7/15/09

In a letter to Congress, President Obama reiterated his warning that he will veto the 2010 defense budget if money for the F-22 fighter is included. Obama and Secretary Gates are finally attempting to eliminate wasteful Cold War-era weapons that not only do nothing to enhance our security, but also siphon precious resources away from programs vital to the wars we are fighting.  Eliminating these wasteful programs is part of a broader effort by of the Administration to move the Pentagon out of the Cold War and into the 21st century. Secretary Gates seeks to better equip our forces for both the challenges they confront today and the 21st century challenges they are most likely to confront ahead.  After eight years of the Bush administration not making any tough choices, the Obama administration has laid out a strategy, set its priorities, and is making the tough tradeoffs. This effort has widespread bipartisan support among the military, defense experts, and political leaders.  Yet old habits – and weapons systems – die hard. On missile defense, conservatives have resisted efforts to scale back a program that has been proven unreliable, unnecessary, and outrageously expensive. The defense budget outlined by Secretary Gates is the first significant step toward rebalancing our priorities and moving in a new strategic direction. It is past time that the Pentagon and Congress move beyond the Cold War and into the 21st century.

Defense budget outlined by Secretary of Defense Gates seeks to move the Pentagon in a new strategic direction that is focused on 21st century challenges. In the January issue of Foreign Affairs, Gates critiqued past defense budget policies, writing: “[t]he United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs.” Gates explained the shift this way: an “underlying theme in the budget recommendations is the need to think about future conflicts in a different way, to recognize that the black-and-white distinction between conventional war and irregular war is an outdated model. In reality, the future is and will be more complex, where all conflict will range along a broad spectrum of operations and lethality, where even near-peer competitors will use irregular or asymmetric tactics, and non-state actors may have weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated missiles.”  Gates continued, “In all, we have to be prepared for the wars we are most likely to fight, not just the wars we've traditionally been best suited to fight or threats we conjure up from potential adversaries who also have limited resources.  And as I've said before, even when considering challenges from nation states with modern militaries, the answer is not necessarily buying more technologically advanced versions of what we built on land, sea and in the air to stop the Soviets during the Cold War.” This strategic shift is not only the right course for keeping America secure, it will also help protect American troops already in harm’s way. [Secretary Gates, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009. Secretary Gates, 4/16/09. Secretary Gates, 4/21/08. Secretary Gates, Parameters, Summer 2008]

There is broad and diverse support among retired military officials, defense experts, and political leaders on both sides of the aisle for Administration’s defense budget. 

• 13 Retired Flag Officers, representing the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force support the Administration’s defense budget.  These retired generals and admirals urged Congress to support the Obama defense budget crafted by Secretary of Defense Gates, stating that “[t]he threats against America have undergone a monumental shift, as dangers emanating from traditional Cold War adversaries have given way to challenges from terrorism and other transnational entities.  While we must always remain vigilant against the many large-scale conventional challenges that still persist to this day, we must also ensure our military strategy reflects the realities of 21st century. And it is essential our defense budget matches this new reality.” [NSN Flag Officer Letter, 6/10/09]
• Diverse defense experts – Nagl, Korb, Adams, Krepinevich – laud President’s budget. John Nagl of the Center for New American Security wrote, “The most important military component of the Long War against radical extremism may not be the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our friends to fight against our common enemies. This budget takes significant steps in the direction of helping our friends defeat the internal threats to their stability that also threaten us.” Defense expert and former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, Lawrence Korb, called the shift in priorities enshrined within the budget submitted by Gates “wise and necessary,” which will “begin to bring defense spending under control.” Defense budget expert Gordon Adams wrote earlier in the year that “Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is said to be seriously considering cutting major weapons programs in the new defense budget.  If so, it is a worthy step.  The budget is over-burdened with systems we no longer need (more F-22s) and some that are bearing no promise (FCS, for example).” Andrew Krepinevich the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted that Gates’ “policy suggestions are on solid ground.” [John Nagl via the Washington Independent, 4/06/09. Gordon Adams, 3/17/09. CAP, 4/09/09. Andrew Krepinevich, 4/19/09]
• Former Republican nominee for President, Senator John McCain, strongly supports Gates’ budget efforts.  Following Secretary Gates’ presentation of the defense budget in April, McCain said, "Today's announcement is a major step in the right direction. I believe Secretary Gates' decision is key to ensuring that the defense establishment closes the gap between the way it supports current operations and the way it prepares for future conventional threats." He added "I strongly support Secretary Gates' decision to restructure a number of major defense programs. It has long been necessary to shift spending away from weapon systems plagued by scheduling and cost overruns to ones that strike the correct balance between the needs of our deployed forces and the requirements for meeting the emerging threats of tomorrow.” [Senator John McCain (R-AZ), 4/06/09]

Defense analysts across the political spectrum – CAP, AEI, and CATO – call for cutting the F-22. Defense analysts as diverse as Lawrence Korb of the progressive Center for American Progress, Frederick Kagan of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Christopher Preble of libertarian CATO have argued that the F-22 is not what is needed to fight today’s battles and has a tremendous opportunity cost.  Korb writes in a recent op-ed that, “The F-22 is the most capable air-to-air fighter in the Air Force inventory. Yet it has only limited air-to-ground attack capabilities, which makes it unsuitable for today's counter-insurgency operations...  The United States already has 187 F-22s on hand or on order - a silver-bullet force that is more than adequate to deal with any likely contingency. In fact, Gates said that even if he had $50 billion more to spend, he would not buy any more F-22s.” Kagan has highlighted the tremendous opportunity cost: “Three hundred forty-five million dollars can, roughly speaking, buy one F-22 Raptor -- the U.S. military's new stealth fighter plane -- or pay the average annual cost of 3,000 soldiers (although it would cost far more to equip, maintain, and deploy either the fighter or the troops). The soldiers are a better investment....”  Preble writes, “The Air Force hasn't even deployed F-22s to Iraq or Afghanistan, since they're not well suited to the battles being fought there. The F-22's armor is too light even for small-arms fire... We shouldn't fritter away precious defense dollars on extraordinarily costly platforms like the F-22, simply to protect the jobs of defense workers when our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being attacked on the ground every day.”  [Lawrence Korb and Krisila Benson, 07/9/09. Frederick Kagan, July/August 2006. Christopher Preble, CATO, 6/05/09]

Ground-based missile defense doesn’t enhance our security. It is unproven, unnecessary, incredibly expensive, and it takes money away from programs vital to our troop on the ground.  The Obama administration’s commitment to defense budget reform has also included taking a hard look at ground-based missile defense – enhancing support for systems that work, while cutting budgets for systems with longstanding problems.  As Center for American Progress expert Andrew Grotto wrote last month, the Administration has actually increased funding for theater missile defense, “the most battle-ready missile defense systems that offer credible protections against current and near-term threats.”  They have quadrupled assistance for Theater High-Altitude Area Defense procurement and increased the budget for the ship-based AEGIS program by 62%.  However, the Administration does plan to make cuts to the unproven and costly programs falling under the National Missile Defense umbrella, programs overseen by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).  A report by the Center argues that “Questions remain about how effective and how necessary MDA’s systems are.”  For instance, “scientists argue that simple physics make boost-phase intercepts extraordinarily difficult—potential interceptors cannot reach target missiles fast enough to destroy them before they release their payloads.  Mid-course defenses remain vulnerable to basic countermeasures and can be overwhelmed by simple numbers of targets.  Terminal defenses are still plagued by the problem of ‘hitting a bullet with a bullet.’ On top of these technical questions, missile defense critics such as Philip E. Coyle, former director of test and evaluation in the Department of Defense, question the strategic rationale for missile defenses, arguing that they needlessly provoke Russia.” The Alaska Daily News wrote in an editorial, “Alaska's three members of Congress are still trying to ward off the cuts the Obama administration has proposed in missile defense work at Alaska's Fort Greely. They are doing what members of Congress do -- defending a huge pipeline of federal money for work located in their home state. But this is a classic case where the parochial interests of one state differ from what's best for the nation as a whole… Right now, no likely adversary has missiles that can reach populated areas of Alaska. North Korea's most recent missile test was an embarrassing failure. Iran doesn't have long-range missiles either... an adversary knows that any missile comes with a return address and the nation where it came from risks a horrific nuclear counter-strike.” [Andrew Grotto, 6/23/09. CAP, 12/2008, Alaska Daily News, 6/20/09]

What We’re Reading

IEDs in Afghanistan are accelerating the lethality of combat, as increased public awareness of causalities in Afghanistan is prompting a strong debate within the UK about the proper resourcing of the British mission in Afghanistan. Helmand Province, the location of the ongoing offensive with US Marines, British and Afghan troops, also saw a helicopter crash which killed 10.

The Pentagon deploys new US troops to Iraq, only this time with a different name.

Iran adds new censorship rules, particularly for local media, as Supreme Leader Khamenei’s religious aura begins to diminish because of his forceful entry into Iran’s electoral crisis. A plane crash in Iran also left all 168 aboard dead.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano orders a review of the colored-coded national terrorism alert system.

Jerzy Buzek, former Prime Minister of Poland, is elected to be the new President of the European Parliament, a first for a leader from a former Soviet-bloc country.

Drug cartels continue to strike back against Mexican authorities, killing 12 federal police officers.

Honduran society is becoming more polarized as competing political factions cannot compromise following a military coup.

Chinese labor practices are cited as a cause of recent unrest between Uighur and Han Chinese, while Chinese intellectuals call for the release of a prominent Uighur economist.

The military junta in Burma offered some political prisoners amnesty, but many are wary of the extent this amnesty will apply.

Azeri bloggers dressed up like donkeys protest Azerbaijan’s agricultural policies, political commentary almost unknown in a country where opposition to the government is rare.

Commentary of the Day

Thomas Friedman discusses how the US should continue to press for compromises amongst Iraqi factions, because the risks of political infighting after US troops withdrawal is too great.

Capt. James Adair of the US Air Force describes bringing one of our fallen home.

Holeman W. Jenkins, Jr. believes poor business practices by the Chinese led to the spat with Australian mining executives, and discusses the implications for future business deals with China.

The LA Times applauds Obama’s conditioning of aid to Africa as a step forward to increasing aid overseas.