EASTERBLOG - TNR
UNDERFUNDED AT $402 BILLION: I know you don't want to hear this, but even at a fiscal 2005 budget request of $402 billion--plus unspecified additional billions for deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan--the Defense Department is underfunded. The new Pentagon budget actually allocates slightly less for weapons procurement than the fiscal 2004 budget, and weapons procurement was underfunded last year, too. (Almost all the requested Pentagon budget increase is for personnel, operations, and maintenance.)
Throughout the 1990s, the defense budget fell in real terms owing in part to the "procurement holiday"--between the Reagan buildup of the 1980s and the Soviet collapse of the 1990s, the Pentagon really didn't need more tanks, planes, or ships in that decade. But now U.S. tactical aircraft are starting to age; many are 20 years old or older. Many tanker aircraft are 30 years old or older. The Army's main tank is a 20-year-old design. The Apache attack helicopter and F117 stealth fighter, both still depicted in news accounts as futuristic, have been in service almost two decades. The last B-52 bomber was built in the early 1960s.
If the United States is to maintain its unparalleled military power, and it must, a great deal of new stuff needs to be purchased. And this budget, even at $402 billion, only maintains low acquisition rates a little different from the "procurement holiday" budgets. Some of the budget increase is buying higher wages and better housing for soldiers, and that's a big plus. Last year I saw the newly built married-infantry housing at Fort Carson, Colorado, and it looks like nice suburban townhomes; people who risk their lives for the country deserve no less. But otherwise, with procurement not rising, it makes you wonder where all these billions are going.
Also, for all the blather about Rumsfeld's love of "transformation," the new budget changes almost nothing. The worst part of Pentagon budget politics is the annual pie-dividing session, in which the three services demand to be treated about the same. Rumsfeld's fiscal 2005 budget is a pie-dividing exercise in this tradition. The Air Force goes up 8 percent, the Navy goes up 3 percent, and the Army goes up 2 percent, preventing any internal tantrum-throwing. (The Air Force needs the most new procurement, owing to aging planes.) A really transformational budget would transfer resources from the Navy, which is significantly overbuilt, to the Army, which is significantly underfunded and stressed in Iraq. With nine supercarrier battle groups to zero for the rest of the world combined, the United States Navy is today stronger than all other fleets of the world combined; in fact several times stronger. Yet the new budget continues all ship, submarine, and aircraft carrier construction programs at about the same pace as when Rumsfeld came in, while denying the Army badly needed resources and only partly funding the new aircraft the Air Force requires.
As everyone knows, Rumsfeld looks down on the Army as a bunch of low-tech dragoons--though the Army (and the Marines) have done, oh, maybe 98 percent of the work in Iraq. In the Rumsfeld budget the Army, which is doing nearly all the work in Iraq, gets $97 billion, while the glamour boys of the Air Force get $120 billion and the Navy and Marines (their budgets are intertwined) get $119 billion. Long-range remote-controlled gizmos have replaced people only in Rumsfeld's mind and in the fiscal 2005 budget. |
