[Our current arsenal] is based on [old] requirements for deterrence [which] have stayed the same….the question now is ‘does this make sense’?

Our New Defense Strategy for a New Era report, based on the proceedings of a group Barry chaired, took this question to heart and realigned nuclear spending according to the strategy.  Indeed, the costs associated with the nuclear arsenal, which BFAD has previously shed light on, should be up for debate in budget discussions. Stay tuned for our continued analysis on the issue.

The base international affairs budget request is roughly flat to last year’s request. The only problem is the actual international affairs budget for FY13 was $4.5 billion less than the request.  But f150 got $3 billion more in war funding in FY13 than the President requested.  And although the budget documents say this year’s war funding is just a placeholder and not a real request, it shows State only getting $3.8 billion, or $4.5 billion less than requested last year and $7.5 billion less than it was appropriated.  All of those moving pieces add up to a total request just shy of $3 billion less than appropriated for FY13.  

Once again, the President’s request tries to shift funding into the base budget, though this time it also requests significantly lower war funding.  Still with war funding only as a placeholder, a larger defense request may provide room for Congress to maintain most of the f150 funding even if some has to migrate into the war budgets. 

First, the President’s budget matches the pre-sequester caps contained in the amended Budget Control Act (BCA).  That is different than last year’s budget, which assumed Congress would change the law to reflect a security/non-security divide; security being not just DoD but veterans, international affairs, homeland security and other spending and non-security everything else.  This year it accepts the budget really will be decided on a defense/non-defense basis.  And it accepts the cap level, which required trimming $36B over ten years from last year’s DoD request.*  But it means we have this funny situation where the budget is acknowledging one part of statute but ignoring another—sequester—since the caps it matches don’t include the automatic reductions that are already the law of the land.  

Second, the budget trims another $114B from DoD over ten years to help provide defense’s share of the offset the President has offered as part of his plan to replace sequester.  Those cuts don’t start until FY17—three years from now—and in the President’s budget are expressed as lower statutory spending caps.  But those cuts are real savings.  Or as real as projected savings can be.  The first cut of $36B isn’t real savings because its just a decrement from a request, which wasn’t approved in any way by Congress.  The $114B cut is a cut from the current statutory caps and has the effect of actually decreasing deficit and debt projections.

Nobody needs telling anymore, but this budget is yet another step in the gradual decline that turns into a defense builddown in retrospect.  

* These figures are calculated assuming DoD’s share of the 050 cap is 96%, DoD’s traditional share of 050.  But that is an assumption not mandated by law.  

… It's time to start asking tough questions about redundant staffs… There are dozens of offices of general counsel scattered throughout the Department. Each service has one. Every agency does, too. So do the Joint Chiefs… The same could be said of a variety of other functions, from public affairs to legislative affairs… Health care is another…

…DOD also has three exchange systems and a separate commissary system, all providing similar goods and services…

…It takes today twice as long as it did in 1975 to produce a new weapon system, at a time when new generations of technology are churned out every 18 to 24 months…

…No business I have known could survive under the policies we apply to our uniformed personnel. We encourage, and often force, servicemen and -women and retire after 20 years in service, after we've spent millions of dollars to train them and when, still in their 40s, they were at the peak of their talents and skills.

Now for the kicker: this is not an excerpt from Secretary Hagel’s address at NDU, though it easily could have been.   Nor from the Defense Advisory Group that Stimson co-founder Barry Blechman chaired last year, or the Defense Business Board, or CBO’s Budget Options analysis, which has repeatedly said the same things.  Donald Rumsfeld made these points – and not for the first time – in an address on September 10th, 2001.

The ideas are still worthy, and the evident difficulty in achieving them should not deter the Pentagon and Congress from trying.  Indeed, there is some hope in one of Rumsfeld’s lines whose time has returned: “In this period of limited funds, we need every nickel, every good idea, every innovation, every effort to help modernize and transform the U.S. military.”

I think on some level the relationships have gotten even better and stronger than they were previously, because you have a more open environment in which to have truly strategic discussions with these partners,” the official said. “Which is only a good thing. It can feel a little slower at first, I think. And I think it can look at little slower from the outside.

This optimistic view contrasts with that of BFAD’s Gordon Adams, who discussed the dangers of increased military engagement in Africa in January. Adams argued that the emphasis on security assistance shifts the focus away from governance, health, and development, and risks drawing the U.S. into Africa’s internal politics.

Africa can and should do better. And, lest we slide down that slippery slope to military commitments in fragile states, we should do better as well…The context for our engagement should be responsive and accountable governance, conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and development -- none of which is a core skill in the military, as well-intentioned as they may be.

Based on the defense official’s comments quoted above, these concerns do not appear to be part of the administration’s calculus at the moment. While it may be “[o]nly a good thing” right now, the Pentagon may be overlooking the longer-term consequences of this kind of engagement.

RADM John Kirby, the Navy’s principal spokesman, took to the pages of The Virginian-Pilot in response.  It’s worth the lengthy excerpt:

Could money have been found somewhere, anywhere, to pay for the Truman's deployment? Maybe. But without the ability to transfer money from other accounts, there aren't many places from which we could have taken it without a greater cost to readiness elsewhere. And doing so obscures the real issue.

This was never about saving the cost of a single deployment. It was about managing risk across the joint force and about preserving our ability to keep a robust naval presence longer in that part of the world.

It was also more in keeping with the global force management plan, or "GFMAP" as we like to call it in Pentagon-speak. That's the plan that sets out the official requirement for military forces around the world. More importantly, it's the plan for which we are officially funded.

The GFMAP calls for a single carrier in the Middle East. But since December 2010, we have been trying to meet an additional request by U.S. Central Command for two.

Even before all this budget uncertainty, meeting that request was becoming increasingly difficult…

Get that?  The Navy never favored having two carriers in the Gulf on a permanent basis.  Change is the only constant when it comes to ship schedules, and the pretense of official long-term plans is perhaps overstated, but Kirby is clear about the Navy’s position: It wanted just one carrier on that station.  Irrespective of how much discretion the Navy had in the Truman decision, from its perspective the result is a return to the status quo, not a reduction below it. 

Chalk that up to being an important reminder that combatant commands like CENTCOM have wide discretion in setting requirements but that the resourcing of those requirements is always subject to negotiation with the Services.  This is not a rigid formula.

Yet Kirby’s comments also point to a different storyline.  The Truman has made a great political symbol, but the operational subtext may include elements of the Navy’s institutional interest.  Surging a second carrier to the Middle East overrode its management plan, and taking that carrier back comes with the advantage of restoring that plan.  This ‘cost’ sounds more like a ‘benefit’ from that viewpoint, a far cry from the claim that meat is getting axed.

There’s no way to know exactly how things came together to keep the Truman in Norfolk.  But RADM Kirby told us a lot.

Amos returned to the point in an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal.

I don't think there is any way my service is going to be allowed to [just]...go down to 182,000… Sequestration is going to drive us to a lower number.

But why is that?  Salaries are exempt this year, and the services have the latitude in the coming years to propose alternative ways for fitting within the spending cap.  The Journal pushes Amos into giving us a clue at the very end of the article:

Gen. Amos has been the military's strongest advocate of the advanced F-35 stealth jet. The Marines are planning to buy a version of the fighter capable of short take-offs and vertical landings, which has been plagued by cost over-runs and development problems.

"I don't have a choice," Gen. Amos said. "Absolutely, die in a ditch, we need this airplane."

That last sentence, of course, is a bit of a paradox.  It’s been clear for a while that there’s a collision course between personnel compensation – what Defense Business Board member Arnold Punaro calls “GM-style fringe benefits” – and acquisition costs – pithily summed up by Augustine’s Law.  Amos is feeling that very real friction and making a judgment about what has to give – but then he’s glossing over it by portraying his option as necessary, rather defending it as preferable. 

In other words, this absolutely is a choice, just an especially hard one.  Not only could this have gone another way, at other points in the Corps’ history it very well might have gone another way – namely, one less attached to particular hardware choices.

Amos remarked in the same article that, despite the pain, spending caps “will cause us to focus on what is really, really important and what is core to the institution… I think it is good for us."  Those interested in the Marine Corps as an institution should stay tuned to see if Amos’ direction on what’s “good for” the service sticks for the duration of this build-down.

There’s a famous saying from the interwar years, “We’re out of money, now we must think,” and we’re really at that phase right now. The forcing function of money is going to force us to think innovatively, and I think that may well exercise a powerful effect.

In January, MajGen McKenzie discussed the impact of budgetary factors on the QDR and the Marine Corps for an event hosted by BFAD. In both cases, he discussed how he sees the USMC’s role in the new strategic environment.

We think going forward, the Marine Corps can best contribute to the national strategy by being forward deployed, by being able to respond to crises this afternoon, not tomorrow, not next week, but being able to act immediately, and we think that’s the niche where we fit. Sort of a middle-weight force that is not going to need to be brought forward, that is going to be on the ground, or at sea, ready to act very quickly.

With Secretary Hagel confirmed, MajGen McKenzie said he expects the QDR process to formally begin in the near future. BFAD is excited to have been on the front end of this discussion, and we hope to continue to inform the conversation going forward.