White House seeks military spending cuts

[Sam_Stone]

I’m not going to argue specific dollar values for an appropriately-sized U.S. military, because I don’t know what that might be.

I do, however, want to talk about the process of determining how much military you need.

Some principles:

1. It’s not about jobs. It’s about having a military that can handle the threats you might face 20-30 year in the future as well as now. If that means cutting soldiers and spending more on research, that’s what you should do. If it means recruiting more soldiers, then that’s what you should do.

2. It’s not about what else could be done with the money. Defense of your nation and its interests is critical, and trumps just about everything else. Of course, there’s a limit to what you can afford, but the military isn’t just another program to be horse-traded for something else. You evaluate it on its own merits.

3. It’s not just about defense of the American mainland. America is in no danger of being invaded. Not now, and not in the next 50 years. No one could possibly manage to land an invasion force across an ocean. A herculean allied effort managed to float an invasion force across the English Channel, and it’s still considered one of the greatest logistical and engineering feats man has attempted.

4. It’s not just about the potential threats to American interests as they exist today. It’s about the potential threats that may exist in the next 30 years; that being about the length of time a real military transformation takes these days. Military leaders today are trying to figure out how they might be attacked in 2040.

5. It’s not even necessarily about an actual shooting war. The whole point to a ‘Pax Americana’ is to present such an overwhelming superiority that your enemies don’t even bother trying to build a military to counter it. It’s tempting to look around the world and see no threats, and assume that means you can drop your military posture. But that begs the question, “What if there are no threats because of your military posture?” The smart thing to do is to determine what the threats would be under the assumption that you downsize the military. What aggression does it deter today that might flare up if other nations thought the U.S. had lost or was losing its ability to defend its interests?

6. It’s also about non-proliferation. Very few countries have the bomb, and that’s largely because the U.S. has agreed to protect them. If the U.S. withdrew from Asia, you can bet that Japan and a number of other countries would start work on nuclear weapons tomorrow. The U.S. is the great equalizer. Take that away, and countries will turn to the next great equalizer - nuclear weapons.

You can’t just point a a dollar amount and say, “That’s too big”, or “We can easily shave 200 billion off that” or whatever. The proper analysis is to look at all the threats the U.S. faces, and the cost of countering them.

The situation is much more complex than that. Americans depend on the world for their standard of living. Americans also need the world to remain stable and relatively peaceful.

My specific worries are whether Russia would make a serious play to reconstitute the USSR, whether China would start to move against Taiwan, whether the North Koreans might see an opportunity to start playing even harder brinksmanship games against South Korea, whether Russia might make a play against Canada and the U.S.'s interests in the North (especially if the Northwest Passage opens up fully), and whether we’d start to see aggressive moves to control oil distribution in the Middle East and South America.

I think it’s likely that the U.S. military can be downsized somewhat, but what you really need is something like the base closing commission of the 1990’s, made up of serious thinkers who have decades of experience in defense and who aren’t politically tied to big military programs that benefit individual states. They should do a complete review of the current forces and the future threats (in consultation with generals), and then make hard recommendations.

[spifflog]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

It’s a question of simple math. Social programs are a negligible percentage of discretionary spending. Even if you eliminated all of it, it would make very little difference to the deficit. Defense takes up a massive percentage of the budget and most of it is superfluous.

Besides, what social programs do you want to cut? We barely have any as it is.

What are you talking about? Social programs are negligible but DoD is massive? DoD is about 23% of the budget. Social Security is about 20% with medicare and medicate about 20%.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Marley23

I agree it makes more sense to cut potential boondoggle projects than eliminate what amounts to a small number of jobs.

Remember that even the boondoggles employ people, typically with decent salaries, and that those jobs have economic multiplier effects of many kinds that may make them more efficient forms of welfare than direct payments. Further, even “boondoggle” projects can spawn new technologies that lead to new innovations that can turn into “useful” products later. And, people who work on them get the experience to be able to work on other, more useful things, etc.

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

It does look an awful lot like the F-23, Northrop’s entry in the Advanced Tactical Fighter contest that spawned the F-22.

Those 2 airplanes competed for the contract, which the F-22 won. The multiple tail surfaces on the J-20 look more like the F-22 than the F-23 anyway. The exhausts are the familiar straight round very-non-stealthy type, not the 2D vectored type on the F-22 (but not the F-35 - that was a systems trade). And the J-20 is much larger, more the size of an F-111, anyway.

The Sukhoi T-50 also uses a slightly trapezoidal wing and V-tail, and nobody has suggested it’s based on stolen technology.

Well, yes they have, but they’re wrong. It’s clearly an S-27 variant.

Now, if the Chinese build a working stealth aircraft in the next 10 years, which they say they will, It will almost certainly be based on stolen tech. But they won’t.

Depends on what you mean by the word. “Stealth”, or “low observability” in the broader term, is a matter of degree, and it’s a lot more things than radar cross-section. It includes noise, electronic emissions, infrared signature, and visibility as well, and a number of those things depend on the distance and orientation of the aircraft relative to the observer. They’re all measured on scales, not “stealthy or non-stealthy”.

Chengdu’s issues with getting this aircraft to be useful are more likely dependent on engine technology than LO, anyway. That’s where they’re behind even the Russians, and why their military philosophy until now has been based on numbers rather than technology. The PLAAF has 1950’s-design airplanes, yes, but it has them by the thousands.

So why do they want this airplane? Maybe the same reasons they want a carrier - a superpower has to have a prestigious air force as well as a prestigious blue-water navy.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@ElvisL1ves

Those 2 airplanes competed for the contract, which the F-22 won.

Yes, the Advanced Tactical Fighter program spawned the F-22 *and *F-23. However, since everyone knows about one, and hardly anybody knows about the other, I left out the also.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

START just passed, no? That means several hundred less warheads. How much do we save by decommissioning those?

My suspicion is that however much is saved, it will be spent on some other military project instead of simply being cut. Considerations like this lead me to think that the military edges towards being a money-laundering project, from the treasury to people familiar with those in charge. But of course I am the suspicious type. I’m glad to see the other side represented in this thread.

[XT]

[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
That means several hundred less warheads. How much do we save by decommissioning those?
[/QUOTE]

What do you suppose they will do with the warheads? Put them on eBay? It’s going to cost quite a bit to decommission them, so in the short term it’s not going to save us much money. Also, you do realize that part of this type of treaty is the verification aspects, right? It’s probably going to cost more in verification than it cost to maintain those nukes, though maybe it will be a wash or even a small gain in the long run. It wasn’t done to be a cost saving thing though (well, not from the US’s perspective…possibly the Russians are hoping to save some money by getting rid of their crap that probably doesn’t even work anymore).

-XT

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@xtisme

It’s going to cost quite a bit to decommission them, so in the short term it’s not going to save us much money. Also, you do realize that part of this type of treaty is the verification aspects, right? It’s probably going to cost more in verification than it cost to maintain those nukes, though maybe it will be a wash or even a small gain in the long run.

Do you have a cite for any of this? I have my own gut feelings, and one of them is that it costs a fortune to maintain hundreds of nuclear warheads.

[Sam_Stone]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Do you have a cite for any of this? I have my own gut feelings, and one of them is that it costs a fortune to maintain hundreds of nuclear warheads.

Not really. Not in terms of the U.S. military budget, anyway.

Here’s a report from Brookings, published in 1998, which broke down the cost of all spending on nuclear weapons and all related technology:

(in billions of dollars)

* Strategic nuclear forces — $7.5
* Tactical nuclear and dual-capable forces — $1.0
* Command, control, communications, and intelligence — $6.0
* Operation and maintenance — $4.0
* Research and development — $.400
* Defense Special Weapons Agency — $.300

The entire operations and maintenance budget for the whole U.S. nuclear force was only $4 billion that year. That’s about 1% of what the military budget was then. The entire strategic nuclear budget was only 7.5 billion.

As of 2002, there were 10, 600 missiles in the U.S. stockpile. Removing 1,000 missiles would only lower the stockpile by 10% or so, and would probably not make much of a difference at all in the overall cost of strategic nuclear defense, which in turn wouldn’t make more than a little dent in the military budget even if you eliminated the entire thing.

In terms of defense value, nothing comes close to the nuclear weapons command. It’s a fraction of the U.S. military budget but provides by far the biggest deterrent to attacks against the United States. It’s not necessarily the place you want to go to if you’re looking for big savings from the military.

[RitterSport]

@spifflog

What are you talking about? Social programs are negligible but DoD is massive? DoD is about 23% of the budget. Social Security is about 20% with medicare and medicate about 20%.

I’m not DtC, but I think he’s making a distinction between discretionary spending and entitlements. SS and medicare are entitlement programs, whereas the military budget is part of discretionary spending (meaning, I think, that the budget has to be passed every year?). That’s why you hear politicians talk about cuts to non-defense discretionary spending.

Social programs may not be a big part of discretionary spending (although maybe they are a big part of non-defense discretionary spending, I don’t know).

[spifflog]

@RitterSport

I’m not DtC, but I think he’s making a distinction between discretionary spending and entitlements. SS and medicare are entitlement programs, whereas the military budget is part of discretionary spending (meaning, I think, that the budget has to be passed every year?). That’s why you hear politicians talk about cuts to non-defense discretionary spending.

Social programs may not be a big part of discretionary spending (although maybe they are a big part of non-defense discretionary spending, I don’t know).

I agree that is what he was doing. But I think that’s just lies, damn lies and statistics. Money is money. We can trim discretionary spending or entitlement spending, neither or both. Entitlement spending isn’t’ set in stone. It can be cut as well. So separating discretionary for this debate is just a way to target DoD IMHO.

Bottom line is the DoD is about 23% of federal spending. Even if you cut half, which would be crazy in my opinion, you’ll still not trim enough. The military has been trimmed greatly since the end of the cold war (with a temporary uptick during the current war). We have to get to entitlements if we are going to solve the dept crisis.

[Laudenum]

@Der_Trihs

Considering how enthusiastic America is about attacking other nations, I can’t see a weaker American military as anything other than a net humanitarian gain. If I could I’d slash the military by a factor of ten or so, turn it into a purely defense force.

And when people begin to realise that they can start getting away with genocide again?

[Baboonanza]

@Laudenum

And when people begin to realise that they can start getting away with genocide again?

What do you mean agian? The cases of U.N. or U.S. intervention preventing genocide are outnumber by an order of magnitude by those that weren’t. Arguably the only time it has ever happenned was in Kosovo.

[Chessic_Sense]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

I’m in the camp that it’s nice, but doesn’t go far enough. It’s not like the bulk of military spending has anything to do with defending the US anyway. Of curse, the righties will say that cutting military spending will “put Americans in danger,” but that’s a crock of shit and always has been.

How can you say that? When Clinton slashed the budget, equipment fell apart. Good soldiers were forced to retire. Bases were closed. Promotions were delayed. They couldn’t get the funds to maintain their rifles and tanks.

In the current war, we ran out of troops and bullets. We had range trips canceled because there weren’t enough rounds for everyone. And we had people doing two or three rotations while others were extended in theater indefinitely.

Thus, when there’s a low op tempo and you cut funds, it hurts. And when you have a high op tempo, there’s always a need for more money.

If you think that the money we spend on troops or maintainence is bloated, you are sorely mistaken. If you think that we should cut funding despite the drawbacks, then that’s your prerogative, but to suggest that cutting military spending won’t weaken our Armed Forces is just pure ignorance of the needs-to-be-fought variety.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Well, that kind of misses the fact that we should never have started the current war in the first place. We seemed to have more than enough working equipment and ammunition in Afghanistan (though we were short on body armor, IIRC).

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Because technology and manufacturing need to advance even if we don’t need them right now. In other words, if you cut R&D and procurement, then defense contractors won’t have high-tech weapons to sell when a war rolls around and they won’t have enough manufacturing capacity to meet our demand. In theory.

The impact of cutting research and development goes even beyond that. Many of the technologies we currently enjoy–including robust international computer networks, cellular and satellite communications, oceanographic monitoring, the Global Positioning System–all started out as military R&D programs. In terms of ultimate payback for the dollar these have been vastly profitable in terms of both economic stimulus (essentially creating new needs and new industries to supply them) and in advancing the quality of life of Americans and by flowdown people in other countries. That doesn’t mean that every blue sky military project is worthwhile by any means, but there are often larger benefits than strictly defense and industrial jobs emerging from these expenditures, which is something that cannot be uncategorically said about social welfare programs.

@Sam_Stone

In terms of defense value, nothing comes close to the nuclear weapons command. It’s a fraction of the U.S. military budget but provides by far the biggest deterrent to attacks against the United States. It’s not necessarily the place you want to go to if you’re looking for big savings from the military.

While it is true that nuclear weapons are the best dollar value in terms of pure destructive capability, their utility as a deterrent is a debatable proposition. Because of the scale of destruction caused by even a very small nuclear weapon and how easily they can be deployed with minimal logistical planning, nuclear weapons have consequences that go far beyond the battlefield and hence require executive approval before they can be used. Nuclear weapons have been of virtually no value in any conflict from Korea forward; they have not deterred aggression or conventional attacks directly against the United States for its allies and interests, nor did they allow us to defeat or negotiate a favorable compromise with an opponent on foreign soil. In principle (in the minds of some) they serve as a deterrent against a strategic attack directed at the US or its allies; in reality they act as political bargaining chips for negotiation, and should any full-up attack occur they provide no effective means to stop or limit an attack via counterforce (attacking the enemy’s forces).

However, there are no short term savings in reducing the nuclear arsenal, insofar as the cost savings from reduced maintenance will be offset by the costs of demilitarize weapons. The real reason to reduce the size of the Active Stockpile is to provide a moral basis for discouraging proliferation and to reduce or eliminate low reliability and potentially hazardous older weapons that do not have modern failsafe features designed into them.

Stranger

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Sam_Stone

As of 2002, there were 10, 600 missiles in the U.S. stockpile. Removing 1,000 missiles would only lower the stockpile by 10% or so, and would probably not make much of a difference at all in the overall cost of strategic nuclear defense, which in turn wouldn’t make more than a little dent in the military budget even if you eliminated the entire thing.

All right. But there are still millions in potential cuts there; probably billions. I like billions. It’ll take a helluva lot of billions to resolve the budget issue though. We’ll probably have to look beyond the military. I won’t wet my pants if Social Security is reduced a bit. I won’t be flapped by modest tax increases neither.

[Batsinma_Belfry]

@RandMcnally

There’s parties in Afghanistan?! I really wish someone would tell the Taliban that we’re partying over there because then maybe our boys will stop being blown up.

They should be paid according to what they do, while there. The ones most people hear about are the ones risking/losing their lives.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

The impact of cutting research and development goes even beyond that. Many of the technologies we currently enjoy–including robust international computer networks, cellular and satellite communications, oceanographic monitoring, the Global Positioning System–all started out as military R&D programs.

Big whoop. If it is R&D you are after, fund R&D.

@Chessic_Sense

If you think that the money we spend on troops or maintainence is bloated, you are sorely mistaken. If you think that we should cut funding despite the drawbacks, then that’s your prerogative, but to suggest that cutting military spending won’t weaken our Armed Forces is just pure ignorance of the needs-to-be-fought variety.

I think it will weaken our Armed Forces. That’s ok. Nobody can define a threat that requires our current level of forces. ‘Weakening’ it is the path to spending cuts. I am not suggesting gutting the military, which is what the hawks always portray this proposal as doing.

You say we need this massive military to ensure world stability for the sake of our economy? How’s that working out? The US government debt has passed $14 trillion:

Today’s debt level represents a $45,300 tab for each and everyone in the country.

Anyone ready to talk about how we are actually going to pay this back?

The relationship between military spending and budget deficits is easy to understand. Look at the history of the US military budget. Compare that to the [[URL=“http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/USDebt.png”]history of the US budget deficit.](Compare that to http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/USDebt.png)

It is clear that the US budget deficit was more-or-less manageable until the extraordinary increases in military spending under Reagan. He increased military spending by 43% over peak levels of the Vietnam era(!). Not coincidentally, the US budget deficit starts to become unmanageable at this point. We’d had the New Deal programs for over 40 years, through all kinds of weather, without blowing up the budget deficit. To say that you care about cutting the debt without cutting defense spending is the very pinnacle of insincerity- it is the military budget which has and is causing the debt. (Though I admit there are other factors, revenue for one) And we don’t need this much military. IIRC we were not conquered pre-Reagan, nor under Clinton, nor at any other time in our history (Unless you count the fucking Brits in 1812). If Reagan can increase a perfectly adequate military budget by 43%, obviously we can trim the military back down by- as some have suggested- about half, without risking being conquered by those pesky Russians or Chinese or- who??? IDENTIFY THE THREAT. hint- there isn’t a military threat which justifies our current military buildup. The Soviets themselves were an exaggerated threat, and nothing today even comes close.

IMHO, the debt is the threat, and the military budget is the cause.

Still concerned about giving up hardware or manpower? We don’t have to.

-Close bases in Germany, Japan, elsewhere. These guys aren’t going to attack us. But they want us to be there!!! Too bad. Last I checked the US military doesn’t take orders from them.

-Revoke the GI bill. Seriously people, this is a ridiculous benefit. Free college? This made sense when GIs were drafted to defeat the Nazis, but not anymore. Lean times are ahead, and we need to spend our education dollars on educating people who have actually demonstrated talent for intellectual pursuits, not just anyone who is willing to kill mostly innocent foreign strangers via remote control sans the context of a defined goal or threat in exchange for slurping on, for the rest of their lives, what they must perceive as the bottomless teat of the US treasury. Not that military people aren’t smart, but that these dollars can be more intelligently allocated. It’ll save us a fortune.

-Trim military pensions. AFAIK, 20 years in the military will render you a retiree. A 38 year old retiree!!! Does that seem ridiculous to anyone else? I think 20 years is plenty of time to earn a pension in any field, but let them wait until 57 like everyone else to begin collecting. We cannot afford to pay able-bodied people 50 years of pension. You’d think we’d have learned something from the collapse of GM.

-End the VA. We have public heathcare now, so fold soldiers into that system. It isn’t good enough? Sounds like it need improvement then, no?

You always hear horror stories of military people on food stamps &etc. in connection with military spending cuts. That is because cuts are always implemented in the stupidest possible way, to create the largest public spectacle possible. Yes, probably some personnel will be cut. But by planning ahead we can have a perfectly serviceable, yet far leaner, military machine, without the spectacle of starving servicemen’s families.

Eisenhower was referenced by the OP. He deserves another listen.

Cut the military budget.