(Mint Press) – During a press conference in regards to the Pentagon’s Defense Strategic Review last January, President Obama was quoted as saying,
“As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and the end of long-term nation-building with large military footprints — we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces. We’ll continue to get rid of outdated Cold War-era systems so that we can invest in the capabilities that we need for the future, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.
“So, yes, our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats.”
The United States has the largest military in the world by expenditure and the seventh largest by manpower. The amount of money the United States spends on its military is enough to operate the national governments of Russia, Finland and Switzerland combined. America’s military budget is larger than the military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Australia and Canada combined. At 4.7 percent of America’s gross domestic product, only Saudi Arabia pays more per capita for its military. This level of spending has led many to speculate why this is, and most suspect that frivolous bloat may be to blame. In 2012, the amount of the budget that will be allocated to military contracts is $319 billion.
The 2012 military appropriation bill from the House actually offers the military $3.1 billion more than the military requested. According to the White House, the Pentagon’s operational budget — excluding war funding — rose 48 percent in the last 10 years, adjusting for inflation. In all, the United States is responsible for more than 40 percent of all military spending on the planet.
By even the most conservative estimates, the nation will not be able to support this military if it continues to grow at its current rate. In light of the nation’s and the world’s economic woes, $319 billion a year in military contracts seems excessive, and even crass. However, among the military hawks in Congress, cutting the military budget sacrifices national security. Despite Republicans sponsoring and voting on the Budget Control Act, which includes an automatic 10 percent sequestration of defense expenses (it was generally hoped for by Republicans that Democrats would cave on social program cuts in order to secure the nation’s credit rating; it didn’t happen), Republicans have been outspoken against defense spending cuts.
In an August speech, John McCain (R-Ariz.) said, “We can’t afford another $500 billion in cuts to our defense budget — on top of the nearly $500 billion in cuts that the president is already making … And yet, the president is playing no leadership role in preventing this crippling blow to our military.”
The $500 billion in cuts reference by Sen. McCain, or $30 billion for 2013, resulted when the extralegal “SuperCommittee” — formed in regards to the Budget Control Act — failed to stop the automatic sequestrations by proposing an alternate suite of cuts that would satisfy both the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate. Republicans defend their position by saying the sequestration was never meant to become law; instead, it was just meant to be used as a threat to force the two sides to compromise.
Indiscriminate cutting across the board would be disastrous for the military, most experts agree. However, targeted cuts to unnecessary or redundant programs, such as the nuclear arsenal, Cold War programs and reductions to America’s overseas presence can meet or exceed the 10 percent proposed in sequestration without significantly altering the nation’s ability to respond militarily.
The president’s proposal, which would change the military from being battalion-based to being taskforce-based — allowing for smaller, more adaptable units to do the larger job units would find it logistically difficult — would dramatically cut the cost to run the military. However, as this would ultimately affect military contracts, Republicans — who are heavily backed by the aerospace and defense weaponry industries — have rejected any cut to the military’s budget in the name of national security.
In addition, the question of war readiness calls for more investment into the military and not less. As reported on the PBS program “Frontline,” Chuck Spinney, an analyst in the pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, attests that the combination of deteriorating equipment, dated manuals, a lack of quality spare parts, increased stress and frustration from making working solutions out of mismatched components and tools and declining retention and recruiting rates has created a state of unreadiness that started from decades of misplaced opportunities to reinvest in the military after the force reduction at the end of the Vietnam War.
As reported from the Wall Street Journal:
“… As a new American Enterprise Institute study concludes, the military over the past decade didn’t modernize but rather embraced the equivalent of buying new apps for its old, clunky cellphone.
“The Air Force wanted 750 F-22s to replace the F15, above, but they ultimately only received 187. From 2000-2010, the Air Force spent $38 billion on 220 fighters—as compared to $68 billion for 2,063 fighters from 1981-1990. Air Force leaders wanted 750 F-22s to replace their F-15s, but successive administrations cut that number—to 648, then 438, 339, 270 and finally 187—before President Obama terminated production. That wasn’t a coherent acquisition strategy but budget-driven politics, plain and simple.”
More damningly, the culture in the military today is a “them vs. us” mentality, in which non-commissioned officers feel that the officers care more about their own interests and not those of their subordinates.
Also from Frontline, Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., the executive director of the non-profit Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, answered the following when asked if he thought there was a readiness crisis:
“… Certainly there is reason to be concerned in the army … over the issues of army recruitment and army retention. There’s growing concern about the army’s ability to retain talented young officers. The migration, as I understand it, is away from combat arms and into other supporting arms. There’s growing dissatisfaction with the quality of life issues. These are things that speak somewhat to near-term readiness. But they portend problems for readiness over the long term. Readiness degrades gracefully up to a point, and then you reach a kind of snowball effect.
“I was in the ‘hollow army.’ For example, in my unit, spare parts shortages led to frustration on the part of mechanics and maintenance people, who then left the service. They were replaced by less capable people who misused the existing spare parts we did have. So there was increased frustration on the part of other soldiers. And you get this compounding effect. The great danger the army faces now, as with the other services, is there’s a sense that it’s on the ragged edge. It’s at the point where, if it’s not careful, readiness may become more precipitous in terms of a decline. That gets you back to this issue of an unprecedented challenge for the American army. Never before has the American army had to support a US policy of being an active global power, and at the same time transform itself to a different kind of fighting force. These are uncharted waters.
“Military revolutions typically bring about not only new forms of operation, but new kinds of military capabilities and a shift in the kinds of military systems that dominate the battlefield. … What strikes me as odd is that, to a certain extent, we are moving forward in some areas very aggressively to procure large numbers of systems. Those systems may be dominant today, but they may not be dominant at all tomorrow. In short, they may depreciate very rapidly in value.
“A case in point is tactical aviation. Right now, the Defense Department is planning on spending several hundred billion dollars to modernize its short-range tactical air forces. This seems to be a case in extremes of putting the modernization cart before the strategy horse. It seems to me that one would at least want to have some idea of how one we’re going to protect these kinds of forces from missile attack over time as they’re deployed to fixed forward bases. If the price tag for protecting these kinds of systems also includes massive air and missile defense systems, then maybe there are better and cheaper ways of modernizing our strike forces.”
So, how can the military find its way back to being combat-ready?
Tough solutions to impossible questions
In order to determine what is needed to make the military combat-ready, we must look at the military’s role in the future. After 12 years, nearly $1 trillion has been spent and thousands of servicemen and servicewomen have been killed or critically injured — and little can be said to have been gained for all of the effort.
Afghanistan is in danger of being retaken by the Taliban and Iraq is less stable and more of a front for terrorism than it was under Saddam Hussein. There is both little public tolerance and little political will for the United States to continue in grand “world police”-style military operations and “nation-building.” An example of this new reality is the United States’ restrained assistance to United Nations’ peacekeepers during the air raid against Gadhafi’s regime forces in Libya. President Bush was both criticized for getting the United States involved militarily in this conflict and for the limited scope of the operation.
President Obama has ensured, however, that the United States will continue to meet its obligations abroad. This includes maintaining a military presence in Asia, supporting peacekeeping efforts with NATO and the U.N. and being able to efficiently and quickly deal with all threats to national security. The military, in the future, will work with other militaries in global conflicts and would pursue other cost-saving schemes. The proposed plan would result is a smaller Army and Marine Corps, with a greater emphasis on operations forces and intelligence-gathering, and a shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific. This shift would save more than $480 billion over the next decade, in light of the cutting levels sequestration would achieve.
The Army is scheduled for a force reduction of 27,000 soldiers by 2015. The Marines are scheduled for a reduction of 20,000. In total, these reductions will save about $6 billion in 2015-2016. The reductions will be paced out to avoid a massive spike in the labor force.
The Army has committed to maintaining and enforcing the Army Force Generation Model, which calls for one corps, five divisions, 20 brigade combat teams and 90,000 enablers available for immediate deployment at all times.
Dr. Eric Darr, interim president of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, spoke to MintPress in regards to the future of the American military. Darr, a former information technology project manager with the Department of Defense, believes that the future of the military lies with its personnel.
As the military grows smaller, according to Darr, more advanced technology will be needed, and the soldier in the field and at base will need more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) training and skills. As the military typically recruits out of high school, finding personnel with these skills is a major obstacle. Military training offers STEM skills, but typically and ironically, soldiers with these skills leave the military to pursue higher education or better opportunities in the private market.
Ultimately, as Darr states, the key to making the military combat-ready starts with the nation’s K-12 education system. Investment in STEM training, re-certification of teachers to effectively teach new technologies and an increased emphasis on mathematics and science-based curricula for grade school and high school students will provide the highly-skilled labor force needed to carry the military into the future.
This is problematic. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, of the 48 states that publish analyzable data in regards to their education budget, 26 states are offering less funding per student to local school districts than they did a year prior. For many states, these cuts came after years of deep operational cuts. Thirty-five states are offering funding at levels lower than what they offered five years ago. Three states — Arizona, Alabama and Oklahoma — have reduced funding in K-12 schools by more than 20 percent.
As of 2010, according to the world education rankings from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 14th in reading among the world’s nations, 25th in mathematics and 17th in science. The United States was beaten by the likes of Estonia, Poland, Belgium and New Zealand.
This is the national security threat. Without qualified and well-trained workers, this nation cannot compete either militaristically or industrially. At this point, this nation is ill-prepared to live in the world its innovation helped to create. In a world where nations can be toppled with social media, where a power grid for an entire nation can be destroyed with a few lines of code and where a handful of well-placed guerrilla can cripple an entire military column, it is no longer a matter of who has the biggest and most guns.
In the future, the smartest, best trained soldiers will rule. The United States is in danger of becoming an outdated relic.