Gates Wants To Change Pentagon Spending, Not Cut It

By Cernig

Bob Gates is in a privileged position for the next couple of months - he can say what he really thinks and neither his current nor his future boss will have the political capital to fire him. So his essay in the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine can be taken as straight from the horse's mouth, unfiltered by the Bush or Obama agendas. It's entitled "A Balanced Strategy, Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age" and is being taken by some writers as showing the wayfor an Obama administration's restructuring of the Pentagon into a leaner, less conventionally oriented war-fighting machine which will end entrenched "big ticket" procurementof shiny new hi-tech toys usless for fighting the kinds of wars America has mostly fought during the last four decades.

Spencer Ackerman writes:

Read this sentence and tell me some dirty hippie didn't write it:

Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit.

Much as I admire and respect Spencer, I did read the whole essay, and it sounds more like "give us the f-ing money" than anything else to me.

"Support for conventional modernization programs is deeply embedded in the Defense Department's budget, in its bureaucracy, in the defense industry, and in Congress. My fundamental concern is that there is not commensurate institutional support -- including in the Pentagon -- for the capabilities needed to win today's wars and some of their likely successors."

The words used throughout mean "commensurate", not "alternative", "also" not "instead". Gates explicitly backs FCS, the future bomber, the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and missile defense. All massive boondoggles. Then he wants extra for nation building, proxy group building (what, like the MeK?), cyberwarfare etc etc. Some programs, like the F-22 and the DDX littoral destroyer might face cutbacks or even the axe, but Gates seems certain the money should then be spent anyway, just on other weapons systems.

There is no doubt in my mind that conventional modernization programs will continue to have, and deserve, strong institutional and congressional support. I just want to make sure that the capabilities needed for the complex conflicts the United States is actually in and most likely to face in the foreseeable future also have strong and sustained institutional support over the long term.

Nowhere in the whole essay is there any echo of progressive hopes that an Obama administration would freeze then cut senseless Pentagon funding. The elephant in the room here is that America can either keep current levels of defense spending or try to balance the budget as best you can during a recession - and Gates doesn't seem to care about military deficit spending. Roll out the 4% Doctrine.

Then there's the lack of awareness that American foreign adventurism may be part of the problem, not part of the solution (an awareness which is as notably missing from Democratic "realism" as it is from Conservative "realism"). He says, without naming names, that Pakistan is the biggest threat because it's already a rogue/failed state with nukes and then goes on to repeat the usual BS, repeated by Obama too, about Iran actively seeking nukes too - something unsupported by the last NIE or current IAEA findings. China, North Korea, "failure" in Afghanistan and Iraq, stateless actors in their own small ponds...all are still on the list and still apparently to be possible targets for US preventative military action. In fact, despite saying that "not every outrage, every act of aggression, or every crisis can or should elicit a U.S. military response," Gates seems to think the only non-threat which has been touted as one by the Bush administration's warmongers is Russia.

Gates looks back at "two generations of constant military engagement" in "Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and more" and doesn't see anything inherently wrong in that - only the procurement strategy for another two decades of the same needs adjusting. He even quotes a neocon godfather, Donald Kagan, in his last graph:

In world affairs, "what seems to work best," the historian Donald Kagan wrote in his book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, ". . . is the possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose."

No, that doesn't sound like a dirty hippie to me. That sounds like more American exceptionalist ideology as an excuse for more military adventurism. Just like the realists of the late British Empire, the realists of current American foreign policy cannot see beyond their own paradigm: the Divine Mandate to carry the White Man's Burden, reworded for a New Age.

Comments

[Michael]

Seriously, I hope someone in this government realizes that we can't increase the military budget and bail out the economy and provide universal health care all at the same time. Nukes and bombers are pretty much useless against stateless enemies unless you are willing to have unlimited collateral damage. We need to cut back on conventional/nuke armed forces and increase our intelligence capabilities and have real diplomacy. It is so much cheaper and more effective than bullying, and it does not have the negative blowback.
Aside from Russia there is no state that has 1/100th of the nuke warheads that we do, so we should be negotiating with Russia so we can cut back our nukes so we only have 10 times as much as every one else.