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MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS FROM: DAN McKIVERGAN, Deputy Director SUBJECT: Defense Budget America is at war, yet, according to military historian Frederick Kagan and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, we have not funded our military to reflect the harsh realities we face in the post-September 11 world. Nor have we had a serious debate about how much we should be spending to defend our nation abroad and at home. In the accompanying Weekly Standard piece ("Cheap Hawks Can't Fly"), Kagan welcomes the administration's new strategic doctrine released in mid-September as a "relief from a decade of confusion and misdirection," but warns that the "defense budget must be increased dramatically" if we expect our military to be "able to fulfill the President's national security strategy." Likewise, Gingrich believes ("A Wide World of Trouble," Newsweek, 10/28/02) that to meet the security challenges ahead spending on national security should be increased from 3 percent of gross domestic product to 5 percent -- or about $200 billion by 2005. This proposed increase is substantially more than the Administration's own budget plan, which calls for a spending level of 3.3 percent of GDP in 2006. Given the stakes involved, it is odd that while there's been considerable debate about how much we should spend on prescription drug coverage for seniors, education programs, and the farm bill, there's been scant talk about how much is enough when it comes to America's military security. As Gingrich correctly points out, "we need a national debate [on defense spending] that's not occurring right now."
In recent speeches
and in the newly minted National Security Strategy, President Bush has
declared that he intends to prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively
and to oppose the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by rogue
states. U.S. actions in Afghanistan and preparations for a war against
Iraq have confirmed that he means what he says. The president's forthright
approach has been a welcome relief from a decade of confusion and misdirection.
But there remains one critical component that the president does not mention:
A year into this activist foreign policy, the defense agencies that will
prosecute the war on terrorism remain starved of resources and thus incapable
of fulfilling their assigned tasks. The rapidly developing crisis with
North Korea sharply underlines this point. In 1994, Kim Jong
Il extracted a series of bribes from a war-wary Clinton administration
in return for the promise to terminate its nuclear program. Now, having
admitted that it broke that promise, North Korea is preparing to demand
another set of concessions for yet another promise. The Bush administration
appears to understand that there comes a point at which the United States
must insist that North Korea keep its promises without further bribes.
This is the right course, but there is no way to guarantee that it won't
lead to open conflict and, possibly, war. Can the United States win a
war against North Korea? Of course. Estimates vary wildly on the number
of casualties we would take and inflict, but that we would win is not
in doubt. What would happen,
however, if war with North Korea broke out, or even threatened, while
we were fighting around Baghdad? Or during the period after victory when
thousands of troops were required to restore order in Iraq? The answer
is frightening. Our armed forces right now are not capable of fighting
well in two such conflicts. The result would be not defeat in either,
but almost certainly greater damage to our allies and many more casualties
sustained by both sides than would be necessary if our military were more
capable. The great danger,
however, is not that we would fight and endure damage, but that we would
be deterred from fighting, leading us to yet another bad deal. Which could
be disastrous. We know the North Koreans already possess highly advanced
ballistic missile technology. And we have no reason to be confident that
they would not make their weapons available to the highest bidders--for
North Korea is an extremely poor and hungry country--or use them to blackmail
us and their neighbors. In order to halt the North Korean nuclear arsenal,
we need the strength to face the prospect of war with Pyongyang with equanimity.
In the short term,
then, Bush's failure to champion increases in the numerical strength of
the armed forces and to secure an adequate defense budget threatens to
undermine his forthright foreign policy. Between the downturn of our economy
and the upsurge of patriotism in the wake of September 11, it can no longer
be said that there are not enough volunteers. The army needs probably
50,000 more soldiers on active duty (the equivalent of two divisions,
plus increases in supporting elements); the navy and the air force need
more pilots and crews; the Marines should have another expeditionary force
on active duty. These are needed simply to execute the president's current
plans. The long-term picture
is bleaker. The president rightly insists we transform the military to
prepare for future conflict, but his current budget spends too little
on "leap-ahead" technologies. The administration may already
be heeding this criticism, however, and preparing to kill or reduce certain
systems (including the F-22, the Comanche helicopter, and the navy's DD21)
in order to fund the leap-ahead systems, missile defense, and the war
on terrorism. This is not an acceptable
solution. Without developing the interim systems, it is impossible to
know what the next set of systems should look like and what attendant
changes should be made in organization, doctrine, and training. And the
world will not wait for us to complete our leap. As events have shown,
the armed forces must be able to meet multiple and significant threats
even as the technologies they rely on are evolving. Killing the interim
systems will reduce our capacity to respond to crises and likely force
us to choose between accepting greater damage than is necessary and failing
to act when action is essential. It is vital, in other
words, to fund both interim systems and "leap-ahead" technologies.
The administration's other priorities--ballistic missile defense and homeland
defense--are also important and necessary to the successful prosecution
of the war on terrorism. But those efforts should not compete with conventional
armed forces for funding. In short, the defense
budget must be increased dramatically. The Bush administration, it will
be objected, has already increased the budget both in terms of proposals
and in requests for emergency supplemental appropriations. Most of those
increases are appropriate to help the nation respond to the terrorist
attacks, but they do not touch on the problems outlined above. Increases
of some $100 billion annually or more--over and above the increases already
called for--will be necessary to provide for a defense establishment able
to fulfill the president's national security strategy. This fact should surprise
no one. The president has repeatedly said we are at war, that it will
last a long time, and that it may take many unpredictable turns. Which
makes it all the stranger that President Bush has not called for a wartime
budget. Money alone, of course,
will not solve the problem. The Department of Defense needs radical reform
as much as the agencies handling homeland security do. The activities
of the individual services need to be mutually supporting, to bring about
truly joint planning and programming. Organizational and doctrinal reform
within the services is also essential. Without it, no amount of advanced
technology will transform the way we conduct war. The truth is that
we need to increase readiness and the size of the force today. We need
to purchase interim systems, even flawed ones, to upgrade our capabilities
in the mid-term. We need to invest heavily in generating truly transformational
technologies for the long term. We need to fund missile defense and protect
ourselves domestically against terrorism. We need to make thoroughgoing
changes in the way our defense agencies do business. We need to transform
our strategic and organizational culture fundamentally. And we need to
do it all as quickly as possible, because the world will not wait for
us to be ready. Frederick W. Kagan is a military historian and co-author of "While America Sleeps."
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