defense modernization debate, The

Sea Power, Aug 1997

The last few years have seen a vigorous debate between Congress and the White House about the adequacy of President Clinton's defense modernization budget requests. Administration officials have contended that a "holiday" in weapons procurement was justified over the past few years because so many new weapons were purchased in the 1980s. With older and less-capable weapons being retired in recent years as a result of the drawdown in the size of the armed forces, the smaller but better-equipped post-Cold War forces, it was argued, still would be adequate to meet all foreseeable combat requirements.

Senior congressional leaders have consistently said, though, that disproportionate cuts in the equipment modernization accounts have jeopardized the technological edge so well demonstrated by the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf War. Consequently, in the fiscal year 1996 and fiscal year 1997 National Defense Authorization Acts, Congress added a total of $ 11 billion, despite the administration's opposition, to the Pentagon's force modernization accounts; the add-ons represented a 15 percent increase over the president's budget requests in each of those two years.

Before approving the increases, Congress sought the advice of the military service chiefs on their most urgent unfunded modernization priorities. Not long after the acts had been signed into law, though, the administration said it planned to use the added modernization funds to pay for various operations and readiness expenses that had not been included in the president's budget requests.

The same pattern of underfunding modernization continued with submission of the administration's fiscal year 1998 defense budget request, which defers attainment of even modest modernization increases until the outyears of the current future-years defense plan.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John M. Shalikashvili told Congress two years ago that, beginning with fiscal year 1998, the Department of Defense (DOD) would require $60 billion annually for procurement to keep the force modernized. Despite Shalikashvili's early warningswhich were reinforced in the May 1997 report of the Quardrennial Defense Review (QDR)-the $42.6 billion fiscal year 1998 procurement budget represents a reduction of $1.5 billion from fiscal year 1997 appropriations and a $2.9 billion decrease from the estimates submitted last year by the president himself for fiscal year 1998. The fiscal year 1998 budget request also marks the fourth consecutive year in which Clinton has reduced his fiscal year 1998 procurement estimate-by a cumulative total of $14.5 billion, relative to his initial FY 1998 projections.

The QDR report acknowledges that the long-promised "rebound" in procurement "has been repeatedly postponed in recent budgets as increases previously projected for the procurement accounts have been eroded by unexpected demands for additional funding in operational activities." Because of the higher-than-expected operational tempo for the armed forces, Pentagon budget analysts now say thatwith the overall DOD budget unlikely to exceed $250 billion for the foreseeable future-procurement funding, instead of growing to $60 billion per year, will more likely stall in the range of $45-$50 billion annually.