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.