The Defense Death Spiral
The courtiers in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac are lining up to give Leon Panetta advice on how to manage the Pentagon in the coming era of budget “constraints.” Most of this wisdom takes the form of platitudes of how important it is to have a strategy and to make the hard choices needed to budget for that strategy. Duh!
My current favorite is Dr. Daniel Goure’s recent blog on the web page of the Lexington Institute, a pro-defense “think tank.” Goure starts his advisory by saying:
Let’s be honest. The current U.S. defense program is underfunded, even at over $500 billion a year in the base budget and another $100 billion plus in contingency expenses.
Goure then goes on to discuss the need for vision, particularly concerning controlling personnel and health costs and avoiding duplication by transferring work done in government facilities, and by the military, to contractors. In other words, when times are tough, return to the old game of protecting industry at the expense of the soldier and the taxpayer.
Thanks for your honesty, Daniel, but more of the same won’t cut it this time.
Goure is correct about one thing, however. The defense program is underfunded. But before dispensing advice on how to shovel money to his friends in industry, Goure ought to explain how and why the highest budget since the end of World War II could possibly end up underfunding the current program. After all, the United States is engaged in a tough but relatively small war on terror, with far smaller forces and minuscule operational tempos compared to those deployed to either Korea and Vietnam.
Moreover, the United States no longer needs to spend a large part of the defense budget to maintain a large forward deployed conventional and nuclear forces to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union. With a few minor exceptions, the United States is also fielding the smallest combat-coded force structures since 1950. Nevertheless, despite a defense budget that has almost doubled in inflation adjusted dollars since 1998, Mr. Panetta is inheriting a defense program approaching the programmatic equivalent of a meltdown.
Why?
If Mr. Panetta wants to nurse the Pentagon into to health he must come to grips with the real causes of the Defense Death Spiral — a problem I have been studying and writing about since the late 1970s.
The central management problem plaguing the Department of Defense — i.e., the meltdown of the entire defense program — can be characterized in a general sense as being produced by the mutually reinforcing effects of …