The GOP presidential candidates will participate in yet another debate tonight from South Carolina in anticipation of the primary there on Saturday. I hope that the moderator, CNN’s John King, will bring up some of the major national security issues at hand, namely military spending.

Out of all the GOP contenders, it is clear that Ron Paul is the only candidate still standing that offers an alternative to the entrenched Republican foreign policy views. Some have called his foreign policy positions naïve and outside the mainstream. Others point to the fact that Ron Paul is so popular precisely because he is outside the mainstream and presents a different perspective on the intertwined issues of national security and military spending. Of course, the “mainstream” views on foreign policy are relative: what is common thinking inside the Beltway is not usually representative of the country.

Tonight at 10 PM EST on Fox Business Network’s Stossel, a host of experts will discuss Ron Paul’s foreign policy views, war, and whether the federal government has gone too far in its Constitutional obligation to defend the homeland. I will be discussing military spending and argue that we can cut the Pentagon’s budget and be more secure for it.

Tonight on Stossel: Ron Paul, War, and Military Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There’s more to the Pentagon’s new strategy than the emperor’s new clothes, but barely. It’s hardly new and not particularly strategic.

The document justifies a minor defense budget cut. The Obama administration wants to grow military spending at a pace slightly less than projected inflation for a decade. If we assume that plan stays in place—and we shouldn’t given that plans change, and we may soon have a new president—that new spending trajectory will cut non-war Pentagon spending by about eight percent compared to 2011 spending. You can come up with bigger numbers for the cut by comparing the new plans with past Pentagon spending plans or by including declining war costs. But however you slice it, these are small cuts compared to past drawdowns.

Conventional wisdom is that the cuts ought to be made strategically—that it is bad policy to let deficit concerns drive the size of the defense budget, so revised numbers require revised strategy. This new strategy document is a response to that conventional wisdom. It lets the president and Pentagon say that they have a strategic rationale for their budget.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is desperate to avoid the sequestration mechanism required by the Budget Control Act, which would roughly double the size of those cuts, and would start in January 2013. That would return military spending to where it was in 2006, more or less. Pentagon leaders complain about the suddenness and broadness of sequestration—the cuts are distributed across programs and departments, which prevents prioritization.

One function of this new strategy document is to help avoid additional cuts. By making minor changes seem like a big deal, the Pentagon is pushing back against real strategic change, which could save far bigger sums without sacrificing safety.

In an op-ed published Friday in World Politics Review, Veronique de Rugy and I argue that the size of the coming defense cuts has been grossly exaggerated. Here’s a chart from the op-ed showing military spending in current dollars with and without sequestration:

We note in the op-ed that under the Budget Control Act, the Pentagon can avoid sequestration without Congressional action by budgeting at the levels it would achieve.  That would allow it to avoid the most onerous aspects of the sequester. The Pentagon has thus far refused to do that, probably figuring that offering sensible cuts would encourage Congress to allow them. But far larger cuts are possible with real strategic change. Big cuts would encourage that sort of change.

The current U.S. defense strategy is basically primacy or global military dominance. It requires policing the seas, maintaining or strengthening current alliances, and preparing for all manner of military contingencies. Both parties’ foreign policy elites basically embrace that strategy. The documents that purport to make strategy—Quadrennial Defense Reviews and so forth—are basically sales pitches for primacy. Their standard blueprint is to mix geopolitical gobbledygook about uncertainty with vague threat inflation, assert the importance of U.S. global leadership to U.S. security without any clear theory, then list things we want our military to do, without any attempt to separate big threats from small ones and large interests from hopes, or to translate their analysis into budgetary guidance. They have no obvious effect on budgets.

This strategy offers only minor change in form and content. It embraces the strategy we have with at best a few minor tweaks. Like those past strategy documents, this effort insists that the world is getting more complex but makes no effort to demonstrate that assertion. It lists ten objectives without prioritization, although it identifies certain goals as those that drive the size of the force. It suggests a few minor shifts but gives no budgetary guidance.

The document suggests that we might shift forces from Europe and perhaps add some in Asia. No details are given. It sensibly suggests we might get by with fewer nuclear weapons but again avoids details. The most relevant bit of the document is the argument that we are less likely to fight occupational wars and thus can cut the size of the ground forces. That is a sound idea, one that should be taken further, but a reflection of current policy rather than a change. If we are really to avoid such wars, far greater cuts in the ground forces are possible.

So what we have here is a largely inconsequential defense of the status quo. It offers incremental changes to stave off the real strategic change and savings that our geopolitical fortune allows.

Too Much Ado about the Pentagon’s New Strategy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Desperate to fend off cuts in military spending, the defenders of the status quo are claiming that potential reductions included in the debt ceiling deal’s sequestration provision would result in huge job losses. In September, Leon Panetta suggested that cuts of up to $1 trillion would increase the nation’s unemployment rate by a full percentage point, and put up to 1.5 million people out of work.

Early last week, the Aerospace Industry of America (AIA) jumped in claiming that “more than one million American jobs could be lost as a result of defense budget cuts if the deficit reduction select committee fails to reach agreement on alternative balanced budget solutions….”

The media picked up on the AIA’s press release, but their documentation was flimsy, at best: AIA offered up a five-page summary of the research conducted by George Mason University professor Stephen S. Fuller, and a video of the press conference in which Fuller, AIA CEO Marion Blakey, and Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, railed against the “devastating impact” (Blakey) of military spending cuts and the “economic turmoil” (Buffenbarger) that would result.

Yesterday, nearly seven weeks after the secretary issued his dire warning, Panetta’s office released the findings of a report from Interindustry Forecasting at the University of Maryland (INFORUM) to buttress their claims.

By then, the counteroffensive was already in full swing. Bill Hartung has one of the better assessments that I’ve seen because it includes Bill’s insight into the inner workings of the military-industrial complex, blended with his characteristic wit. The bottom line, he explains, is that the contractors are doing just fine, and they will be in the future. The claims of massive job losses are just the latest in a string of scaremongering tactics aimed at allowing them to hold onto their loot.

Other opinion writers and columnists have fixed on aspects of the jobs argument that suit their broader purpose. Paul Krugman pushed a predictably Keynesian line (all government spending is good, but non-military spending is better). Others pointed to the hypocrisy of the situational Keynesians, people who generally oppose government spending when it buys road and bridges, but who embrace military spending for its supposedly magical stimulative effects. These are the “believers in the military spending fairy,” explains Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy Research.

None of this debate is new. In the late 1940s, Keynesians assailed Harry Truman for questioning whether excessive military spending might drag down the economy. Nonsense, they said. We can afford much more spending, and it will have wonderful stimulative effects, to boot. Many of these same Keynesians claimed that Dwight Eisenhower’s fiscal restraint was forcing the country to fight the Soviets with one arm tied behind its back. (Truman eventually relented, which has earned him the undying respect and admiration of liberal and conservative hawks alike; Ike’s fiscal conservatism, by contrast, has generated only scorn from the same group).

Ronald Reagan was no Keynesian, but he seemed to agree with them when it came to military spending. “Defense is not a budget issue,” he said, “You spend what you need.” And yet, not even the Gipper spent as much as we do today on our military. We are spending more, in inflation-adjusted terms, than at any time since World War II. More than during Korea, more than during Vietnam, and more, even, than in the early 1980s. It is likely that total military spending will be lower in 2012 than 2011, but most of these savings will come from the troop reductions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s base budget may yet emerge unscathed.

Military spending advocates routinely skirt around such inconvenient facts. Looking at absolute spending, even if adjusted for inflation, they say, obscures the reality that spending as a share of GDP is relatively modest, in historical terms. But the hawks can’t have it both ways: they can’t claim on the one hand that military spending constitutes a very small share of the total economy (and therefore we can spend as much, or more, with ease), and at the same time wail about the massive job losses that would result from cuts in military spending.

In the end, it all comes back to opportunity costs. Unless one believes that every dollar saved from the Pentagon’s budget will be thrown into a huge government money hole in the New Mexico desert, the reality is that at least some–and likely most–of the taxpayers’ dollars that are currently dedicated to the military could be better employed elsewhere. My preference would be for each of us to keep a bit more of the money that we earn, money that we will then choose to spend as we see fit. This new private spending would more than offset the cuts in government spending, given the government’s inherent inefficiencies, dead-weight losses, etc. Yes, some workers might lose jobs in the near term, but, as Gordon Adams notes, the economy has recovered from a number of previous military build downs, which were deeper and faster than those envisioned today.

Finally, we should embrace the discipline that even modest fiscal constraints can have on our grand strategy. The most “draconian” cuts envisioned under sequestration would take the military’s budget back to 2007 levels–hardly a “lean” year for the defense industry–but policymakers are likely to pay more attention to how they allocate resources if they perceive that they have less of them.

During his last few months as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen explained that the Pentagon had forgotten how to prioritize during more than a decade of ever-rising budgets. The White House and others in the national security community have as well. I’m confident that shrinking budgets will infuse a measure of prudence and restraint that is long overdue.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

The Pentagon and Jobs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The media has again provided us with a breathless report of a terror plot. This time it’s a 26 year-old Massachusetts man, Rezwan Ferdaus, who planned to fill three remote controlled airplanes with explosives and then fly them into the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.

Ferdaus’s accomplices were FBI agents. As with many past cases, the FBI agents were crucial to his plot. Without the FBI’s men, money, and “explosives,” there is very little chance that Ferdaus could have successfully committed an act of terrorism.

Ferdaus, broke and living with his parents, had a plan that should make us question his mental competence. He planned to fly two remote-controlled airplanes, each packed with five pounds of explosives, into the Pentagon using GPS-guidance, and another similarly loaded plane into the U.S. Capitol’s dome, which he apparently thought would cave in. Following that, he would somehow destroy the bridges at the Pentagon complex and a six-man team armed with AK-47s would attack the complex. Whom he would recruit with the ability to launch such an audacious assault is not clear. The affidavit never identifies a non-FBI accomplice. At one point, Ferdaus says that he told a friend about his idea, but that his friend declined to participate and suggested that it would be easier to shoot up a military recruitment center. So, absent FBI assistance, Ferdaus’s plan would have been impossible until he had found several more willing participants.

Another impediment was money. Ferdaus purchased only one of the remote control planes for a total of $7,500, which was provided by the FBI. He needed several thousand dollars more to buy the other two. Ferdaus even needed the FBI’s help to pay the $450 fee for a rental facility where he planned to store his material and construct his bombs.

Even if Ferdaus had succeeded in finding others and buying the planes and other necessary electronics, he would still have needed to create a proper explosive that could be detonated at precisely the right time. He initially planned to use several grenades that would have had their pins pulled exactly three seconds before impact using a “detonation servo” device. He later decided to use “plastic explosives,” or C-4, as long as it was “obtainable.” As directed, the FBI undercover agents provided him with 25 pounds of C-4, only 1.25 pounds of which was real. They also delivered six fully-automatic AK-47s.

Wanna-be terrorists face numerous obstacles to success, starting with their own incompetence. We should applaud the FBI’s investigative zeal but keep in mind that without them, Ferdaus probably wouldn’t have launched an attack, let alone succeeded in it. Here we have a ”Darwin Award nominee,” not the hypercompetent home-grown terrorist the authorities keep telling us to expect. Saying so is a way to avoid being terrorized.

Wanna-be Mass. Terrorist Incompetent, Lacked Resources is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times weighs in this morning with a timely and sensible editorial on military spending. The main focus is on the increasingly outdated pay and benefits system for the nation’s troops. Some choice excerpts:

Military pay, benefit and retirement costs rose by more than 50 percent over the…decade (accounting for inflation). Leaving aside Afghanistan and Iraq, those costs now account for nearly $1 out of every $3 the Pentagon spends.

Much of that is necessary to recruit and retain a high-quality, all-volunteer military….But current military pay, pension systems and retiree health care benefits are unsustainable and ripe for reform.

[...]

The retirement system is both unfair and increasingly expensive. Most veterans, including many who have served multiple combat tours, will never qualify for even a partial military pension or retiree health benefits. These are only available to those who have served at least 20 years. Those who do qualify can start collecting their pensions as soon as they leave service, even if they are still in their late 30s, making for huge long-term costs.

So far, so good. Two essential points bear repeating.

First, the rise in military spending over the past decade has not been driven solely by the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon costs are growing, and the rate of growth is rising. Programmatic reform is needed to reign in those costs; avoiding stupid wars won’t solve the problem (although it won’t hurt).

Second, the current system disproportionately rewards individuals who stay in the service for 20-plus years, and undercompensates those men and women who serve several tours, but who do not qualify for military retirement. A better system would allow anyone who has served to retain some of what they paid (or what taxpayers paid for them) into a portable retirement account that they control. Private industry has been steadily moving away from a fixed-benefit, pension-style system for years. I have heard the arguments against such a move, but I don’t find them particularly convincing.

One point from the Times editorial, however, calls out for clarification. The editors claim on two separate occasions that current military spending patterns are “unsustainable.” They conclude:

The United States already has a comfortable margin of [military] dominance….The Pentagon’s ambitions expanded without limit over the Bush era, and Congress eagerly wrote the checks. The country cannot afford to continue this way, and national security doesn’t require it. (emphasis added)

The latter point, “national security doesn’t require it,” is crucial, correct, and should be repeated at every opportunity. The former assertion, “the country cannot afford” it, is false. Repeating that claim plays into the hands of the inveterate hawks who never saw a war, or a weapon system, that wasn’t deserving of more lives/money.

The hawks are correct to point out that the United States has in the past, and could in the future, choose to spend as much or more on our military. Current spending levels amount to about five percent of GDP (when including the costs of the wars), and military spending as a share of total government spending has been falling steadily for years. According to the hawks, it is other spending, or too little revenue, that is putting our children and grandchildren into debt.

I wish that the Times had spent more time hammering the point that such spending is unnecessary. Contrary to anecdote and the evening news, the international system is remarkably stable and peaceful. The United States need not spend more than we did at the height of the Cold War in order to be secure from most threats. And those few genuine threats to our security could be handled with a smaller, more efficient military—if we offloaded some responsibilities to other countries that have sheltered under the U.S. security umbrella for decades.

The Times doesn’t directly address that last point. By focusing most of their attention on programmatic reforms to pay and benefits, and a bit on costly procurement of unnecessary weapons, but not enough to the underlying flawed assumptions that drive military spending, the editors contribute to the misconception that the U.S. military should continue to be the world’s policeman, and find ways to do this on the cheap.

That is unfortunate. Spending more than we need to doesn’t make us stronger. Ignoring our favorable strategic circumstances is simply stupid. We spend too much on our military because we ask our troops to do too much. To spend less, we must do less. The good news is that we can. The bad news is that too few people understand that.

Strength vs. Stupidity is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Earlier this week, the House Armed Services Committee Republican staff released a video using the anniversary of September 11 to argue for higher military spending while pretending that lately we have cut the defense budget. Chris Preble and I rebutted these outlandish claims, and Evan Banks made our comments into a cool video:

Hawks like HASC Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA)—who thinks that “power in benevolent hands is a virtue, not a vice,”—pretend that we are about to slash military spending thanks to the Budget Control Act, the deficit deal legislated early last month. Reporters abet them by repeating the White House PR myth that the bill’s security budget cap will cut Pentagon spending by $350 billion over ten years, and writing that the sequestration provision will probably cut another $500 billion. But as I explained here, the BCA will likely produce either a miniscule defense cut in the near term or no cuts at all. That is because I consider a “cut” to mean spending less than we do now, not less than plans say, because agencies other than defense can absorb the cuts required by the security cap, and because the bill encourages lawmakers to move capped base defense funds into the uncapped war bill.

The Senate Appropriations Committee’s proposed funding levels (302b allocations in budget speak) released earlier this week bear out those concerns. Because they come after the BCA, the Senate spending levels are likely to guide those set by the House. Compared to 2011, the committee would cut just under $3 billion from the base defense budget, which is less than one percent. That cut comes entirely from the military construction and family housing account, which was recently bloated by the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. The senators get another chunk of the $4.5 billion in security spending cuts required by the BCA from State, which would lose $3.5 billion, and Homeland Security, which loses a half billion. The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Veterans Administration get minor increases. For more on these allocations, see Stimson’s The Will and the Wallet blog, especially Matthew Leatherman and Russell Rumbaugh’s recent posts.

So that’s a minor defense cut, right? Maybe not. The Senate appropriators seem to have slipped a larger amount of base defense spending into the war bill (Overseas Contingency Operations funding). The committee’s markup press release brags that it fully funded the president’s war request of $117.8 billion, but then claims that they cut $6.6 billion from that request by trimming funding for U.S. and native forces in Afghanistan. What that most likely means is that the committee, probably in league with the Pentagon, cut the war bill by that amount and shifted the same amount over from the base, keeping the war bill flat and maintaining the fiction of a minor base defense cut. We won’t know for sure until the appropriations bills are published.

The longer term prospects for the BCA cutting defense spending are a story for another time. For now, suffice it to say that the prospects of the bill’s current spending limits staying in place for ten years are slim. Future Congresses easily free themselves from legislative bonds set by prior ones, and democracies with two-to-six-year election cycles can’t stick to ten-year plans.

Make-Believe Defense Cuts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• “PBS used to ask, ‘If not PBS, then who?’ The answer now is: HBO, Bravo, Discovery, History, History International, Science, Planet Green, Sundance, Military, C-SPAN 1/2/3 and many more.”
• “The fiscal problem that is destroying U.S. economic confidence is not the fiscal balance, however. It is the level of government expenditures relative to GDP.”
• “The Pentagon’s first cyber security strategy… builds on national hysteria about threats to cybersecurity, the latest bogeyman to justify our bloated national security state.”
• “How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?”
• National debt is driving the U.S. toward a double-dip recession: 

Friday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon will soon release a policy document explaining what cyberattacks it will consider acts of war meriting military response. Christoper Preble and I warn against this policy in an op-ed up at Reuters.com:

The policy threatens to repeat the overreaction and needless conflict that plagued American foreign policy in the past decade. It builds on national hysteria about threats to cybersecurity, the latest bogeyman to justify our bloated national security state. A wiser approach would put the threat in context to calm public fears and avoid threats that diminish future flexibility.

Reuters headlined our piece: “A military response to cyberattacks is preposterous.” Actually, our claim is not that we should never use military means to respond to cyberattacks. Our point instead is that the vast majority of events given that name have nothing to do with national security. Most “cyberattackers” are criminals: thieves looking to steal credit card numbers or corporate data, extortionists threatening denial of service attacks, or vandals altering websites to grind personal or political axes. These acts require police, not aircraft carriers.

Even the cyberattacks that have affected our national security do not justify war, we argue. There is little evidence that online spying has ever done grievous harm to national security, thinly sourced reports to the contrary notwithstanding. In any case, we do not threaten war in response to traditional espionage and should not do so merely because it occurs online.

Moreover, despite panicked reports claiming that hackers are poised to sabotage our “critical infrastructure” — downing planes, flooding dams, crippling Wall Street — hackers have accomplished nothing of the sort. We prevent these nightmares by decoupling the infrastructure management system from the public internet. But even these higher-end cyberattacks are only likely to damage commerce, not kill, so threatening to bomb in response to them seems belligerent.

The Stuxnet worm shows that cyberattacks may indeed do considerable harm, perhaps someday killing on a scale akin to small arms. Attacks like that might indeed merit military response. But they remain hypothetical here.

Vague terms like “cyberattack” and the alarmist rhetoric that surrounds them confuse common nuisance attacks with theoretical tragic ones. The danger is militarized responses to criminal acts, foolish regulation, wasteful spending, or even needless war.

To learn about the exaggeration of cyberthreats, read these two articles from the Mercatus Center. For a good discussion of the policy options for dealing with the various cyberharms, see this 2009 congressional testimony from Jim Harper.

Cyberphobia is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today in Politico I have an op-ed titled “How Washington changed Obama.” In the piece, I argue that the recent appointments of Leon Panetta as secretary of defense and Gen. David Petraeus as director of the CIA, combined with revelations in the recent New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, suggest that President Obama has given up on changing U.S. foreign and defense policy:

Panetta is a dubious choice to fulfill Obama’s recent pledge to trim military spending. Any secretary charged with realizing that pledge would need extraordinary credibility with Capitol Hill Republicans, many of whom are determined to continue raining money on the Pentagon regardless of the nation’s parlous fiscal position. Despite having once been a Republican, Panetta ran for Congress as Democrat and has served prominently in Democratic administrations. He is unlikely to craft the pragmatic consensus needed to give the Pentagon a haircut.

Petraeus’s nomination poses a different problem. He has spent the past decade focused— at the behest of his commanders in chief —  on what we used to call the “global war on terrorism.” But is U.S. nation-building in the Muslim world the most important national security and intelligence problem we face today?

[…]

The U.S. desperately needs to change its focus. We account for roughly half the world’s military spending, yet we feel terribly insecure. We infantilize our allies so that they won’t pay to defend themselves and instead allow us to do it for them. We stumble into small- and medium-sized foreign quagmires the way many people eat breakfast — frequently and without much thought.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Cross-posted at The National Interest.

Has President Obama Given up on Changing U.S. Foreign Policy? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

For all the boldness of Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to reduce projected federal expenditures by $6 trillion, an initiative that I support, the Pentagon’s budget emerges essentially unscathed in Ryan’s plan. This is a mistake on both fiscal and strategic grounds. Significant cuts in military spending must be on the table as the nation struggles to close its fiscal gap without saddling individuals and businesses with burdensome taxes and future generations with debt. Such cuts will also force a reappraisal of our military’s roles and missions that is long overdue.

The Pentagon’s base budget has nearly doubled during the past decade. Throw in the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy, and a smattering of other programs, and the total amount that Americans spend annually on our military exceeds $700 billion. These costs might come down slightly as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawn to a close — as they should be — but according to the Obama administration’s own projections, the U.S. government will still spend nearly $6.5 trillion on the military over the next decade. Surely Rep. Ryan could have found a way to cut…something from this amount?

Defense is an undisputed core function of government — any government — and spending for that purpose should not be treated on an equal basis with the many other dubious roles and missions that the U.S. federal government now performs. But please note the emphasis. The U.S. Department of Defense should be focused on that purpose: defending the United States. But by acting as the world’s de facto policeman, we have essentially twisted the concept of “the common defence” to include the defense of the whole world, including billions of people who are not parties to our unique social contract.

The rest of the world is more than content to free ride on Uncle Sam’s largesse. Absolved of their core obligation to provide for the defense of their own citizens, the governments in other countries have been busy expanding the social welfare state and growing the public sector. The true burdens fall on U.S. taxpayers who spend two and a half times more on national security programs than do the French or the British, five times more than citizens living in other NATO countries, and seven and a half times more than the average Japanese. Meanwhile, our troops and their families are struggling to cover the many commitments that their civilian leaders have unwisely incurred. And yet the defenders of the status quo — those who prefer that Americans pay these costs and bear these burdens — cry for more. More money and more missions.

Fiscal hawks such as Ryan are not serious if they cannot see massive waste and inefficiency in the Pentagon. Robert Gates’ ballyhooed reforms barely scratch the surface of the problem. Mismanagement of major weapons programs is rampant; cost overruns are the norm. A meaningful cap on future defense expenditures will force the Pentagon to seriously confront these inefficiencies, and might also precipitate some useful competition between the services on who is best positioned to keep the country safe and secure.

If Washington is serious about cutting spending, and if the Pentagon’s budget is included in the search for savings, then we need to adopt a different strategy, one that would husband our resources, focus the military on a few core missions, call on other countries to take responsibility for their own defense, and share the burdens of policing the global commons. A serious proposal for reining in runaway Pentagon spending would have precipitated such a strategic shift. By giving the Pentagon a free pass, Rep. Ryan practically ensures that such a discussion never sees the light of day.

Cross-posted at The National Interest.

Rep. Ryan’s Budget Avoids Cuts to Military Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last year the House Republican leadership created the GOP’s “YouCut” website, which offers several possible spending cuts for citizens to vote on. The cut with the most votes goes to the House floor for an up-or-down vote. It’s a decent idea, but unfortunately, most of the cuts the GOP have offered thus far only amount to chump change.

This week the House Republican leadership finally put the Pentagon on the YouCut chopping block. However, the possible cuts suggested by the GOP are pathetic:

1. Reduce the Department of Defense’s printing and reproduction budget by 10 percent ($36 million in savings in fiscal 2012).

2. Reduce spending for Defense studies, analysis and evaluations by 10 percent ($24 million in savings in fiscal 2012).

3. Restrict payout of annual nationwide adjustment and locality pay for “below satisfactory” civilian Defense employees ($21 million in first-year savings).

To put the potential “savings” in perspective, the United States’ latest act of military adventurism (Libya) has already cost taxpayers $550 million. Take that military-industrial complex!

The Washington Times recently reported that Sen. Rand Paul’s balanced budget plan drew “several fairly vocal objections to it” from his GOP colleagues because he dared to include defense cuts. Indeed, House Republicans left the Pentagon alone when coming up with $61 billion in cuts to discretionary programs for the remainder of the fiscal year.

As my colleague Chris Preble told the Times, playing GloboCop isn’t cheap:

“At the end of the day, even when you take out the cost of the wars, military spending in the base budget has grown close to $1 trillion since 2000,” said Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign-policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “So, I think there is kind of a growing realization that the cost that we have incurred on behalf of a lot of other places around the world are growing increasingly burdensome, and the military has not exactly been starved of funds.”

The YouCut website says that it “is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress.” Nice line, but when it comes to the Pentagon, it appears that the Republican leadership continues to be a-okay with runaway spending. That mentality will hopefully be forced to change due to the government’s sorry fiscal state of affairs. If it does, a Cato essay has plenty of good suggestions for military spending cuts.

A New Low for GOP’s ‘YouCut’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings—yes, that Michael Hastings—has written another investigative article on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, centered again on a general in the theatre.  The revelations are perhaps more shocking than those that resulted in General Stanley McChrystal’s dismissal last summer.

His newest bombshell alleges that the U.S Army illegally engaged in “psychological operations” with the aim of manipulating various high-level U.S. government officials into believing that the war was progressing in order to gain their continued support.  The list of targets includes members of Congress, diplomats, think tank analysts, and even Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff.  Over at The Skeptics, I attempt to put this in context:

While American soldiers and Afghan civilians continue to kill and be killed in Afghanistan, the Pentagon seeks to provide the illusion of progress, systematically misrepresenting realities on the ground to bide more time, gain more troops, and acquire more funding. It’s bad enough that the American media uncritically relays statements from U.S. officials portraying “success” on the ground. Now the Pentagon is using its massive propaganda budget to blur the line between informing the public and spinning it to death. In fact, several years ago the Associated Press found that the Pentagon had spent $4.7 billion on public relations in 2009 alone, and employs 27,000 people for recruitment, advertising and public relations, nearly as many as the 30,000-person State Department. Essentially the Pentagon is trying to influence public policy and lobby civilian officials to shift policies toward their own ends while dispersing the costs onto the American taxpayer.

Luckily, it appears that Americans have come to learn that despite the media’s frequent adulation of their uniformed military, the Pentagon operates just like every other bureaucracy in the federal government. According to a poll released earlier this month by Gallup, 72 percent of Americans want Congress to speed up troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. Much like the McChrystal flap from last summer, there is a very fine line between military officials offering their honest opinion and threatening civilian control of the war.

Click here for the full post.

The Pentagon Propaganda Machine Rears Its Head is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Monday was budget day, where the President sends Congress the budget he would like it to pass and reporters and analysts scurry around reacting, as if the he were issuing stunning edicts rather than predictable suggestions . Due to a Healy-esque aversion to this species of DC pageantry, I was not planning to comment.

Then I read this oped in Politico where James Fly and John Noonan of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative flack for the President’s defense budget.  It demonstrates the intellectual poverty of the case for current defense spending so well that I decided to discuss it.

Fly and Noonan first claim that the White House wants to cut defense spending by $78 billion over five years, repeating the President’s talking point and labeling the reduction “deep and far-reaching.” But as Chris Preble wrote earlier, the cut is to the rate of spending growth. Neither Obama nor Secretary Gates has ever proposed cutting actual defense spending. In the unlikely event that the administration’s new five-year spending plan holds up, the non-war portion of Pentagon spending will cost taxpayers $2.918 trillion from fiscal year 2012 to 2016, rather than last year’s proposed $2.994 trillion, a reduction of 2.5 percent. We will still spend more on the non-war Pentagon budget, even adjusting for inflation, than we did in the prior five years, which was the most ever. Some cut.

The oped dutifully repeats Gates’ claim that he canceled procurement programs worth more than $300 billion in 2009. It does not say that that’s a speculative lifetime spending estimate, that new programs replaced those canceled, and that other Pentagon spending categories, like personnel, have grown more rapidly than procurement, eating any savings.

When they try their own arguments, Fly and Noonan do even worse. They write that “it is worth asking whether other federal agencies or domestic entitlement programs have been forced to reduce their budgets to the same extent that the Pentagon has over the past two years.” Though they mean to imply otherwise, the answer, since they asked, is yes, more. As they could have figured out by looking at OMB’s historical outlay table, total non-defense discretionary spending has not grown over the last two years. Defense has.

It gets worse. Fly and Noonan complain that we lack a military that can handle “any unanticipated contingency, which cancould [sic] emerge at any time.” We could triple defense spending, reinstitute the draft, and still not meet that standard. What if we had to occupy India? And why is instability anywhere always our problem?

Of course they also mention China, noting that it wants to use its military to assert “its long-term interests” and recently tested a stealth fighter. Given that we spend almost as much researching, developing and testing new weapons as China spends on its whole military, that we have far more advanced stealth and surveillance technology, that we have eleven carriers while China has one that they can’t really operate, and that we have no good reason for war with China, the Chinese’s effort to build a military that can protect their interests is unalarming, reasonable and a terrible argument for our current defense budget.

Beyond China, Fly and Noonan make no effort to justify military spending with specific threats. They just assert that the world is “volatile” and the “strategic landscape” grows “increasingly perilous.” Actually the world has been getting less volatile for several decades, if we measure volatility by the frequency and human cost of wars. And even if that were not true, why should our military aim, quixotically, at pacifying all war, rather than self-defense?  Strategy is a product of our making, not a landscape we passively confront.  National security threats to Americans are quite limited in historical context, and mostly avoidable. A less activist stance would avoid the peril we now increase by having defense commitments in so many unstable places.

Defending Defense Badly is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama might want it to appear as though he is reining in defense spending with his budget submission for FY 2012, but his approach to the Pentagon’s budget reveals the opposite.

Perhaps the president hopes that his adoption of the faux cuts that Secretary Gates put on the table last month will be seen as responsible. Perhaps he is taking a prudent first step and signaling to the military, and its suppliers and contractors, that the days of double-digit increases are over. That may be; but far deeper cuts are warranted. . If the president had truly wanted to send a signal, he would have followed the advice of his own deficit reduction commission and endorsed far deeper cuts in military spending.

The Department of Defense will spend $78 billion less over the next five years than previous projections. This amounts to a drop in the bucket — technically just over 2% — of total Pentagon spending over that period. Nonetheless, in Washington-ese, this constitutes a cut. But the base budget (excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) will increase — from $549 billion to $553 billion, the largest budget in the department’s history. In the past 12 years, the budget that has doubled in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

Deeper cuts should be made along with an effort to lessen worldwide defense commitments, reducing the strain on the force. It will be up to outside pressure — either from Congress or from interested groups outside of government – to force Washington to cease acting as the world’s policeman, and forcing other countries to take responsibility for their own defense.

The Pentagon’s Faux Cuts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A just-released Rasmussen survey finds that nearly half of all American voters would withdraw troops from Europe and Japan, but fewer than one in three favor leaving U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula. This portion of the survey is attracting most of the attention, but the survey as a whole reveals some modest public support for a strategy of restraint, one in which the U.S. military focuses primarily on defending U.S. security and core interests, and calls on other countries to play a larger role in their own defense.

For example, when asked “Should the U.S. military strategy be to focus narrowly on defending the United States and U.S. interests, or should the U.S. military strategy seek to maintain worldwide stability and peace?” a solid majority of likely voters (55 percent) agreed with the former, with just 34 percent wishing to be the world’s policeman. Other polls have shown even less support for the globo-cop role (e.g. here).

On this point, and the related one of allowing wealthy allies to defend themselves, I was able to drill down in the cross tabs a bit, and I found a few suprising areas of divergence between likely voters, former military, and self-identified members of the Tea Party movement.

There is some obvious overlap in the survey among these three groups (e.g. 30 percent of former military people self-identify as Tea Partiers, compared with just 18 percent of likely voters). Tea Partiers are more likely than LVs to agree with the statement U.S. military strategy should  “Focus narrowly on defending the United States and U.S. interests” (66 pct vs. 55 pct), but they are less likely to support removing U.S. troops from Europe (40 pct. vs. 49 pct). Also interesting, this is one of the few areas where the former military members agree more with LVs than Tea Partiers. Those who have served in the military align with TPers (within the margin of error, +/- 3 pct, 95 pct confidence interval) on the question of focusing on defending U.S. interests, but agree with LVs that we should withdraw troops from Europe.

One last point: these and other surveys (including an earlier Rasmussen poll) reveal a considerable gap between what the public believes, and what is actually true. For example, when presented with the true/false question “Most federal spending is spent on only three programs—Social Security, Medicare and national defense,” only 40 percent of respondents correctly answered “True” (38 percent said no, and 22 percent were unsure). A solid majority (65 percent) agreed that “the United States military [is] more powerful than any other nation’s military force,” but that still left a troubling 21 percent who disagreed, and another 14 percent whe were unsure.

That means, as I argued here last year, that those of us responsible for explaining public policy still have a lot of work to do.

New Rasmussen Poll Finds Modest Support for Restraint is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) has introduced the Cut Unsustainable and Top-heavy Spending Act, which would cut spending by $44 billion annually.  Brady’s effort moves in the right direction but it is a very modest fiscal reform effort.

The legislation, which Brady calls a “down payment on getting America’s financial books in order,” chooses targets that have already been proposed by the Obama administration or the president’s Fiscal Commission. Therefore, the proposal should have bipartisan appeal. For example, Brady’s bill would cut Pentagon spending and eliminate subsidies to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Many of the targets represent “house cleaning cuts” that would reduce spending on bureaucratic activities such as printing and federal travel. The legislation would also reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent per the Fiscal Commission’s recommendation. While there’s nothing wrong with a little house cleaning, these types of cuts would occur on their own if entire government agencies and programs were eliminated.

Eliminating federal agencies and programs should be the ultimate goal. Annual savings of $44 billion only amounts to about 3 percent of the project budget deficit this year, and less than 10 percent of the annual amount needed to be cut to stabilize the debt by 2020. (See this Cato spending cut plan for more details on what is needed to get our budgetary situation under control.)

Rep. Brady’s CUTS Act is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As I discussed last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s latest attempt to “cut” the Pentagon’s budget are phony. The Secretary would ideally like to see the $78 billion over five years in savings filtered elsewhere into the budget; meanwhile, the 2012 budget will actually grow.

This hasn’t stopped uber-hawk Max Boot and a cadre of neocons from attempting to spin the Secretary’s announcement as the latest example of military downsizing that will make our services less prepared to deal with any conflict or international issue around the globe. I rebut Boot’s claims over at The Skeptics:

In his latest offering at The Weekly Standard, Boot wails that the personnel cuts “will bring the Army’s active duty strength down to 517,000—still larger than it was in 2001 but far smaller than it was in 1991, and not big enough to meet all of the contingencies for which it must prepare.”

Boot doesn’t define the “contingencies” that he wants the military to prepare for, but it seems pretty clear that he disagrees with Robert Gates’s assessment that “The United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire.”

…

One can only imagine how hysterical [the neocons] would be if Gates had actually proposed to reduce the amount of money going to the military every year. As it is, the DoD budget is slated to grow. Gates explained at last week’s press conference that his goal was “a steady, sustainable and predictable rate of growth” without explaining why the Pentagon should simply expect to see more money every year while the rest of the country is supposed to be cutting back.

My word of advice to anyone who wants to know what Gates has actually proposed: look at the facts, not the neocons’ interpretation of them.

Gates’s ‘Cuts’ and the Neocons’ Lament is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is poised to axe or significantly restructure a number of high-profile weapons platforms, and otherwise rein in the Pentagon’s budget. The reports present these initiatives as intended to preempt greater scrutiny of the military’s budget by Congress.

The cuts will be announced later today, but it seems pretty clear that Gates will call for terminating the unnecessary Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), a Marine Corps program that is more than 176 percent over its original per-vehicle cost. Unhappily for taxpayers, the Pentagon has already spent $3 billion on the program, which has managed to deliver only prototypes. The Marine Corps’s version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will also be delayed, according to news reports. And the secretary will continue his search for efficiencies in defense, an initiative that even the reliably conservative Washington Examiner finds worthy.

But amidst all the focus on “cuts”, two facts stand out:

1) Gates intends for the efficiencies, if they materialize, to be plowed back into the military’s coffers — not returned to taxpayers or used for reducing the deficit. Pentagon spokesman Jeff Morell told Politico’s Jen DiMascio ”any story which purports that he is going to announce that the services don’t get to keep and invest the savings they’ve made are flat out wrong.”

2) The Pentagon’s base budget, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is expected to grow in 2012. The FY 2011 base budget calls for spending $549 billion; the Obama administration is expected to request $554 billion for the Pentagon in its FY 2012 budget, which will be released next month. In real, inflation-adjusted dollars, that is a 42 percent increase over the base budget in 2001. When the costs of the wars are factored in, total Pentagon spending has grown 72 percent — again, in real terms — since 2001.

Keep those essential points in mind when you hear the predictable cries from the Defending Defense crowd that Gates is shortchanging the military as it fights two wars. He is doing nothing of the sort.

Indeed, although Gates’s moves are aimed at preempting Congress, members and their staffs aren’t fooled. One Senate aide told DiMascio that despite Gates’s prior cuts, there are still a number of troubled programs drawing billions of taxpayer dollars. “So we can cut,” he said. “We can cut and we can cut big.”

To make “big” cuts in the military’s budget without rethinking its missions would be a mistake. Instead, the Obama administration should be actively soliciting input on ways to reduce the military’s global posture; terminate the open-ended nation-building mission in Afghanistan, and stop planning similar missions in other failed states; and compel wealthy, stable allies to bear the costs and risks of their own defense. Such steps would allow the White House and Congress to responsibly restructure our military based on a realistic assessment of available means and achievable ends, with the savings being returned to U.S. taxpayers.

Gates’s Cuts that Aren’t is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Spurred on by a new release of documents from the archives, the past few weeks have witnessed a renewed interest in the military-industrial complex (MIC), the term forever associated with Dwight David Eisenhower.

Or, at least, that should be the case. Eisenhower – the West Point graduate, career military officer, and hero of World War II – was one of the first to ever use the phrase, in a televised Farewell Address to the nation on January 17, 1961. Over the years, however, the MIC has become a mantra for progressives and left liberals, usually used in tandem with an assault on private enterprise, writ large, or as part of an elaborate conspiracy theory that equates crony capitalism with market economics. The left’s capture of the term has enabled too many on the right to dismiss it out of hand.

That is unfortunate. Dwight David Eisenhower was no liberal; far from it. And though the neoconservatives have attempted to expunge Ike from our collective memory, it is appropriate that his legacy is enjoying yet another revival. For what it’s worth, I’ll be doing my small part, at a half-day conference next month, and throughout 2011, to offer a perspective on the military-industrial complex that might appeal to devotees of limited, constitutional government.

This work will focus not just on Ike’s farewell address, but also on one of his first public addresses, the Chance for Peace Speech, delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 1953. Taken together, the speeches highlight two of Eisenhower’s enduring concerns: opportunity costs, money spent on the military cannot be spent elsewhere; and the political and social costs of the United States becoming a garrison state, the creation of a permanent armaments industry, Ike feared, had already precipitated major changes in the nation’s economy, and threatened to change the nation itself.

Speaking in January 1961, during one of the darkest periods of the Cold War, Eisenhower viewed the MIC as a necessary evil. He viewed the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its sometime communist allies as sufficient justification for maintaining a large standing army, and a vast and technologically advanced Air Force and Navy. He also presided over a dramatic expansion of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and realized (belatedly) that he had far too little control over those weapons and the men tasked with using them.

But I suspect that the permanence of the MIC would be most disturbing to President Eisenhower, were he with us now. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans today spend more on the military than at any time since World War II, and more than twice as much — in inflation-adjusted dollars — than when Ike left office. The general-president clearly failed to convince his fellow Americans of the need to limit the military’s growth. For all practical purposes, the MIC won.

Here’s hoping that many Americans will rediscover Eisenhower, and take heed of his warning, starting in 2011. They could start by supporting efforts to refocus our military on a few core objectives and reduce the Pentagon’s budget.

Eisenhower’s Lament is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Although the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission has come up short of the 14 votes among its members that it needs to force Congress to vote up-or-down vote on implementing its recommendations, the debate over ways to cut spending will certainly continue. Of particular note is the emerging consensus that military spending cannot be held sacrosanct in the search for savings.

Over at The National Interest Online, I try to shed some light on the actual scale of the cuts proposed by various deficit reduction reports. Kim Holmes and others affiliated with the Defending Defense alliance claim that the cuts are deep, indisciminate, and dangerous. I show that the proposed cuts, even if they were to materialize, would bring U.S. military spending back to 2006 or 2007 levels, and this would still be more than we spent on average during most of the Cold War.

But the more relevant point pertains to why military spending can safely be cut, not merely in Washington’s “slower growth” terms, but in real terms; historically, military spending comes down when our perceptions of threats change.

I predict a similar scenario playing out in the next decade. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan draw to a close (and that should move more swiftly than currently planned), recent increases in the ground forces could be rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. Additional savings can be realized if the United States were to terminate its outdated deployments in Europe. We could also revisit the role played by U.S. troops in South Korea and Japan. The Pentagon’s civilian workforce could be cut, chiefly through attrition, and save tens of billions of dollars. Finally, tighter scrutiny over the Pentagon’s spending, beginning with an audit, would allow taxpayers to realize additional savings, while ensuring that our men and women in uniform are provided with the highest quality equipment at the lowest possible price.

You can read the rest here.

Cuts, Slashes, and Savings at the Pentagon is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog