Officials, lawmakers again exaggerate Defense cuts

Here we go again.  On February 24, 2015, eighty members of the military-industrial-congressional complex, including former U.S. government officials, retired military leaders, and national security experts from both parties, sent an open letter to Congress urging them to increase defense spending by a trillion dollars over the next decade and end what they claim is the needless harm the Budget Control Act and sequestration are inflicting on our armed forces.

This letter was followed up a week later by letters from 37 members of the House Armed Services Committee and the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee asking the budget committees to add $77 billion to the BCA level for the Pentagon in FY16 alone. The chairman followed this up with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Like most proposals of these kind, these missives present a distorted and misleading picture of the current U.S. defense budget and the current state of our armed forces.

The letters claim that the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) and sequestration require trillions of dollars in defense cuts.  While the BCA does mandate reductions of $500 billion in projected levels of defense spending over the next decade, the letters ignore the fact that, even under the BCA, the defense budget is still extremely high by historical standards. 

The current level of defense spending, even under the BCA, is $100 billion more in real terms than the drawdown after the Korean, Vietnam, and Cold wars.  Additionally, in real terms, the defense budget for FY2015 (the current fiscal year) is 45 percent higher than the lowest post-Cold War budget and 37 percent higher than the FY2001 budget that existed when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Finally, beginning in FY 1998, the base, or non-war, defense budget grew in real terms for an unprecedented 13 straight years, 9 more years than under President Reagan, unleashing what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, one of the signers of the letter, correctly called a “gusher of defense spending.”

The letter also exaggerates the impact of sequester, or automatic across the board cuts. A sequester has only occurred once, in FY2013, when the Congress refused to lift the caps for the Pentagon request that came in over the BCA caps.  Since then the Congress has lifted the BCA caps every year, avoiding further sequestration.  Moreover, the Pentagon has learned to get around the BCA caps by using its OCO, or war-funding budget, which is not impacted by the BCA, as a slush fund.  In fact, as Robert Work, the Deputy Secretary of Defense admitted, at least $20 billion of the $64 billion OCO budget in FY2015 were base budget costs that had nothing to do with the war.

The reductions in the ground forces that the letter-writers lament will bring troop levels back to where they were before the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, something that the country does after every large ground war ends.  Moreover, these leaders ignore the fact that if we should be foolish enough to send large land forces into another Middle Eastern country, we can always mobilize the Ground Forces of the Reserve Component that performed so admirably in combat over the past 15 years.

Most importantly, the letters fail to acknowledge that the Pentagon does not have a resource problem but a management problem. For example, even with sequestration in effect, the DOD has added tens of thousands of civilians to its payroll. Moreover, the Department still has not come to grips with the escalating costs of military compensation for active duty and retired personnel, which the Administration and the Congress allowed to grow much faster, almost 50 percent, than inflation over the last decade. And the Defense Department has done little to reign in the costs of weapons programs. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Pentagon’s top 85 acquisition programs have experienced cost overruns of $411 billion, almost the same amount that sequestration has cut from projected levels of defense spending. Finally, the last Base Closure and Realignment Commission ended up costing $30 billion more than it saved.

As the Congress discusses these letter, it should keep in mind the following quote from Aston Carter, the newly sworn in Secretary Defense, a strong proponent of lifting the caps. “The taxpayer cannot comprehend, let alone support the defense budget when they read of cost overruns, lack of accounting and accountability, needless overhead and the like. This must stop.” And this from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the newly installed chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We have to acknowledge an inconvenient fact: sequestration has occurred, in part, because a growing public frustration with the culture of waste and inefficiency as the Defense Department went unaddressed for far too long.”

Hopefully, they will heed these admonitions before unleashing another needless gusher of defense spending that the letters recommend.

Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy think tank.