The Think Tanks Have Spoken

Wednesday, February 5, 2014
http://www.informationdissemination.net/

The folks at some of the leading think tanks in Washington (The American Enterprise Institute, The Center for a New American Security, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments) got together today on Capitol Hill to outbrief an incredibly innovative exercise in which teams from each organization (using the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments' tool) put forward their strategies to rebalance DoD capabilities (and capacities, as we will see) as "alternatives" to QDR 15. Lots of information on the slides posted at the link above, and several thoughts arise:

There is real and lasting damage being done to the national security apparatus of the United States by the combination of insufficient resources, strategic paralysis, and the inability of our government to get entitlement spending under control. The teams were clear in their determination to make the "least bad" choices, as the dollar amounts they were given to work with ensured that the task would not be easy. Even in an atmosphere in which decision making was not hampered by the weight of Jointness or impact on Congressional delegations, the cuts suggested in this exercise are by any measure, significant.
The teams seem to come down on the side of funding high end warfighting capability over war preventing capability, as plus ups to the Air Force and the Navy SSN force (and the cuts to the carrier force) demonstrate.

The magnitude of these cuts bring into sharp relief the cowardice of Congress and the Administration in tackling serious defense reform, including base closures and pay and compensation reform. Because so much of the budget is off limits, we will continue to pare down the force across the board, although this effort suggests several ways to do so that are not "Service share" driven
There is a shared perception that the Air Force is in a hurt locker. All four teams plus-sed up the Air Force, and the adds reflect in part the cost of buying technology--space in particular, but also long range bombers, and recapitalization of two legs of the strategic triad.
The Army comes in for the largest cuts in the exercise, with all four teams cutting it significantly. Of interest to me (of course) were what the teams did with the Navy--and the results weren't pretty. I suppose the good news is that they didn't cut the DoN as nearly as much as they did the Army. And truth be told, the game did force rational people to make rational decisions based on irrational circumstances (the current budgeting atmosphere). I know many of the people who participated, and they are some of the sharpest, least hyperbolic people in town.

The logic seems to go like this--the Air Force is in profoundly bad shape, and we need to fix that. In order to do so, we'll raid the Army's TOA. What you say? You can't get enough out of the Army fast enough to meet the gates you need for the budgeting madness? Oh--so now we have to go and get some money from the Navy. Aircraft carriers! There you go. One cut, big money. Under both budget conditions (the bad and the really bad), a minimum of 2 carriers get cut, with one team cutting four. Problem solved.

So if you think like I do--that the aircraft carrier is the most important component of forward deployed credible combat power--how could they possibly move to cut the carrier force from 11 to 9 (in the best case) or 7 (in the worst case)? Well, we did it to ourselves. We abandoned the Mediterranean in the 90's as a hub for naval forward presence and then enshrined it in the Maritime Strategy of 2007. When you have two employment hubs and a four to one ratio of carriers to hubs, all you need is 8. I realize some are going to read this as a "the carrier is obsolete" signal, but it isn't. It is math, pure and simple, math under the irrational pressure of budgeting malpractice (if the carrier were obsolete, the rational thing would be to zero them). And as long as the Navy does not articulate the need for the third hub and does not make the case for what we lose without it, we will are likely to put CVN's away with useful life in them rather than pay to refuel them.

On the positive side, the teams recognized the value of our SSN force with three out of four teams increasing their numbers under either scenario. I'm a huge fan of of what SSN's bring to the fight, and I believe we need more of them. But clearly, this decision is part of the preference for war-fighting power over war preventing power.

That's actually the message I take out of this entire exercise. We used to have a military that had the capacity to both prevent war and wage it. We are moving steadily toward one that can wage it, but which is less capable of preventing it. There is nothing wrong with this, if that is what we are choosing. But if that debate has occurred, I must have missed it. Rather, we are backing into this arrangement as the result of strategic blindness, bureaucratic malpractice, legislative gridlock and public disinterest. It doesn't have to be this way.

Bryan McGrath