National Security Requires Healthy Defense Budget

Human Events, Feb 12, 2007 by Franc, Mike

A Conservative Agenda for the 110th Congress

This is the third of a four-part series written by Heritage Foundation Vice President of Government Relations Mike Franc, discussing tin agenda for the new Congress, balancing the need for bipartisan cooperation against the temptation to veer too far leftward on domestic and international policy issues.

The stakes in the "long war" against the forces of Islamic fascism are high-nothing less than the survival of the free world. Congress and the President must ensure thai our military receives the resources it needs to prevail. There's simply no greater challenge.

Unfortunately, the recent trend with respect to our military budget suggests that we are dangerously close to revisiting the dark days of the 1990s, when we allowed our armed forces to "hollow out" and render us vulnerable to attack.

First, let's briefly review what happened when the Cold War ended.

Clinton's Procurement Holiday

After the fall of communism. Congress and the Clinton Administration determined that we could scale back military spending and still protect America's vital security interests. This gave rise to the so-called "peace dividend." the flood of money saved by slashing the Defense budget.

During the decade between 1990 and 1999, Defense spending decreased in real terms each year. However, history, as current Defense Secretary Robert Gates said even at the time, had not ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. It had just been frozen by the Cold War. In the '90s, it began, he noted, "thawing out with a vengeance."

Regional conflicts erupted across the globe, prompting Clinton to send U.S. forces to hot spots more frequently than his predecessors-to the former Yugoslavia, Somalia. Haiti and elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, all of these military deployments and "peacekeeping" operations increased spending on operations and maintenance-even as lawmakers craving that "peace dividend" shrank the overall defense budget. Something had to give. In the words of former Missouri Republican Sen. Jim Talent, the preferred solution was "a decade-long procurement holiday."

Hollowed-Out Military of the '90s

Talent, in a Senate floor speech, offered a vivid depiction of how the hollow military took form:

* Scout and attack helicopters: Between 1975 and 1990. we purchased an average of 78 per year-from 1991 through the year 2000, we purchased only seven.

* Battleforce ships; Between 1975 and 1990, we purchased 19 each year-during the 1990s, annual purchases fell to seven.

* Navy fighter aircraft: An average of 111 were purchased annually between 1975 and 1990-only 42 were purchased annually during the 1990s.

* Tankers: Annual purchases almost disappeared entirely, tailing from five per year between 1975 and 1990 to only one per year during the 1990s.

* Artny tanks, artillery, and other annored vehicles: Annual purchases of these basic fighting platforms collapsed as well, from an average of 2,083 annually to a mere 145.

The hollowing-out process led to a smaller Navy and Air Force. At 283 ships, our current naval strength falls considerably short of the Pentagon's desired 375-ship fleet. And since we're adding only 5.6 new ships per year while retiring older vessels, the fleet will eventually bottom out at 170 ships.

Weapons vs. Personnel

Lawmakers faced with the difficult choice of whether to spend precious defense dollars on weapons or personnel costs often choose the latter. In 1985. there was rough parity between what the Pentagon calls the "operation und support" portion of the budget (military personnel costs plus operations and maintenance) and spending on "modern i/ation" (research and development plus the procurement of new weapons).

Over the lasl two decades, however, that parity has disappeared. We now spend more than twice the amount on operation and support (health care, subsidized food and housing, child care for dependents, and education benefits for GIs) than we do on modernization.

Talent sums up the Pentagon's budgetary conundrum us follows: "Most of the [Pentagon's] budget is basically committed. You cannot short operations and maintenance ... [or]... readiness. You must pay your people. You musl provide the benefits you have committed to provide. That means any budget cuts must come almost entirely out of exactly the platforms, the ships and planes, and tanks and vehicles ... that our men and women need to ... defend us."

Indeed, our European allies have traveled even further along this road. Last year, the 24 member states of the European Defense Agency reported spending an average of only 1.8% of their GDPs on defense, less than half of what we spend. And they devoted much less (only 18(/(of their defense budgets! Io modernization. Instead, they spent more on generous benefit packages for their servicemen and women. Little wonder that a spokesman for the Belgian Defense Ministry acknowledged shortly before the 2003 liberation of Iraq that "I'm not sure that the mission of the Belgium military is to fight."

Coming Crunch