December 20, 2000

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT & THOMAS DONNELLY

SUBJECT: Defense

We commend to your attention the column by James Schlesinger and Harold Brown in today’s Washington Post (“What About Defense,” p. A35). The two former defense secretaries confirm an argument we have long made: that U.S. defense spending needs to be increased substantially.

Even outgoing Clinton Administration defense officials now accept that annual Pentagon budgets fall $30 to $50 billion short of what is needed. Schlesinger and Brown gauge the defense deficit to be much higher. They echo arguments first made by William Kristol and Robert Kagan several years ago (“Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996) and more recently in the Project’s comprehensive defense report (Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century; available on the Project’s interim website at www.geocities.com/newamericancentury), that making up the defense deficit will require “a phased increase in defense spending to a level about 20 percent higher than the present one.”

Though Schlesinger and Brown reflect an emerging consensus that defense spending must be significantly increased, they also observe rightly that President-elect Bush’s campaign pledge to restore America’s armed forces has not been backed by a commensurate commitment to substantially larger Pentagon budgets. The Schlesinger-Brown column is also an indication that closing the defense deficit is an idea that would enjoy wide bipartisan support, if the new administration will provide strategic and political leadership