The Obama/Gates War Budget

By Steve Hynd

I feel mystified every time pundits talk as if the Obama administration is trying to cut the military's budget. It isn't being cut, it's being expanded. Gates had tried to push the Bush administration's 14% increase on Obama and it didn't work, but Obama still authorised an increase.

Gates has signaled for months that the Pentagon's resources are misallocated, but his embrace of the budget increase proposed by President Obama represents an abrupt turnaround. Late in the Bush administration, he blessed a military-service-driven budget proposal for 2010 packed with $60 billion in spending beyond what the Pentagon had earlier recommended. Much of the added funds would have accelerated the production of existing ships, airplanes, Army vehicles and missile defenses.

...The new president agreed instead to a 4 percent increase in defense spending, which put Gates, whom Obama decided to keep on as defense secretary, in the position of having to reorient military priorities within a smaller spending limit than he had initially supported.

...The 2009 total of $513 billion -- not including special Iraq and Afghanistan war costs -- exceeds the combined military budgets of the next 25 highest-spending nations.

The Pentagon got $513 billion instead of  $584 billion - but had originally asked for even less as being sufficient, given that all-important caveat of "not including special Iraq and Afghanistan war costs".

The Obama administration, and Gates, are now considering major cuts in the "shiny toy" category of military spending.

Among the programs expected to be heavily cut is the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a network of vehicles linked by high-tech communications that has been plagued by technical troubles and delays; with a price tag exceeding $150 billion, it is now one of the most costly military efforts.

Gates also is considering cutting a new $20 billion communications satellite program and reducing the number of aircraft carriers from 11 to 10, and he plans to eliminate elements of the decades-old missile defense effort that are over budget or considered ineffective, according to industry and administration sources.

...Obama addressed the Pentagon budget March 24, saying: "We've already identified potentially $40 billion in savings just by some of the procurement reforms. . . . And we are going to continue to find savings in a way that allows us to put the resources where they're needed, but to make sure that we're not simply fattening defense contractors."

But the figures tell us that those savings won't effect the overall size of the military budget - it's still going up. Nor will the savings go to Iraq and Afghanistan - remember that all important caveat because it cuts more than one way.

Instead, the money will go to reorganising the U.S. military as a force capable of fighting 15 year plus "nation building" occupations i.e. counter-insurgency wars. But that fateful phrase -- "not including special Iraq and Afghanistan war costs" -- comes into play again. The money is being spent on a generic capability to fight such wars. Wars that can only be fought, at great off-budget expense of both blood and treasure, if the U.S. keeps occupying foreign lands.

Bob Gates has been clear that he expects the military to re-tool as an all-singing, all-dancing COIN nation-building apparatus. Not co-incidentally, there will be no drop in the military's budget allocation due to this refocussing and unlikely ever to be one given that COIN wars last decades and are horrifically expensive. But more wars of occupation will be the inevitable consequence of the COINdinistas PR push to say "Can we win wars? Yes we can!" 

As James Joyner reminds us, policy is what gets funded, the rest is just talk. The Obama administration is busily engaged in finding extra funding to pursue an inevitably interventionist policy objective.