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Battle of the Bean Counters
Travis | Apr 13, 2009 |
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Herbert Kornfield, RIP
After Secretary Gates made his defense budget recommendations last Monday, a fierce debate erupted in Congress, the media, and the blogosphere. Conservatives accused President Obama of attempting to gut defense spending. Liberals’ quite (in my opinion) vapid response was that Obama was actually increasing the defense budget (vapid because liberals think less defense spending would be better – why not just own that position and explain our vision instead of merely reacting to conservatives’ sniping?)
The debate reached a head with last week’s unfortunately titled “Obama and Gates Gut the Military” in the Wall Street Journal by AEI analysts Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt. In the aftermath of this piece’s publication, Donnelly took to the digital pages of the popular COIN blog abu muqawama to present his “ten-step process for analyzing the defense budget.”
Lawmaking is often compared to sausage making. To that analogy I would add budget analysis. Donnelly exposed his methodology on abu muqawama, and there were some pretty significant shortcomings. I had no choice but to respond, which I did this morning.
I’m probably carping, but it takes a bean counter to refute a bean counter. Plus precision matters.
In the bigger picture, Donnelly’s WSJ piece presented the main talking points conservatives are using to oppose defense budget reform this year: 1) the world is dangerous! 2) these new weapons are really high-tech! and 3) these cuts are ad hoc and not tied to strategy!
Particularly on that last TP, beware. You’re going to hear that from conservatives a lot this year. How do I know? Because anytime you oppose something the government is trying to do, the default tactic is to call for more study. The arms control lobby (aka us) did this for eight years under President Bush, so I know of what I speak.
Now that Obama runs the show, the Heritage Foundation will say any defense budget decisions cannot be made until the National Security Strategy and Quadrennial Defense Review are released, the latter in about a year. Again, when opposed, just delay, delay, delay.
To the delayers, however, may I suggest reading Anthony Cordesman’s assessment from last month? He wrote:
If God really hates you, you may end up working on a Quadrennial Defense Review: The most pointless and destructive planning effort imaginable. You will waste two years on a document decoupled from a real world force plan, from an honest set of decisions about manpower or procurement, with no clear budget or [future years defense plan], and with no metrics to measure or determine its success.
That’s what we should wait for while there are two wars going on and the country is in an economic crisis that demands a realignment of budgetary priorities?
More strategic planning is almost always a good thing, but not when it is used as an excuse to delay hard decisions at a critical hour.
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