-Caveat Lector-
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Subject: Defense 'Train Wreck' Confronts Incoming Bush Administration
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 13:41:04 -0600
From: The Republican <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.stripes.com/servlet/News/ViewArticle?articleId=100035406&frontpageId=
100035519
Defense 'Train Wreck' Confronts Incoming Bush Administration
Dec 18, 2000
Ed Offley
Stars and Stripes Editor in Chief
It never took center stage as a campaign issue in the 2000 presidential
race, but President-elect George W. Bush in five weeks will be confronted
by a major issue neither he nor Congress can afford to ignore: the
potential for a systemic collapse of the U.S. armed forces within the next
decade.
]
While the 16-month electoral contest between Bush and Democratic nominee Al
Gore turned and twisted on a host of domestic issues -- the future health
of Social Security and Medicare, income tax cuts and the federal role in
controlling prescription drug prices -- a growing number of defense experts
warn that one of the first nightmares the new president will inherit is the
threat of a "defense train wreck" looming in the next five to 10 years as
the result of a decade of massive under-funding of the true costs of
maintaining the current size and structure of the U.S. military.
"Everybody hits the wall about 2005-2006," says Dan Goure, deputy director
of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, D.C., who co-authored a detailed
analysis of the defense budget crisis last year. "The derailment is in
sight."
The defense crisis comes above and beyond the normal range of headaches the
incoming president must manage in assembling a national security team,
Goure and other experts say.
Multiple Deadlines Ahead
With the traditional 10-week transition period lopped in half as a result
of the prolonged ballot recounts in Florida, Bush faces multiple deadlines
-- to assemble his Defense Department transition team, to name a secretary
of defense nominee and assemble the key cadre of subordinate political
appointees for the Pentagon's civilian leadership, to amend or reconfirm
the existing National Security Strategy of the United States to reflect his
foreign policy priorities and the military structure to enforce them, to
manage the ongoing congressionally-mandated 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review
and to recommend amendments to the 2002 defense budget inherited from the
outgoing Clinton administration.
But those are by far the easy tasks.
Long-Ignored Crisis
Sidelined by poll-driven campaign tacticians, ignored by the mainstream
news media and overlooked by a majority of voters, the defense "train
wreck" crisis has until very recently received scant attention. Until 1998,
even many uniformed military leaders scoffed
But the staggering dimensions of the crisis now are becoming apparent to
the military leadership and to a wider circle of Americans outside the
Pentagon E-ring, congressional defense committees and Washington think
tanks.
Gen. Henry Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, formally
acknowledged the seriousness of the situation in a speech last Thursday
where he said the Clinton administration's current goal of $60 billion per
year for modernization program budgets has been found to be "inadequate."
"Based on the best projections at the time [1997], we thought this would be
adequate to maintain an acceptable level of modernization," Shelton said of
the $60 billion figure. "Reality has dictated otherwise! In the past three
years alone, the demanding pace of operations demonstrated how inadequate
that level was."
Outside experts agree.
"We have lived off the technology of the 1960s and 1970s that was developed
and fielded in the 1970s and 1980s, and used it ever since," says retired
Army Lt. Gen. Lawrence Skibbie, president of the National Defense
Industrial Association. "We are in a death spiral of [military] equipment."
'Train Wreck' Foreseen
As detailed in their December 1999 report, "Averting the Defense Train
Wreck in the New Millennium" (Center for Strategic and International
Studies), co-authors Goure and Jeffrey M. Ranney provided a bleak portrait
of how the Clinton administration and a Congress controlled first by
Democrats, then Republicans, opted to short-shrift the actual costs of
maintaining the U.S. military in its current size and structure by more
than $426 billion, mostly through cancellation or deferral of planned
modernization programs.
Shelton, in his speech to the National Press Club, noted that defense
spending in 1985 constituted 6.5 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic
Product, but has shrunk since then to just over 3 percent of GDP today, for
an actual decrease in defense spending of about $300 billion (current
dollars) per year.
"At the 1985 rate, our budget this year in DoD would be double what it is
today," Shelton said. "That is quite a peace dividend!"
The modernization crisis stems from the inescapable fact that most of the
current U.S. military infrastructure -- naval warships, combat aircraft and
ground combat vehicles -- is now nearing the point of obsolescence and
mandatory retirement in the current decade, experts warn.
U.S. military forces and capabilities [will] decline and deteriorate to a
degree that the United States is de facto demobilized and possesses a
diminished capacity to shape and influence world events.
- CSIS 'Train Wreck' Report
As a result of that eight-year period of inattention to actual defense
costs, Goure and Ranney predicted that the United States faces a looming
crisis where, as a result of the aging and block obsolescence of many
fundamental combat systems, "U.S. military forces and capabilities [will]
decline and deteriorate to a degree that the United States is de facto
demobilized and possesses a diminished capacity to shape and influence
world events and to safeguard and protect U.S. national interests."
In 1997, the Defense Department conducted its first Quadrennial Defense
Review, which had been mandated by Congress the year before (and whose
primary sponsor was Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.). The QDR assumed that
Congress would continue to authorize about $266 billion per year over the
next decade to support the current U.S. military structure -- a force of
1.4 million personnel including 10 Army divisions, 11 aircraft carrier
battle groups and 12 fighter wings -- configured to fight two
near-simultaneous regional wars. That has been the essential size and shape
of the military since 1993.
That review has come under criticism by a number of defense experts who say
that because the Pentagon assumed a static budget for the military, the QDR
became a mere budget drill rather than a comprehensive analysis of U.S.
military requirements and capabilities.
In its own assessment of the current state of the armed forces, the
nonprofit Project for a New American Century was unusually harsh about the
1997 QDR: "Absent a strategic framework, U.S. defense planning has been an
empty and increasingly self-referential exercise, often dominated by
bureaucratic and budgetary rather than strategic interests."
True Defense Costs Much Higher
What the CSIS analysis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other
researchers have learned is that the true defense costs for the United
States have been grossly under-reported for most of the past decade.
The CSIS "train wreck" report determined that the true annual costs for the
existing U.S. military force have been nearly $100 billion higher than the
$266 billion assumption cited in the 1997 QDR. And to preserve the existing
force, Congress and the next administration not only have to raise the base
level of each annual budget, but must also cover the unfounded defense
costs from the previous eight years, Ranney and Goure found.
"DoD procurement budgets will need to average $164 billion annually during
2001-2010 to provide for steady and continued modernization and replacement
of the QDR force " the CSIS report concluded. At currently projected
funding levels, Ranney and Goure estimated that by 2005 the accumulated
shortfall in military investment will reach a negative "bow wave" of more
than $815 billion.
(The CBO report was slightly less dramatic, estimating that the military
was underfunding defense by about $51 billion per year, including about $37
billion for procurement of new ships, aircraft and weapons.)
Before he left his post as Deputy Secretary of Defense last year, John
Hamre was advocating an increase of $100 billion annually to restore the
Pentagon's operational and modernization accounts, Shelton acknowledged in
his speech last week.
Skibbie said the problem has grown too large to be deferred any longer.
"We have a lot of problems facing defense," Skibbie said. "Given the
reduction in budgets [since 1993] we have this big bill we keep pushing in
front of us, a big bow wave."
Neither Bush nor Gore came close to advocating defense spending hikes of
the magnitude cited as essential by the CSIS analysis.
Gore supported spending an additional $127 billion over a 10-year period --
an annual increase of just $12.7 billion. Bush declined to name a specific
figure for defense hikes, while explicitly advocating a multi-tiered
national and theater missile defense system that some experts say would
itself require another $60-100 billion to deploy.
The Navy Disappears
Barring a major transformation of the Pentagon budget, the CSIS analysts
predict an inadvertent collapse of U.S. military capability, including:
The current inventory of 15,682 U.S. military aircraft, which requires an
annual production rate of 578 aircraft to maintain the status quo, will
plummet to 8,421 aircraft by 2010 under current procurement funding, which
is only providing for about 148 new planes each year.
To sustain the current Navy force of 304 ships and submarines, Congress
must fund an annual shipbuilding rate of eight vessels funded by an average
procurement commitment of $15 billion each year to offset the inevitable
retirement of older ships. The 2000 ship-building request covered only six
ships and $6.7 billion in investment. Long-term projections show the Navy
constructing on average of only four ships per year. Under that trend, the
Navy will shrink to a force of only 89 ships two decades from now.
Several defense leaders have begun to step forward to confirm the necessity
of a radical shift in budgetary priorities to restore the health of the
U.S. armed forces, including Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James L. Jones
and Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters.
In a meeting with the Defense Writers Group on Oct. 26, Peters admitted
that the air service is seriously lagging in its efforts to modernize the
aircraft fleet.
"If you want us to continue to do what we are doing today from an Air Force
perspective, you're going to have to give us $20 billion to $30 billion a
year more," Peters said. "We need to replace 150 airplanes a year from now
to the next 15 to 20 years. I think this year we did under 50. It's
substantially fewer than 150."
Jones, the Marine Corps commandant, has been quoted as favoring a gradual
ramp-up in Pentagon spending to a level of 4 or 4.5 percent of GDP to
restore the lost procurement funding from the 1990s. That would represent
"an investment strategy in this time of unbelievable surpluses and I
believe it is eminently doable," Jones told the journal Defense Daily.
Years of Denial
Goure said defense leaders are aware of the impending crisis after years of
ignoring warnings of its coming.
"The department is running scared," Goure said of the military leadership.
"One or more of the services is about to crash and burn."
Signs are emerging throughout the armed services of the impending collapse,
Goure said, including all tactical aviation branches of each service.
Other analysts have warned that even with the current federal budget
surpluses, an increase in the defense budget from 2.5 to 4 percent of the
gross domestic product -- as some officials have privately said is needed
-- would face profound political opposition. Based on the current economy,
a 4 percent GDP increase in the Pentagon budget would amount to about $438
billion in 2002.
"The 4 percent defense solution, if implemented in this decade, would be
tantamount to a declaration of total war on Social Security and Medicare in
the following decade," wrote Franklin Spinney, a tactical aircraft analyst
in the Defense Department's program analysis and evaluation directorate, in
an e-mail assessment that circulated widely through the defense community.
"Such a war could be justified only if our nation's survival was at stake,"
Spinney cautioned.
Goure said there are no easy options.
"Neither one [political party] is willing to give up global power," Goure
said. "There is no way to get out of the world."
[Forwarded For Information Purposes Only - Not
Necessarily Endorsed By The Sender - A.K. Pritchard]
------------------------------
A.K. Pritchard
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