4/12/11 

This week, Washington is steeped in the details of various budget proposals. Congressional leaders are hashing out the final funding details for the rest of fiscal year 2011, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2012, President Obama will give a speech tomorrow laying out his vision for deficit reduction and congressional Democrats will present their own budget plans for fiscal year 2012 tomorrow as well.  With three ongoing military operations and a tough economic climate at home, a responsible budget must strike a balance between our national security goals and these fiscal realities. Getting this right is essential to our national security, as America's economic health is the wellspring of our military power. Understanding that, any plan to tackle the deep fiscal problems facing the country should include smart reductions to the defense budget and cannot be solved by simply gutting the civilian tools of foreign policy, which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called "critical" to our national security and which represent a relatively small proportion of total expenditures. Budget plans put forward by some conservatives in Congress and think tanks show a lack of understanding of these principles, and their positions will undercut American security in the twenty-first century.

Any plan to reduce spending and tackle the national debt must take a serious look at defense spending. As TIME columnist Romesh Ratnesar points out, "Not a solitary penny of the $38 billion in spending cuts [for the rest of the fiscal year] will come out of the Pentagon's coffers. In fact, defense spending will increase by $5 billion over 2010 levels, to $513 billion. And that doesn't even include the cost of ongoing ‘overseas contingency operations,' otherwise known as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All told, U.S. military spending in 2011 will exceed $700 billion - the most since World War II. That amounts to more than half of all government discretionary spending."  Given the current economic climate, the lack of smart cuts to the defense budget is glaring and must be part of a balanced effort to reduce spending. While the administration's planned efficiency savings are a good first step, there's more work to be done. As a recent report from the Center for a New American Security makes clear, "...the widely reported bottom line - that the Pentagon will cut 78 billion dollars in spending from its future years defense program (FYDP), the multiyear blueprint used for U.S. military planning - does not tell the whole story. The FY 2012 request will reduce planned future expenditures, but it will not cut actual future spending. Indeed, the defense budget will continue to grow each year, albeit more slowly than DOD previously had hoped."

We can have smart reductions in defense spending and a strong national defense - but it will take strategic planning.  Ratnesar notes, "In the past several months, a number of analysts in Washington from across the political spectrum have drafted proposals to cut military spending by 10% to 15% over the next 10 years. Though they differ in programmatic details, these proposals have some common themes: they all assert that we can make meaningful defense cuts without compromising U.S. military primacy. But simply going after Pentagon waste and abuse won't be enough. To conserve its power, the U.S. will need to reduce the size of its armed forces, curtail expensive missions and shrink America's military footprint around the world. And that means rethinking how, where and for what purposes the U.S. commits its military to intervene in foreign crises." Failing to think strategically will have its own consequences.  As the CNAS report concludes, "Over time, the economic consequences of indebtedness may crowd out investments in a U.S. military that undergirds international security; render the United States more vulnerable to economic coercion; and erode America's global stature and soft power. Relieving U.S. indebtedness demands preventive action by American society and government - including DOD." [Romesh Ratnesar, 4/11/11. CNAS, 2/11]

Gutting diplomacy and development funding is a pound-foolish approach to national security. Cuts to the civilian tools of national power make up more than one-fifth of the cuts in the Continuing Resolution for the remainder of the current fiscal year. According to a summary of the bill, "The funding level for the State Department and Foreign Operations in the CR is a total of $48.3 billion - a $504 million reduction from last year's level and an $8.4 billion reduction from the President's fiscal year 2011 request." Proposals for fiscal year 2012 make the same mistake, reports Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy magazine: "The long-term budget announced on Tuesday by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) would cut the budget for international affairs and foreign assistance by 29 percent in 2012 and 44 percent by 2016 -- while increasing the defense budget by 14 percent over the same timeframe." Security leaders agree -- drastic cuts to the international affairs and foreign assistance budget are penny-wise and pound foolish, and will endanger our national security:

Gen. David Petraeus on how cuts could hurt efforts to secure gains in Afghanistan:"I am concerned that levels of funding for our State Department and USAID partners will not sufficiently enable them to build on the hard-fought security achievements of our men and women in uniform," Petraeus said in Congressional testimony last month. [Gen. Petraeus, via AP, 3/14/11]

Secretary Gates: civilian agencies play a "critical role." "There has to be a change in attitude in the recognition of the critical role that agencies like [the] State [Department] and AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] play... for them to play the leading role that I think they need to play." [Sec. Gates, via Foreign Affairs, 12/10]

Building new democracies in the Middle East. Former Republican Members of Congress Jim Kolbe and Connie Morella: "Were we to scale back our diplomacy and development efforts - as some lawmakers have proposed - we would be turning our backs on the democratic movements in the Middle East at the very moment we have a historic opportunity to reorient our relationship with the region... we need to talk about improving the civilian tools of our foreign policy, not abandoning them." [Kolbe and Morella, 4/6/11]

Relinquishing American leadership, harming national security. House Appropriations Committee's State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Ranking Member Nita Lowey (D-NY): "Cutting international affairs spending on this scale would put our nation at higher risk of terrorism, hamper our ability to achieve vital security objectives, and result in a retreat from our leadership role in the global community," she said in a statement. "It is senseless to respond to a fiscal challenge by creating a national security emergency." [Rep. Lowey, via the Cable, 4/6/11]

[House Appropriations Committee, 4/12/11. The Cable, 4/6/11]

Conservatives' flawed approach to the budget is a result of a larger failure: the inability to understand the sources of America's power.  While some conservatives are calling for unprecedented increases in defense spending, others are demanding steep budget cuts, mainly aimed at critical foreign aid programs. This split is indicative of a larger trend: conservatives do not understand how the pillars of our national power function in the 21^st century.  Our military might is bolstered by, not a substitute for, our diplomatic and development efforts abroad. 

Christopher Preble of the CATO Institute and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, previously explained: "Over fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained that a nation's security was directly tied to the health of its economy... ‘Spiritual force, multiplied by economic force, multiplied by military force is roughly equal to security,' he explained. For Eisenhower this was the ‘Great Equation.' ‘If one of these factors falls to zero, or near zero, the resulting product does likewise.'" Today's conservatives clearly do not understand this-and have instead called for massive increases in defense spending.  On the same day that Rep. Paul Ryan released his budget proposal for the 2012 fiscal year, the Heritage Foundation, which praised Ryan's proposal, released a report which called for dramatically higher levels of defense spending. "An average core defense funding level of $720 billion per year is reasonable," Heritage concludes.  Notably, this figure does not even include funding for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, which has already cost a whopping $1.5 trillion to date.  A responsible foreign policy takes full advantage of all elements of our national power-our diplomatic, military and economic resources - not just our military might. [Lawrence Korb and Christopher Preble, National Interest, 6/16/10. Heritage, 4/5/11]

What We're Reading

Japanese authorities raised the severity rating of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to the highest level on an international scale, on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Sporadic gunfire can be heard in Ivory Coast's main city, Abidjan, a day after former President Laurent Gbagbo was arrested.

Libyan opposition leaders rejected an African Union "road map" for making peace with Muammar Qaddafi, saying that nothing short of the strongman's immediate resignation would satisfy them.

Yemen's opposition stated that it would not accept a Gulf Arab initiative for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down, because it appeared to offer him immunity from prosecution, while Saleh welcomed the plan.

Authorities in Belarus have detained several people in the probe into a subway bombing in Minsk that killed 12 people.

French police arrested two veiled women protesting the country's law banning face-hiding Islamic burqas and niqabs, just hours after the legislation took effect.

Pakistan has demanded that the United States steeply reduce the number of CIA operatives and Special Operations forces working in Pakistan, and that it halt CIA drone strikes aimed at militants in the northwest of the country.

Multiple bomb blasts in Fallujah, Diyala and Baghdad claimed the lives of at least nineteen victims.

Farooque Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, pleaded guilty to being part of a plot to bomb Washington area Metro stations and was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

The number of bodies found in mass graves in north-eastern Mexico over the past week has risen to 88, after 16 more corpses were discovered.

Commentary of the Day

David Miliband argues that a political solution is needed in Afghanistan to make a NATO end-date meaningful.

David K. Shipler explains that trying the 9/11 plotters by military commission creates a dangerous and depressing legal precedent.

Patrick Seale asserts that if Bashar al Assad's regime in Syria falls, the resulting geopolitical shift could hurt its allies Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.