Strategy and the Footprint in Africa

Almost exactly a year ago Secretary Panetta told Congress that “we will probably have to reduce our presence elsewhere, presence perhaps in Latin America, presence in Africa.”  Then the White House notified Congress the very next day that it would be deploying up to 100 Special Forces soldiers to advise and assist in the capture of Joseph Kony, one of Central Africa’s most gruesome insurgents.

Flash forward to today.  The Associated Press used the following opening for a story this morning on US military activities in North Africa:

Small teams of special operations forces arrived at American embassies throughout North Africa in the months before militants launched the fiery attack that killed the U.S. ambassador in Libya. The soldiers' mission: Set up a network that could quickly strike a terrorist target or rescue a hostage.

It continued:

As of early September, the special operations teams still consisted only of liaison officers who were assigned to establish relationships with local governments and U.S. officials in the region… Eventually, the Delta Force group will form the backbone of a military task force responsible for combating al-Qaida and other terrorist groups across the region with an arsenal that includes drones. But first, it will work to win acceptance by helping North African nations build their own special operations and counterterror units.

A few special operations forces providing advice and conducting direct action couldn’t be more institutionally different from a paragon of traditional presence, like Ramstein Air Base in Germany.  Traditional presence includes highly visible, US-owned bases that permanently house major units and hardware, but these are small-unit deployments conducted in close collaboration with foreign partners, possibly even covertly.

Adding personnel and resources to those missions wouldn’t change any of this, and it would appear to support the strategic shift toward counterterrorism over counterinsurgency.  Nevertheless it also marks an increase in the sort of footprint that’s much more common for the US in Africa.  The Pentagon has no major installation there, as a quick glance at the Pentagon’s 2012 Base Structure Report will show, but small-unit special operations forces have been a core element of engagement for years.

So back to Panetta’s statement.  When the White House announced its Central African mission a day later, we said we looked forward to hearing how Secretary Panetta squares this mission with the priorities he sketched out to Congress.  That bears repeating as its still unclear what Panetta meant by “presence in Africa,” how it may be reduced, and how deploying more special operators fits in.

Thinking about the Alternative

DOD Comptroller Robert Hale ran into a tough question during his recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. Three times Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) asked him if the Pentagon would suggest how the law might change to achieve the same savings but in a more responsible way.  Hale stumbled:

Whether we're going to recommend another law, I think I need to think about, and I will.

As he brainstorms Hale might take a look at the analysis our own Matthew Leatherman published last fall in Bloomberg Government.  As Matthew wrote:

Carving a cliff in the Pentagon’s path is not the only way to achieve almost $900 billion in savings.  Smaller trims taken more slowly could substitute for big savings taken swiftly, if the former were sustained for the full nine-year window.

Every now and then it’s worth remembering that that one way to move forward from the defense sequestration stalemate is to concentrate on changing the process rather than the payout.

Argument amid Agreement

Two weeks ago our own Russell Rumbaugh began a commentary on sequester by observing that:

Despite the bickering over the effects of sequester on defense, almost everyone agrees defense sequester should be waived.

A recent hearing of the House Armed Services Committee demonstrated just that. Committee members of both parties were unanimous in lambasting sequester as harmful to national security. Chairman Buck McKeon stressed that

[Sequestration] was supposed to be so terrible it could never be actually put into place.

Indeed - the goal was to force a compromise on government-wide spending and revenue. Defense was intentionally wedged in tight to create pressure for that revenue/spending deal. 

That last insight is especially important.  Congress rarely fills its time with hearings in which participants on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the dais agree.  Nor did they this time.  Beneath the consensus about the irresponsibility of sequester is a hardened dispute about the revenue/spending balance.  Defense is not the crux of this disagreement - its an incentive to resolve it, just as Russell emphasized in his piece.



Triangulating the Survey Data

Americans’ attitudes on defense spending is a hot media topic, and it’s again being grounded by the survey we released in May, together with the Program for Public Consultation and the Center for Public Integrity. 

Yesterday the Washington Post’s WonkBlog and Politico* asked how a new Foreign Policy Initiative poll could find that 63 percent of respondents believe US defense budget is either “too little” or “about right” while our data showed three-quarters of respondents ready to cut.  As we described a few weeks ago when our data was contrasted with figures from the Aerospace Industries Association, it’s all in how you ask the question.  Our survey provided extensive data on the budget before asking participants to assess it, while FPI’s respondents expressed their opinion about the size of the budget without having that data on hand.

That’s interesting, but it’s no surprise that differently framed questions yield different perspectives.  Perhaps more interesting is some new information that FPI has provided.  Unlike our survey, they asked participants which issue is their top voting concern and which national security threats loom largest.  The results are an important reminder that today’s top-level political debate is not about defense.  National Security is the top voting concern for 5.7 percent of respondents, behind the 49 percent that listed “the economy” and another 9.5 percent that listed “the debt.”  Meanwhile the historic safety that we enjoy today seems to have led respondents to list threats that are all over the map without any consensus beyond the 17 percent that put “terrorists” at the top.

We’re excited to remain a grounding for this conversation – expect to see more of it in the weeks to come.

* Politico's article is behind its paywall.  We'll add the link in as soon as it becomes publicly available.

Int'l Affairs CR Consistent with Caps

On Monday we explained how the many issues raised by the Continuing Resolution (CR), including the across-the-board nominal increase of 0.61 percent, haven’t changed the remarkably consistent structure of our defense spending debate.  That budget is going down, and the issue at stake really is the process.

International affairs (fn 150) also is part of the Continuing Resolution, and it too fits into a structured spending debate – but that structure is a good bit less specific.

Let’s start with the commonalities.  Public finances are tight, and that exerts immediate pressure throughout the discretionary budget.  The President requested an international affairs increase but was denied by appropriators in the House as well as the Senate.  Adding 0.61 percent to the international affairs budget in the CR – a nominal increase but real cut – probably doesn’t change that storyline.  That is especially true when taking into account the other commonality with defense.  Overseas contingency operations are winding down alongside the fiscal pinch, narrowing that part of the budget and providing less space for spending outside the caps.

Now the big difference: national defense currently is capped specifically, while international affairs is part of a cap that includes the other discretionary functions of government.  Statutorily, any of those accounts can increase so long as they collectively fit under the cap.

This grouping has been no more stable than the overall international affairs budget process, and it could change again.  Until January of this year international affairs was part of a security cap, putting it into a difficult position of being subject to trade-offs with national defense.  Transitioning into the non-defense category changed that trade-off logic, but the administration has proposed returning to the earlier security cap instead of acknowledging this switch.

For the time being, though, the statute is clear and it puts international affairs inside the non-defense cap.  Unlike national defense, fitting international affairs in the FY13 cap would not force a cut.  Hence the looser structure – reducing international affairs would require Congress to be proactive but, because national defense is already above its cap, it will be trimmed even with no further action from Congress. 

Of course when it comes to international affairs spending, this Congress hasn’t had a problem being proactive.

Budgeteers to the Rescue

This post is featured on, and the copyright held by, Foreign Policy.

Will the fiscal cliff turn into a mere step off the curb for the Pentagon? It may depend on the definition that the administration's accountants use in applying the Budget Control Act to defense -- a definition about which there seems to be disagreement.

The Office of Management and Budget put out its sequester report ten days ago, saying it could not provide details on how the budget sequester would affect government "programs, projects, and activities (PPA)," the way last year's Budget Control Act requires, because Congress only gave the agency 30 days to complete the report. The number-crunchers just didn't have time to get their institutional arms around the definition of PPA and wrestle the details to the ground, according to OMB.

So their report only assessed the impact of sequestration at the level of "accounts," of which there are about 50 in the Pentagon budget -- Air Force aircraft procurement, Navy operations and maintenance, etc. Every one of these accounts has multiple programs tucked inside -- specific weapons systems, for example -- and OMB implied that each of those programs would be hit in a sequester with a 9.4 percent cut.

OMB is still working on exactly what PPA means across the government, but yesterday in an offhand comment Pentagon Comptroller Bob Hale was reported as saying that the OMB document "would give us more flexibility" because it might allow DOD "accounts" to be defined as the PPA.

If Hale's interpretation survives the day, DOD would have an early holiday present. And it would put out the firestorm being whipped up both by the secretary of defense and by such Republican stalwarts as John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Buck McKeon, who have been running a high-volume mini-campaign about the fiscal cliff, warning about job losses, plant closures, and layoff notices -- all backed up by the Aerospace Industries Association's warning about a million defense jobs being lost in the event of sequestration.

Not reporting out data on specific programs ten days ago allowed the Obama administration to escape the politically-charged damage of identifying specific programs and locations that would be hit by the automatic cuts in the middle of the election campaign. That makes a smaller political target for defenders of the F-35, like Lockheed Martin, which integrates the plane, and whose CEO, Bob Stevens, has loudly warned that he will have to send layoff notices to his workers before the election because of the impact of the sequester.

But the Hale interpretation also breaks with past precedent. In the sequesters under the old Gramm Rudman Hollings Act of 1985 (incorporated into the Budget Control Act), OMB defined "PPA" as "program elements" in the defense budget, which means individual programs, like the F-35. This time around, that interpretation would lead to a 9.4 percent cut in resources for each and every specific program; a tough management task. (Though perhaps not that tough: As an Air Force program manager told me last week: "You're telling me I have to manage my program this year with 9.4 percent fewer dollars than I asked for. Heck, that's my job; I do it all the time inside my overall program account. I could do it with no harm to the program at all.")

For DOD, the "accounts as PPAs" interpretation would provide a gift if there is a sequester: flexibility. If a 9.4 percent budget cut hit "Air Force procurement," the Pentagon would have greater flexibility to find those dollars, trading off between various aircraft programs. Defense officials could reduce the funding for additional work on the troubled F-22; they could slow the buy of the new tanker; they could protect the F-35 from the cuts. The budget request for Air Force Aircraft Procurement is $11.3 billion, leaving lots of room for "in flight" budgetary maneuvers. Not so rigid, and good news for Pentagon managers looking for space to maneuver.

Hale's comment may be more wish than reality; it may not last for long. There is no sign from OMB that it agrees, and it is very easy (and probably right, I understand) to read the OMB report the other way. But it tells us the sequester "shadow play" is not over. Flexible or not, though, DOD is in for budget discipline it has not seen over the past decade, something I will be writing about in the coming weeks.

Other Side of the Sequester Coin

Stimson’s own Russell Rumbaugh joined Minnesota Public Radio on the air last week for a discussion of the future of American defense spending amid looming automatic reductions. The theme of the discussion quickly became the willingness of the American public to cut defense expenditures. Russell pointed out that, while there is bipartisan agreement that sequestration is bad policy,

There is [also] a great deal of agreement about what we should do with defense, and that is: spend less.

Stimson’s summertime defense spending poll vividly displays this preference.  Respondents overwhelmingly made significant cuts to defense when given the chance to change the budget as they saw fit.  It’s just one cause among many for the downward budgetary trend, even if sequester is averted.

Figuring Out Air Force Modernization

Sunday’s episode of This Week in Defense News featured the new USAF Chief of Staff, General Mark Welsh, warning about the need to modernize the Air Force:

Our fleet is aging fairly dramatically… we have got to figure out a way to modernize the Air Force.

A little context is helpful on this point.  The Air Force has figured out a way to modernize itself.  As our own Russell Rumbaugh determined in a report released last fall, the fleet we have today is largely the result of the Air Force’s very deliberate procurement choices.  Rumbaugh notes that the Air Force spent $347 billion on procurement between 2001 and 2010 and that its procurement budget was 54 percent higher in FY10 than FY01. Instead of buying new variants of older aircraft, like the Navy did with the F-18E/F Super Hornet, the Air Force chose to modernize by directing its funds toward the impressive but costly F-22 fighter. As a result, the Air Force could not afford as many fighters:

The Air Force ended up with few fighters not because of a lack of procurement funding, but due to a choice to procure an expensive, high-end fighter.

Prioritizing quality often comes with a quantity tradeoff, and that affects the average age of the Air Force’s overall fleet.  World-class quality has obvious advantages, though, and it’s been the Air Force’s choice to use this as the cornerstone of its modernization strategy.

Continuing the Trend

Early, early on Saturday morning the Senate cleared the Continuing Resolution (CR) that allows the government to operate through March 27th.  The need to handle appropriations squarely in the middle of campaign season had been a widely-anticipated obstacle for a while, but shutdown wasn’t in the political cards after House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced the CR plan in late July.  Even if this legislation was about as pro forma as its drafters could make it, though, it contains some nuggets that are important to note.

Spending subject to Budget Control Act (BCA) caps is continued at a value of $1.047 trillion, the sum of the Budget Control Act’s national defense and non-defense allocations for 2013.  That’s $4 billion above the 2012 cap and, because 2012 spending came in slightly lower than projected, it’s $8 billion above the 2012 estimate.  Congress spread three-quarters of that $8 billion evenly across its appropriations bills, an across-the-board raise of 0.61 percent, and then directed the remaining quarter into accounts of its choosing.

Neither the Defense nor the State/Foreign Operations bills benefited from any directed spending.  But like all the other appropriations, both enjoy the 0.61 percent increase.  The result is that Congress increased defense nominally, yet cut it in real terms since the 2012 inflation rate is at least a percentage point higher (see Table 2-1).

Still staying within $1.047 trillion is not all that the BCA required.  That top-line is divided into a national defense cap (function 050) of $546 billion and an everything-else cap of $501 billion (see pdf pg. 44).  National defense has to decrease by roughly $8 billion to meet that standard, a consequence of how caps reset in January.  Adding 0.61 percent, as well as a bit of directed growth in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons activities budget, moves in the direction opposite from what the BCA mandates.

All this helps make the CR even more temporary than it appears.  Absent any new statutory action, the hotly-debated sequester is scheduled for impact on January 2nd.  Congress is unlikely to permit that – but it’s also not the only sequester order on the table.  Caps are law.  Appropriating above them doesn’t change that, and even a deal that narrowly handles the big sequester wouldn’t necessarily turn them off.  Unless Congress specifically amends the cap provision, the Office of Management and Budget will prepare a report within 15 days of the 112th Congress’ conclusion (i.e., in early January) to override the CR’s national defense sum and enforce the lower cap (see pdf pg. 2). 

So early January remains the decision deadline despite Congress’ move to continue appropriations through late March.  That leaves us with a relatively simple national defense trend, once all of this movement is factored out.  It’s down in 2013 after adjusting for inflation, and its likely to decrease even more at the beginning of the year.  Various mechanisms are in play – big sequester, a substitute deal, or just an enforcement of caps – but the overall direction of this storyline probably is not.

Parsing the Navy’s Pacific Shift

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is traveling in Japan, China, and New Zealand this week as part of an ongoing effort to reinforce our rebalance to Asia.  His oft-repeated commitment to adding 10 percent of the Navy to the Pacific – from 50 percent to 60 percent – is almost certain to come up in those conversations.  To date that’s the most tangible metric of the shift on offer.

It’s also subject to a few limitations.  More than half of the Navy’s major ships already are homeported in the Pacific, giving this adjustment an appearance of being less sizeable than claimed.  And there seems to be some disjoint within the Pentagon about which ships will change homeport to get us the rest of the way to 60 percent.

These are details, though.  What they point to is the larger difficulty in trying to parse US military investment, including the US naval fleet, by region.  Two organizational realities contribute to this difficulty.

“Region” translates into military parlance as “Geographic Combatant Command.”  Pacific Command, like all of the others, does not have independent budget authority from Congress.  As a result, it does not own people or equipment, including a fixed percentge of Navy ships.

Instead, geographic combatant commands issue “requirements” for forces based on how they assess their area of operations.  Those requirements are deconflicted by the Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary.  The Navy and its sister services then function as force providers as part of their statutory mission to organize, train, and equip the military.

How the Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary coordinate geographic combatant commanders’ requirements can adjust at any time and for a wide array of reasons.  The forces provided by the services can change just as fast. 

To apply that concept, the Navy is global and its ship rotations are flexible.  Ships homeported in the Pacific can support Central Command requirements, for instance, and ships homeported elsewhere almost certainly would surge into the Pacific should crisis arise.  Counting homeports neglects physical location.  But counting physical location, to the extent its possible at all, is ephemeral and discounts how the force laydown can shift when needed.

So the real issue is that this metric is not nearly as tangible than it sounds.  For those of us in Washington trying to quantify the rebalance, that’s a problem. 

From a diplomatic perspective, though, it may not be.  Rebalancing to Asia  ultimately is about reassuring allies and signaling to China that this region will remain a priority for the military even as its budget declines.  Rhetoric that is firm, consistent, but malleable serves that end without imposing a commitment on the military that it may be unable to meet.  No surprise if it’s the latter that matters most to the Pentagon.

Digging Trenches

Navy undersecretary Robert Work took the budget fight to the Army last week, challenging its potential role in a post-Afghanistan rebalance to the Pacific and predicting “a golden age of American seapower” despite budgetary uncertainty:

The Department of the Navy is well positioned regardless... to make a play for a good share of the budget.

His comments implicate the historically consistent one-third distribution  of service budget shares, but dramatic change seems unlikely. The Army has already dug its trench in this battle: Secretary of the Army John McHugh emphasized last year that he wanted the one-third rule to hold, and strategy-minded expectations to the contrary were upended when the budget roll-out in February actually increased the Army’s share of the Pentagon budget.

When pressed, in fact, even Work admitted that breaking this rule is unlikely.  Although his remarks may contrast with the services’ longstanding budget collusion, it seems he also understands that competition would result in no clear winner and that the other services’ positions are just as firm as his.

Nuke Costs Explode onto WaPo Front Pages

Leading into the new week Stimson’s Resolving Ambiguity nuclear costing report has been cited twice in The Washington Post’s two-part investigation of the US’ nuclear arsenal. Yesterday’s article noted Stimson’s important research combining the many parts of our country’s nuclear program into one concrete estimate:

In the coming decade, updating vast elements of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex – from weapons to delivery systems to the labs and plants that make and test them – is expected to cost at least $352, according to the Stimson Center, [a] nonpartisan Washington think tank.

The Post’s Sunday article also cited that estimate.  So too did Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, in a July 25^th hearing on nuclear weapons stockpile. At the same time she also added some new information to the conversation by announcing that the NNSA’s original cost estimate for refurbishing the B-61 bomb has more than doubled, from $4 billion to $8 billion.  

Hence the importance of using ranges to describe this program.  Excited as we are by these high-profile references, margins are sure to shift, and that’s why $40 billion separated the lower end of our estimate ($352B) from the upper value of $392B. 

Moving forward, we’re encouraged that Resolving Ambiguity will continue to ground the debate on this important issue.

Sequestering the Jury

This post is featured on, and the copyright held by, Foreign Policy.

Well, the new report from the Office of Management and Budget on "sequestration" is out. And, though it will generate lots of coverage, it says almost nothing. Basically, what OMB has done is to dodge the political bullet by producing a dry and minimal analysis of what across-the-board budget cuts would look like -- without saying which specific programs would feel the most pain.
 
This document is not going to satisfy the highly politicized rants that John McCain, Buck McKeon, and the defense industry have been making for months -- complete with defense-plant road show -- about how bad the sequester would be for our national security. But they didn't have the specific cannon balls they wanted to fire at the administration; that is, they did not have enough information to say that the sequester would close a certain plant or halt a given production line, thereby showing what jobs might be lost in what valuable political territory. They hoped the report would provide them with that ammo. Instead, it offers them a matchbox, at the most.
 
Basically, by saying only, as it did, that the Pentagon faces a 9.4 percent drop in funding, the administration is arguing "we need more time" -- time that will probably last until January -- to go through all the "programs, projects, and activities" that would be affected by across-the-board cuts. For now, it provided an Excel spreadsheet, at the level of budget accounts, about how much funding would be cut that might affect specific programs.

The difference is simple: Programs, projects, and activities are specific things, like F-35 fighters and Stryker vehicles and destroyers. The funding for these items is aggregated and therefore buried in broader accounts, like Air Force aircraft procurement, Army wheeled and tracked combat vehicles, and Navy shipbuilding. Instead of providing the program-level data, OMB provided the account-level data. Doesn't tell you much about which programs would be affected or how.

There may be some merit to the report's claim that 30 days was not enough time to produce this level of detail, though doing so is pretty cut-and-dried in defense. But it is safe to assume that the decisions about the report and what it contained were made at a high level in the White House. (I have been told by one source that the Defense Department supplied the numbers but did not see the final draft. And why would they need to? A kid with a calculator could run these numbers.) And on Pennsylvania Avenue, politics certainly prevails, as seems to be the case with the OMB report.

Why would the White House want to provide such a highly aggregated analysis? For the same reason the congressional Republicans want the detail: politics. The administration is doing a good job of seizing the high ground on national security; the Republicans are desperately looking for a foothold, and a sequester looks like one to them.
 
This is not about defense, really. It is a political shadow play about a sequester in the middle of an election, set up more than a year ago when the Budget Control Act was passed and the deadline for cuts was set for after the election.

A sequester for defense, the report says, as for all of the government, would be a disaster. There are a few of us around who think that cutting $50 billion out of defense next year is actually possible, properly managed, and at no price at all to U.S. national security.
 
There are even ways to manage a sequester of 9.4 percent of the Department of Defense's resources, should it happen. Pentagon data show, for example, that DOD has reprogrammed more than $20 billion in funds in six of the last nine years -- nearly $50 billion in FY 2008 alone -- meaning that every year there are billions of unneeded and unused dollars in various programs. And, should a sequester happen, OMB could use its authority to apportion funds in a way that deferred the overall impact of cuts into the third and fourth quarters of next fiscal year, giving the political system time to fix the problem (which has happened in previous sequesters). Moreover, because the defense industry is working off current contracts (unaffected by the sequester) and because new funds spend out slowly, the impact on the private sector will be nothing like what Lockheed CEO Bob Stevens has been screaming about for months. Really, the sequester would hit the Pentagon's civilian work force more than anyone else -- but nobody is screaming about that.
 
So the report makes it hard to specify what Armageddon looks like. But that is unlikely to stop the politics around this issue. Some in Congress and Republicans in the campaign want to make some hay here, so they will doubtless give the administration witnesses who are appearing next week before the House Armed Services Committee a hard time about this report. Expect the administration to continue to duck. They want attention to a deal here, but not until after the election.

More Meaning Behind Bomber’s Nuke Certification Delay

Last year’s announcement from General Norton Schwarz, then-Chief of Staff of the Air Force, that the service would cull part of its savings by waiting to certify the Long-Range Strike bomber’s nuclear capability raised eyebrows.  Schwartz volunteered the cut in the Q&A portion of a congressional hearing, very early in the build-down process, despite the program enjoying first order priority, and without quantifying the savings commitment.

The Air Force could have walked away from this idea relatively easily. Schwartz has since retired, and the House Armed Services Committee has advanced legislation prohibiting the cut (see §211).  But it hasn’t.  To the contrary, the Air Force has opened an even wider window into its thinking on the matter.

Last Tuesday Lt. Gen. Kowalski, chief of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, told Popular Mechanics that:

After the airplane comes off the line and we have it conventionally certified with those weapons, then we’ll transition to the nuke certification. We have never certified an airplane and both weapon types at the same time because it’s very different testing and it would drive a whole lot of expense. Frankly, trying to do them simultaneously would slow those tests down. There is a lot of debate about, well, is it nuclear first or is it conventional first? It’s going to be both. It’s just, what’s the priority?

A pointed question indeed.  It appears to be a rhetorical one, hinting that conventional capability is the Air Force’s priority.  That was clear from the atmospherics before the program commenced, but Kowalski seems to have offered the first public admission that this position hasn’t changed. 

As remarkable as that is on its face, it carries an even larger suggestion: the Air Force may be willing to compromise this bomber’s nuclear mission altogether if the cost trade-offs become strict enough.  It’s worth watching whether this will be one of the ways that the Pentagon demonstrates how “our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force.”

In Remembrance

Saudi Deal Skews Arms Sales Trend

Several weeks ago the Congressional Research Service (CRS) turned heads by reporting that U.S. global arms transfer agreements rose by a striking 210% between 2010 and 2011:

In 2011, the United States led in arms transfer agreements worldwide, making agreements valued at $66.3 billion (77.7% of all such agreements), an extraordinary increase from $21.4 billion in 2010. The United States worldwide agreements total in 2011 is the largest for a single year in the history of the U.S. arms export program.

Dramatic as this increase may appear, it has a very specific explanation.  CRS pointed out to lesser fanfare that a massive $33.4 billion contract with Saudi Arabia singlehandedly caused the spike in U.S. arms export sales in 2011:

Although the global total in weapons sales in 2011 was especially high--due primarily to the unusually large agreements value of the U. S. contracts with Saudi Arabia--the international arms market is not likely growing overall. The U.S. global total for arms agreements in 2011 seems a clear outlier figure.

Taking note of this factor allows us to dismiss several more strategic explanations: that defense industry is succeeding in diversifying overseas sales to supplement weakening domestic demand, or that there has been a fundamental shift in this aspect of US foreign policy.  Foreign military sales likely won’t stabilize at this stratospheric level without those factors kicking in, making them the important ones to watch in the future.

Sequestration and Defense Cuts: A Tale of Two Polls

National defense cuts have remained a significant part of recent political debate, with defense contractors threatening mass layoffs in the event of sequester. The Hill cited the results of our public opinion survey Tuesday while reporting on the latest lobbying effort to stop sequestration cuts:

A joint survey from the Stimson Center, Center for Public Integrity and Program for Public Consultation released in the spring found that respondents wanted to cut the Pentagon budget an additional $103 billion, after they were provided arguments supporting and opposing further cuts to the Pentagon budget.

Contextually, The Hill was comparing our findings to a new Aerospace Industries Association poll, which found that “80 percent of likely voters in five swing states… agree that sequestration should be reversed before the election.”

Questioning how two polls could show seemingly opposite public opinion data, The Hill rightly points out just how differently the two polls were framed. More importantly, however, the two polls actually asked entirely different questions. While the AIA poll only asked respondents whether or not they thought leaders in Washington should find an alternative to “sequestration,” our poll never actually used the word, and it was never intended to poll on the concept — instead we wanted to examine what Americans would do with the defense budget themselves, if they were given the opportunity, and they overwhelming made significant cuts.

In any case, it is good to see that our polling data is continuing to inform the debate.

Unpacking the Navy’s Pacific Shift

Defense Secretary Panetta has chosen some metrics for the Navy’s rebalance toward Asia that may be easier to achieve than they first appear.  Even with that advantage, though, Pentagon leaders don’t yet seem to be on the same page about how to make it happen.

Take Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter and his late-July speech at the Asia Foundation:

As Secretary Panetta said, we intend to have 60 percent – historic high – of our naval assets based in the Pacific by 2020, a substantial historical shift.  We will have a net increase of one aircraft carrier, four destroyers, three Zumwalt destroyers, ten Littoral Combat Ships, and two submarines in the Pacific in the coming years.

The Littoral Combat Ships are the heaviest part of that formula but, in percentage terms, they’re a wash.  The Navy is planning for 20 ships in that fleet, so allocating 10 to the Pacific leaves another 10 in the Atlantic and the overall ratio unchanged.  Meanwhile, one aircraft carrier and two submarines would only marginally adjust that ratio in the context of a Navy that’s several hundred ships strong.*  (Their strategic impact is a completely different matter, of course.  Moving them into the Pacific would be very significant.)

That leaves the destroyers.  Carter’s comment is a little bit vague here – the three Zumwalts could be part of four total destroyers going to the Pacific, or they could be in addition to them.  So the denominator expands by three, since the to-be-acquired Zumwalts will add to the fleet, and the numerator for the Pacific grows by either 4 or 7.  A 1.16% swing in the ratio differentiates those two interpretations, but that turns out to be just a detail.  The Navy doesn’t reach 60 percent in the Pacific under either scenario.  It increases from 53.8% to 55.6% if the Zumwalts are part of the four destroyers being moved, or to 56.8% if they’re additive.

And it’s not just Panetta and Carter that seem somewhat disjointed.  Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, may have gotten a bit cross-wise with the Secretary even while agreeing with the Deputy. 

In setting the 60% standard, Panetta explicitly itemized six carriers in the Pacific.  That’s the same distribution as today.  Carter referred to “a net increase of one aircraft carrier,” though, and Greenert has told San Diego to expect its port to add one to the two it already has.  Again, that doesn’t meaningfully move the Pacific/Atlantic ratio, but an aircraft carrier’s allocation is very potent strategic symbol for both the region losing it and the one gaining it.

There’s an important limit to how much just counting ships tells us about qualitative changes in posture.  But the Pentagon itself chose the 60/40 split as a benchmark for the rebalance.  Judging by the gaps between the Secretary, the Deputy, and the Navy’s Chief, some work remains to figure out how this standard will be met.

* The ship classes included in this analysis are carriers, amphibs, frigates, cruisers, destroyers, LCS, and subs.

Reminder about the Ryan Budget on Defense

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s decision to name Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) as his VP nominee triggered considerable focus on Ryan’s leadership of the House Budget Committee, including the role of defense in the budget package he introduced earlier this year. 

 

As our own Russell Rumbaugh observed at the time, the defense numbers proposed by the President and the House Budget Committee are close, and both would represent year-on-year cuts, after adjusting for inflation. The gap widens in later years, but Congress appropriates just one year at a time.  As Russell pointed out: 

 

In the outyears, the Republican budget lets defense increase pretty steadily, alt hough outyears are easy to play with since they’ll be relegislated next year.  So the Republican budget, like the President’s request, actually acknowledges defense is going down this year even as all the hortatory language says defense is special.

From the looks of Romney’s decision to go with Ryan, the idea that Republicans would spare defense from cuts continues to erode.

Don’t Put Your Money on BRAC

Amid the deluge of commentary about the difficulty of defense cuts, there has been quiet undercurrent suggesting that the tough choices haven’t yet been made.  Marine General Hoss Cartwright, then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave voice to this position in January:

Achieving the $487 billion in cuts was sufficiently doable that it didn't require really hard decisions ... Unless you force them into it, those hard decisions just don't get made. Everybody buys everything they want.

The evidence backs that observation up.  Take the Air Force putting Reserve Component A-10 units on the chopping block.  Or the Navy’s willingness to give up amphibious ships.

Now Secretary Panetta has added the Base Realignment and Closure proposal to that list.  From his speech last week to the Association of Defense Communities:

It’s now clear, obviously, that there will not be a round of BRAC authorized in 2013.  And that’s no surprise.  We didn’t, frankly, I didn’t put any money on the provision.  When I was asked by some of my budget peers, “Shouldn’t we put a dollar sign for the BRAC?”  I said “No, don’t waste your time.

Sounds much more like symbolic goldwatching than a serious savings option, doesn’t it?

None of this means that defense cuts aren’t real – we’re actually in Year 3 of a declining budget.  Rather, Panetta has just reminded us of how much space is left before we get to the truly tough choices.