoided making judgments about whether it was the right or wrong stuff intentionally to help inform the debate not decide it (that point is in the report’s introduction). 

To call my report’s conclusion wrong misinterprets the report’s question and clouds the very debate it was meant to clarify.  I am actually sympathetic to Sledge’s assessment of the stuff we bought and why we bought it.  But his point would be better made if he contested those whose opinions of the future differ from his rather than contest the facts demonstrated by my report.

Defining "presence"

If Tim Owens has the key to understanding what the US pivot to Asia means in terms of military presence, Philip Hammond seems to have it for the European world.

Secretary Panetta unveiled our new defense strategy last week and, anticipating Europe’s sensitivity that it would get short shrift, he emphasized that “we are committed to sustaining a presence [in Europe] that will meet our Article 5 commitments, deter aggression.” But, when asked to explain that presence, Panetta was studiously vague:

With regards to Europe, you know, we will maintain our commitments with Europe… And one of the things that we've made clear with them is not -- you know, not only are we going to continue our commitments there, but we are going to develop the kind of innovative presence that we think will make clear to Europe and to those that have been our strong allies over the past that we remain committed to protecting them.

What, then, is “innovative presence”?  Panetta helpfully defined “innovative methods to sustain U.S. presence” elsewhere in his remarks:

Maintaining key military- to-military relations and pursuing new security partnerships as needed. Wherever possible, we will develop low-cost and small- footprint approaches to achieving our security objectives, emphasizing rotational deployments, emphasizing exercises, military exercises with these nations and doing other innovative approaches to maintain a presence throughout the rest of the world.

Strip out the filler words and Panetta has used four to define “innovative presence”: relations, partnerships, rotations, and exercises.  Notable for their absence are three others that embody actual physical presence: bases, personnel, and hardware stationing.  It sounds a lot like someone trying to strike a balance between strategic reassurance and fiscal restraint, doesn’t it?

So now we cut back to Phillip Hammond, the U.K.’s Defense Secretary, who has a more pointed read on all of this.  “My understanding is that there will remain two [of four] brigades…but in addition to that, there will be some rotating presence,” he told Bloomberg.

Like Hammond, we look forward to seeing whether US “presence” in Europe is “sustained” while ground forces and bases in the region are trimmed in service of lower defense spending.

Nukes as Cost Savers

The Pentagon’s new military strategy hinted that the administration might further reduce the size of the US nuclear arsenal. The recently released document says “it is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force, which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our inventory,” and President Obama said that the US will “continue to get rid of outdated Cold War-era systems so we can invest in the capabilities we need for the future.”

While the number and kind of reductions, if any, are still forthcoming, the administration’s decision to suggest nuclear reductions in a document to rationalize spending cuts indicates that nuclear weapons are increasingly viewed as an option for savings in a constrained budget environment. Total savings will depend on the type of reductions in delivery systems along with the number of warheads. Though the exact cost of the nuclear arsenal has recently been subject to considerable debate, even the administration’s 1251 report, which probably understates costs, acknowledges that DOD will spend $125.8B on nuclear weapon delivery system sustainment, operations, modernization over the next ten years.

Re-re-revisiting Europe

UK Defense Secretary Philip Hammond was willing yesterday to say what President Obama and Secretary Panetta wouldn’t: Pivoting toward Asia means fewer U.S. forces in Europe.  Specifically, “my understanding is that there will remain two brigades.”

Presuming the Secretary has been briefed correctly, this revisits a Pentagon decision from last April.  Eight months ago – ancient history for defense strategy and spending – Secretary Gates determined that one of the four BCTS forward stationed in Europe should return home in 2015. 

So the draw-down is doubling – 2 BCTs staying, 2 coming home – right?  It depends.  Specifically, it depends on how deep of a historical comparison you want to draw.

Going back to 2004, Rumsfeld planned to take the then-5 brigades we had in Europe down to two.  But Gates froze the draw-down in 2007 with four brigades still forward stationed.  So, depending on which benchmark you use, going to two brigades doubles the plan or restores the plan.

History has more to offer here than just comparison points.  The Pentagon vacillated about the proper footprint in Europe for years.  It may well continue to do so, not least because we’re also trying to reassure our allies.  Indeed, the most important figure may be the date of the drawdown rather than its size – smaller changes made immediate are more significant than bigger changes scheduled for a date so far away that it never comes.

Something Happened, but What?

The budget is going down, and the President today personally announced the new strategy to align with the new budget limits (okay, so theoretically the strategy came first).  Interestingly, the service chiefs said just last fall that at this level of cuts, they didn't need to change what they did.  Only if there were deeper cuts would they need to change what they do. 

So then what changes will we actually see in the budget flowing from this strategy? There wasn't much detail, but we've started to hear leaks about what the new budget will contain. Most of those don't seem terribly connected to the new strategy.

• The Marines are likely to cut not quite 10% of its endstrength.  But they announced they were going to do that last March--before the President said the defense budget would be cut and certainly before today's strategy announcement.
• The Air Force is likely to cut 200 fighters.  But primarily from the Guard, where it turns out big Air Force has been trying to cut fighters for several years.  
• The Navy seems likely to delay its buy of the Joint Strike Fighter, the largest procurement program in the Pentagon and instead buy more F-18s.  But the Navy had already started hedging against the Joint Strike Fighter by continuing to buy F-18s, which is also just an extension of its modernization program of the past decade.   
• The Army is maybe the most interesting.  It seems likely to lose about 15% of its endstrength going from 560K to 490K.  Some of that was underway already.  22K was always temporary and funded out of the war budget.  But that is still a major change, and justified by the strategic shift to the Pacific and deemphasis on stability operations.  

The defense budget is intended to go down in both real and nominal terms this year.  But still at slight enough levels that for the most part it hasn't made the services do any more than what they were looking to do anyway.  

Maybe the shift away from the two-war strategy does erode what for twenty years has underpinned the stated requirements of the Pentagon; if so the Army's endstrength might not be the only change in the coming years.  But the emphasis on multiple regions seems to suggest plenty of wiggle room still exists for justifying forces.  Whatever changes may appear, they're not here yet. 

Time for Tea

Reading the tea leaves about defense strategy and spending as we watch Secretary Panetta’s 10:50 press conference with the President?  If so, keep your eye on his 4:00 with UK Minister of Defense Phillip Hammond – it may be just as telling as this morning’s main event.

The Guardian has the scoop on Hammond’s talking points for the Secretary.  He’s going to play it straight: “Today the debt crisis should be considered the greatest strategic threat to the future security of our nations.”

This wisdom isn’t original – ADM Mullen repeated it often – or even new.  Bernard Brodie framed it most eloquently when he observed that “strategy wears a dollar sign.”  But it’s phenomenal that a diplomat would allow the point to leak hours before Panetta goes before the country to pretend that the defense budget is built in a strategic vacuum.

It isn’t – and Panetta knows this, of course.  That’s why the 4:00 with Hammond could be so illustrative.  Presented with the complexity of diplomatic politics and the reality of EU and US economic crises, the interplay between strategy and spending will be exposed even as this morning’s event tries to shield it.  And The Guardian knows exactly what that means:

Britain and the US, close allies who are both victims of the debt crisis, will today agree to scale down their military capability and back away from the kind of armed intervention they have enthusiastically supported in recent decades… Hammond will point to similarities in the US and UK economic situations, according to officials. "Without strong economies and stable public finances it is impossible to build and sustain, in the long-term, the military capability required to project power and maintain defence."

A Cyclical Debate

Earlier this week an editorial in the Boston Globe reminded us of the cyclical nature of the deficit reduction vs. defense spending debate. The Globe highlighted a 1992 interaction between then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and now Secretary of Defense (then House Budget Committee Chairman) Leon Panetta:

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney complained to him that cuts to the Pentagon’s budget “would end up destroying the finest military force this nation has ever fielded.’’

Panetta replied, “I think the most dangerous threat to our national security right now is debt, very heavy debt.” Panetta said he had no problem with America policing the world. “My problem is how the hell are we going to pay for it.’’

Sound familiar? Nearly two decades later, top defense and budget officials are engaged in the same debate. As BFAD pointed out a few months ago, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, almost immediately distanced himself from his predecessor Admiral Mike Mullen, repudiating Mullen’s argument that the debt crisis is the single biggest threat to American national security.

The debt vs. defense debate is perennial, but today’s question seems to be: How will the 21^st Century Panetta respond to the 20^th Century Panetta’s question of “how are we going to pay for it?”

Try Your Hand

The New York Times reported yesterday that Secretary Panetta will brief the Pentagon’s new strategy and spending plan later this week.  But you don’t have to wait until then to see the possible trade-offs – the Times has built an interactive simulation that lets you choose the cuts to meet the administration’s savings target.  Among its sources is the Rivlin-Domenici defense option authored by Gordon Adams and me and also featured in our Foreign Affairs article.

So cut away – but remember that this is just a rough tool.  The sources each calculate their savings from different starting points, although the NYT assumes the savings are comparable.   

Even with these caveats, though, it’s remarkable how straightforward it is to make the numbers line up.  As Gordon pointed out in the Times’ print article, hitting $460 isn’t the real challenge.  Indeed,

Even at a trillion dollars, this is a shallower build-down than any of the last three we’ve done… It would still be the world’s most dominant military. We would be in an arms race with ourselves.