Our greatest risk right now is that we may spend large amounts of money on the wrong things. In so doing, we may never be able to do the right things.
In the US Defense is maybe the most critical of these pivot points. As it is defense takes up such a large part of US expenditure. So being "right" in what is decided in defense has immense ramifications.
Here is what is stake:
As Our Economy Slides, Will Our Military Follow?
By JOHN SAYEN
We
seem to be living in an age where so much that we thought certain and
permanent crumbles into dust be fore our eyes. Our once robust economy
founders while our once cherished personal liberties fade away.
Less apparent has been the ongoing decay and corruption that could lead to a crisis for our nation’s armed forces.
Many of us view our military as the one sound institution we have left.
The press and, of course, the military’s own leaders call it the best
in the world. It claims to dominate the full spectrum of conflict from
disaster relief to all out war while remaining apolitical and under
constitutionally prescribed civilian control.
Yet its constitutional controls are eroding. Although Congress retains
authority over the military budget, it has, since 1950, all but
formally abrogated its power to declare war. This has left the
president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, with de facto
power to take us to war on his own. Most presidents have exercised this
power with results that have ranged from disappointing to calamitous.
The press has credited the winding down of our war in Iraq to a modest
reinforcement of our troops, called the surge. In reality, it took a
Sunni-Shia civil war, Iranian intervention and some hefty bribes to
persuade enough Iraqis to break off their hitherto successful
insurgency against us.
While we have benefited from reduced casualties and relative calm, our
real reward has been little more than the right to with draw gracefully
from a country from which we had once hoped to dominate the Middle
East. In Afghanistan, where our situation continues its steady
deterioration, a rather less dignified retreat may be in our future.
After our short-lived success in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, both
the military and the press declared that we had finally put the Vietnam
War behind us. But have we? Today we fight enemies that don’t even have
armies, don’t control defined territories or have recognizable
economies. They lack modern heavy weapons, night-vision gear, armor and
much else that we consider essential. Yet even after years of costly
effort, we have failed to subdue or even to weaken most of them.
What has gone wrong? If our armed forces are not the “greatest in
history,” they are certainly the most expensive. Our military budget
nearly equals those of all the other nations of the world combined.
Though we spend more today than we ever have since 1945, our forces are
actually shrinking: Since 1986, our armed services have lost nearly
half their force structure.
Worse, this shrinking force must rely on old and deteriorating
equipment that our military procurement system cannot replace at
affordable cost.
We have also neglected the training and selection of our military
leaders. This was a consequence of our “tradition” of only mobilizing
for war at the last minute and relying on doctrine that reduces warfare
to the engineering problem of overwhelming the enemy with superior
resources. Instead of leaders, we train technicians who could put
“steel on target,” without necessarily understanding why or how or even
if it would help.
Since World War II, this style of warfare has won us tactical
successes, but not wars. Worse, our imploding economy coupled with
skyrocketing procurement costs could make it impossible for us to
continue it, forcing us to fight from scarcity rather than abundance.
Even now, our enemies can negate much of our firepower by denying us
targets, and letting us hurt ourselves by hitting civilians instead.
Our very strength is a weakness because, when we don’t win, it makes us
look foolish. When we have successes, we look like bullies and create
sympathy for our enemies.
So what can we do about all this? Here are some directions in which real reform may lie.
■
Realize that we have a problem. Drum-and-trumpet hoopla about how great
our military is has led us to exaggerate its real capabilities and to
give it missions it cannot really perform.
■
Fix the finances. The Defense Department has spent literally trillions
of dollars it can’t account for. It has not been able to pass an audit
in decades. If we can’t even balance our books, how can we hope to
control the ruinous expense of our style of warfare?
Financial exhaustion triggered by a war in Afghanistan brought down the
mighty Soviet Union just 20 years ago. Could this be our fate as well?
■ Re-evaluate the military’s governing authority. Should the president exercise anything like sole control over the military?
Should he even control it in peacetime? During our first 120 years,
most of the military consisted of militia that the state governors
controlled. A decision to go to war had to be based on a national
consensus involving both Congress and the states.
That requirement preserved both our liberties and our security at a far lower cost.
■
The toughest and most important direction is to find new leaders, both
military and civilian, who are competent, informed and uncommitted to
the status quo. What we have now is mainly technicians, politicians and
bureaucrats, all dominated by special interests. Leadership reform is a
subject that could easily consume a shelf of books, but the books and
articles by retired U.S. Army Maj. Don Vandergriff will do for a start.
Our military will never be better than its leaders.
The next administration has promised us change. Will there be any for the military?
John Sayen
is a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. He is the author of
the introduction, “The Overburden of America’s Outdated Defenses,” to a
new anthology, “America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for
President Obama and the New Congress.”
