Presentation: A Nation at War, An Administration in Retreat
The Center for Defense Studies has created an audio presentation, narrated by CDS director Tom Donnelly, assessing some of the key shortfalls of the 2010 QDR and the FY11 defense budget proposal. Check it out HERE. (Note: the file contains audio and may take some time to load.) A PDF of the presentation is available for download HERE.
New Fifth-Generation Challengers
The Russians have made the first test flight of their answer to the F-22, the Sukhoi PAK-FA (Future Front-line Aircraft System). Coming after decades of development, the flight on January 29 was filmed and broadcast on Russian national television. The single-seat, two-engine T-50 prototype in silhouette resembles the F-22, with its radar-deflecting shape, though no further information is readily available on what other types of radar-absorbing materials it contains. In addition, the Russians plan for it to have supercruise capability, AESA radar, and be capable of networked-linked communications. Whether it ultimately will have the maneuverability and actual speeds of the F-22 is a key unknown. Russia is co-developing this fifth-generation fighter with India, whose military is interested in a two-seat version for longer-range missions. Apparently, the final versions for both nations will be different, raising the question of how far joint development will go beyond the prototype stage.
Despite the maiden flight, of course, the PAK-FA is years away from operating capability. Nonetheless, it is perhaps ironic that just days after the Russian flight, Defense Secretary Gates has fired the Pentagon’s manager of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and withheld over half a billion dollars from Lockheed Martin, stating that accountability was required for the delays and cost increases in the program.
Even though no foreign fifth-generation fighter will be deployed anytime soon, Russia isn’t sitting still, and once the PAK-FA is ready for foreign sales, China, Iran, and other nations will undoubtedly want their share. That’s just one reason to make sure not only that the F-35 is fielded on time, but that we know as much as possible about the new Sukhoi’s capabilities, since the F-35 may be facing its variants for years to come, supplemented only by America’s small force of F-22s.
Michael Auslin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
McKeon: QDR Falls Short
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, has laid out some compelling concerns about the newly released QDR. Chief among them: “While the QDR appears to be based on maintaining the status quo and provides a force structure built to win the wars our troops are fighting today, it misses the real purpose of the QDR: to outline and prepare our nation to defeat the threats of the future.”
Read the rest of Rep. McKeon’s statement HERE.
Reporters and Numbers, Part I
It’s hard to write budget stories, and even harder to write the lede on a budget story. Things stay the same more than they change, so that’s boring, but when you throw in all those numbers, it gets confusing.
Government media manipulators rely upon this combination of little interest and less knowledge. It’s particularly easy to sell stories of the man-bites-dog variety. Thus, like last year, this year’s defense budget headline is: “Obama Is Spending More on Defense than Bush!”
There are two points to make here. First of all, the reason that headline is even technically true is that, while the Bush Administration was ruled by warmongers, they liked fighting their wars on the cheap. Thus it wasn’t until 2007 — and in connection with the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and the decision for the Iraq surge — that the Bush Administration felt the need to increase the size of the military, in particular the U.S. Army. And when it came to weapons modernization, the “transformational” imperative to “skip a generation” of programs was never reversed. It was left to the Obama team to finally kill projects like the F-22, but Bush had already crippled that and many other plans.
Second, and more difficult to follow, is a true apples-to-apples comparison of what counts as defense spending. The administration peddled a similar line last year, but the big difference was that they counted Army personnel costs as regular defense spending instead of wartime spending. Honest accounting, for sure, but not really a defense increase.
What accounts for a lot of this year’s “increase” is the cost of the Afghanistan surge. The surge is a good thing, but it’s something that will put a further strain on the military, not an “increase” that will buy more defense capability. It’s also — because budget projections for 2012 and beyond still have artificially low numbers pretending that all the fighting will have ended — dishonest accounting.
Ask yourself this question: if Obama is spending more than Bush, how come so many programs have been terminated? How come those that have survived are stretched out? Why will there be more force-structure cuts? Apparently, Obama is getting less for more.
Now there’s the lede.
Tom Donnelly is director of the Center for Defense Studies.
An Incomplete QDR
Our friends at Small Wars Journal were underwhelmed by the QDR. As Robert Haddick explains, the report “properly recognized the deterioration in the U.S. strategic position at the high end of the spectrum. But it failed to explain the difficult trade-offs that will be necessary to address these problems. In this sense it is incomplete staff work, with a lot of tough decisions left for the future.”
Coming from an organization focused largely on conflicts at the opposite end of the spectrum, this is a pretty tough critique.
Read Haddick’s full analysis HERE.
A Nation at War, an Administration in Retreat
The simultaneous release today of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report and the Fiscal Year 2011 budget proposal reveals the underlying contradiction at the heart of the Obama Administration’s national security policy. As the second sentence of the QDR states, “first and foremost, the United States is a nation at war.” But the remainder of the report and, more critically, the long-term budget, reflect an administration more interested in ending wars than winning them, and ready to “manage” American decline rather than preserving American leadership.
The QDR makes no attempt to answer the basic question of defense planning: How much is enough? It does not even attempt to articulate a force-planning construct, such as the “two-war standard” of past reviews. In particular, the QDR:
- Substitutes “risk management” for victory. Success in war does not go to the best “balanced” but to the strongest force. The purpose of strategy is not merely to equalize all threats but to reduce the threat to a safe level.
- Freezes the size of the force and defers modernization. Events since 9/11 have shown that size matters; the U.S. Army and Marine Corps cannot keep up with the pace of operations without mobilizing hundreds of thousands of reservists and National Guardsmen every day. The QDR caps the active Army at 45 brigades, three less than the 48 planned for at the end of the Bush Administration. The Air Force fleet is smaller and rapidly aging; the Navy has fewer than 300 ships compared to the Reagan-era fleet of 600. The gap between American strategic ends and military means grows and grows.
- Puts budgets before strategy. Despite the legal requirement to define strategic needs first and then derive force size, structure, programs and, lastly, budgets, the Obama Administration last year imposed defense budget limits that have, by the Pentagon’s own admission, constrained the review.
The 2010 budget proposal is the dollars-and-cents reflection of Obama priorities. Despite the “national security exemption” from a proposed freeze to “discretionary” budgets and the unanticipated $30-billion-plus cost of the Afghanistan surge, the level of military spending remains at post-World War II lows. For example:
- The “baseline” defense budget request for $548.9 billion accounts for just 3.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, while “mandatory” entitlement and debt-service spending accounts for 15.4 percent of GDP, or about $2.4 trillion.
- Even factoring in projected wartime costs of about $158 billion, total defense spending is just 4.5 percent of GDP.
- The projected federal deficit is more than twice the size of the baseline defense budget.
Tom Donnelly is director of the Center for Defense Studies.
New Media Update
The Center for Defense Studies is now on Twitter. Follow us @DefenseStudies.
Haiti: Preparing for a Long Mission
On Wednesday, the Center for Defense Studies hosted an event on the international relief effort in Haiti, with a focus on the U.S. military’s mission there. Haitian Ambassador Raymond Joseph provided keynote remarks, while Robert Perito of USIP and Johanna Mendelson-Forman of CSIS joined Roger Noriega, Tim Sullivan, and Tom Donnelly of AEI for a panel discussion on the state of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, the capabilities of the Haitian National Police, and the scope of the U.S. military’s efforts in the country.
Watch the video from the event HERE.
Turning a Blind Eye to China
In an article today at the American, Michael Mazza puzzles over the administration’s decision to downgrade China as an intelligence collection priority. Read the piece here. Gary Schmitt also offered his take on the same issue in this space last week.
