In a move partially designed to one-up the Democrats, House Republicans voted today to impose a one-year moratorium on all earmarks, not just those to for-profit companies.  The ban, approved by voice vote, would apply not only to appropriations bills but also to authorizing and tax measures.

“Yay!” you say? “One of my biggest fears was yet another earmark for the C-17 or the F-35 extra engine!”

Not so much – It looks as if the so-called ban on added spending may be full of holes. The Hill notes that:

… billions added to the defense bills for existing national security programs under contract with major defense companies such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman probably would not be affected.

For example, when House appropriators add more funds for Boeing’s C-17 cargo aircraft, they do not disclose them as earmarks. Instead, they are considered programs essential to national security even though none of the funds are requested by the Pentagon. These funds benefit lawmaker districts where the weapons systems are built.

Further, the Senate does not look to be on board with any current plan for a ban on earmarks. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman, and champion of the C-17, Daniel Inouye has already begun to fight back, remarking that the action was not in the “best interest of the Congress or the American people.”

Today’s announcement is a shrewd political move for a House that has recently been plagued by controversy and talk of corruption, but bears little weight. Congress will not be fighting any tigers in the near future.

UPDATE 3/11: Okay, okay, some people *cough* Dan and Mary *cough* don't get the reference. From Wikipedia: I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! and Other Stories, by Dr. Seuss -- "The title story concerns a boy who brags that he can fight 30 tigers and win. He makes excuse after excuse, finally disqualifying all the tigers until he must fight no tigers at all." Ha!

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, Congress (all tags)

As might be expected, the Pentagon's budget has increased dramatically since U.S. entry into Afghanistan in 2001.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the total defense budget has grown from $432 billion in FY01 to $720 billion in FY11, a real increase of approximately 67 percent. The Pentagon’s base budget, which excludes war and nuclear weapons funding, has also grown steadily over the last decade, increasing from $390 billion in FY01 to $540 billion in FY11, a real increase of 38 percent.

See the full analysis here.

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, FY 2011 Budget Request (all tags)

You may recall the policy debate over Afghanistan from last year:

Analyst 1: [Counterterrorism] is better. I go on first and clean the [foreign nation].
Analyst 2: [Counterinsurgency] is better. I leave the [foreign nation] silky and smooth.
Analyst 1: Oh, really, fool?
Analyst 2: Really.
[Fracas ensues…]

People feel strongly about other policy debates, too. For instance, some people feel that the United States is focusing too much on counterinsurgency. Others feel that nuclear terrorism has been overhyped.

Feelings are nice things. I enjoy feelings. But what do we spend?

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, FY2011 Budget Request (all tags)

Yesterday, U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley announced a probable cost overrun and major delay in the tri-service, nine-nation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Under the Nunn-McCurdy statute, this would trigger an extensive, mandatory review of alternatives.

The outcome of any upcoming review, however, appears to already be determined. “This is a fifth-generation fighter/attack capability,” Donley told reporters, “There are no alternatives to that in our system. Yes, you can build the 4.5 generation, enhanced capability F-15 kind of capability. But, really there are no good alternatives to F-35 at this point. This is a program to which we are deeply committed.”

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget bases its revised program strategy for the F-35 on the Joint Estimating Team II report (JET II), prepared last fall. Based on this analysis, the Pentagon chose to extend development by 13 months, reduce production by 122 aircraft and add an additional low-rate initial production lot, LRIP 9, to the program. It also adds a single carrier variant to the development program and pulls three LRIP aircraft into developmental testing to add to the 19 flight test assets already in the program.

Overall, the FY 2011 budget request contains $11.4 billion for the F-35, including $8.7 billion in procurement funding, $2.3 billion for continued research and development and $535 million for spare parts.

Since the budget was announced in February, however, problems with the F-35 have continued to mount…

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, FY 2011 Budget Request, F-35 (all tags)

In case you haven’t heard, the President’s FY 2011 budget request was released this week.

For a full report, see my budget briefing book online.  

For Fiscal Year (FY) 2011, which begins on October 1, 2010, the Obama Administration has requested a base budget of $548.9 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD). This is approximately $18 billion, or 3.4 percent, above FY 2010 appropriations.

In addition, the administration has requested $159.3 billion to support Overseas Contingency Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which brings the FY 2011 defense budget request to a total of $708.3 billion.

Including an expected $33 billion in supplemental appropriations, the planned percent increase in total DoD spending for FY 2011 will be 2.1 percent over FY 2010.

Adjusted for inflation this amounts to a $9 billion, or 1.3 percent, increase over FY 2010.

In addition to an initial $708 billion, the administration has requested $18 billion for nuclear weapons activities at DoE and $7 billion for additional non-DoD defense related activities. This brings total non-DoD defense related spending (053/054) to a total of $25 billion, a $2 billion increase over FY 2010.

Though the numbers are large, particularly compared to non-military discretionary spending, let’s look at the bright side of things...

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Security Matters, FY 2011 Budget Request, Iraq & Afghanistan (all tags)

Gordon Adams, the Don Corleone of State/DOD Budgets, weighed in earlier this week on the QDDR. In arguing that State and USAID should possess a clear civilian mission that is separate from merely supporting DOD’s stabilization missions, Adams writes:

There are also serious near-term downsides to a mission that ties the civilian capability to the Defense mission. First, because the focus is on short-term results, we could become intertwined in the internal affairs of countries where stability is an issue, but the conditions for success are minimal. I’m thinking here of Somalia. Second, even with a civilian attachment, U.S. engagement presents a military face. Therefore, “host” countries such as Yemen wonder whether Washington is truly investing in its long-term needs or simply intervening to protect U.S. interests. Finally, after decades of teaching foreign militaries that their proper role is to stay in their barracks and to eschew any involvement in politics and business, we now seem to be saying that the military is the most effective institution for governance and economic growth.

That third point certainly lingers, doesn’t it? Given the 2010 QDR’s commitment to “Strengthen and institutionalize general purpose force capabilities for security force assistance,” the apparent contradiction highlighted by Adams is worth keeping in mind as the U.S. military expands its ability to train and equip foreign militaries.

So what is the appropriate civilian mission for State and USAID? Adams suggests:

I envision one element of such a scenario working like so: Governance would be the centerpiece of State/USAID. As such, there would be a major investment in State and USAID so that they could provide assistance for the rule of law, the reduction of corruption, administrative and political processes, and civil society. A much smaller U.S. civilian capability would exist to work alongside deployed U.S. military forces, but the goal would be to make such deployments unnecessary. (And Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t the prototypes; both were U.S.-led invasions with regime change in mind.) For instance, such a mission focus could lead to sending civilians into many African countries with stronger governance in mind, and a small number of military personnel for security force training, under State policy guidance.

[snip]

The bottom line is that any “whole of government” effort at interagency cooperation needs to be based on the reality that the missions of the civilian agencies are not the same as the missions of the military. With that in mind, what we really need is a healthy debate about strategy and mission, with a civilian set of missions clearly defined. It’s a mission that State and USAID need to shape before they can bring the case to the interagency discussion.

Word.

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Security Matters, QDR (all tags)

Defense geeks are abuzz: A draft version of the Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) was obtained yesterday by Defense News.  The Pentagon’s major planning document, spearheaded by Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, will shape U.S. defense posture around the globe for the next several years and likely influence the fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget.  

The document “Acknowledges and puts top priority on succeeding in today’s conflicts,” but also places a major emphasis on the balance between “near and longer-term risks.”  It states that the FY 2011 budget will build on FY 2010, placing additional attention on “key lines of investment.”  These include, “our troops and our people” and “how we buy and operate.”

Gone is the focus on fighting two peer militaries simultaneously, which has existed as a pervasive part of the QDR since the 1990s.  The Pentagon will scrap that concept, “in order to prepare the services for a wider and more complex array of security challenges,” notes Jason Sherman.

Spencer Ackerman points out that this new focus is better because it is centered on existing capabilities: “Not on people. Not on states. Not on specific enemies. But on capabilities that hostile actors have demonstrated to use against the United States and its allies.”

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, FY 2011, QDR (all tags)

An article in the Washington Independent today, in which I’m quoted, points to one – particularly glaring – problem with President Obama’s proposed spending freeze: Why does the proposal exclude defense spending?

From the piece, by Spencer Ackerman:

But while Obama did not rule out future defense cuts in the speech, many of these defense wonks could not understand why an effort at deficit reduction would explicitly exclude defense spending. “Defense spending is over half our discretionary spending,” Olson said. “It would be crazy not to include it. It begs the question whether this is a real effort.” Shortly before the speech, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the House, told reporters that any spending freeze ought to include defense spending.

[snip]

Still, Todd Harrison, an defense-budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he believed the combination of massive defense budgets, massive federal deficits and a weak economy would inevitably compel Congress and the president to cut defense. “It’s likely in the future that everything will come under pressure, defense included,” Harrison said. But he conceded that a variable in that calculation is “political will” for such cuts — which is not in evidence in either the White House or, especially, the Congress, which loves to send defense money back home to individual states and districts.

Also today, Fred Kaplan writes that, “If some Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1982, woken up in 2009, and looked at the U.S. military budget as an indicator of what was going on in the world, he would assume that the Cold War were still raging.”  He notes that, while every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget should not be subject to a spending freeze, there is certainly a large chunk that should.

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, FY 2011, Shameless Self-Promotion (all tags)

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates hosted a meeting with top defense company executives for the first time since 2008, where he stressed the need for a closer partnership and pledged to work with the White House to “secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time.”

Steady growth seems likely, since recent reports indicate that the President’s upcoming defense budget request will increase from $636.3 billion to a record $708 billion in FY 2011. This number does not include an additional $33 billion in supplemental appropriations, set to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  But although Gates has called for ‘steady’ growth, he has also vowed to kill many unneeded and troubled programs.  

Last week, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn reiterated the criteria that senior Pentagon leaders have used to determine which weapon programs will be cut or curtailed in FY 2011: “Our criteria for exercising program discipline are clear: programs that are performing poorly, either over budget or behind schedule or delivering less capability than promised, open themselves up to reconsideration.”

In addition, Reuters reports that, “it looks like mounting public concern about federal spending and the sharply widening budget deficit are likely to curb the ability of lawmakers to pump money back into programs targeted for termination as they have in the past.”

Draft budget documents obtained this week show Gates is seeking to end seven weapons programs in FY 2011, including two that were rescued from the eight-item kill list last year -- Boeing Co's C-17 transport plane and a second engine for Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jet.

Other new terminations are less surprising, including a new Navy cruiser and a program to replace the Navy's EP-3 surveillance plane, while some programs, such as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, an amphibious vehicle being developed for the Marine Corps by General Dynamics Corp that has experienced problems in the past, have apparently escaped the axe, at least for now.

The U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review and FY 2011 budget request will be released one week from today.  Until then, the speculation continues.

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, FY 2011 (all tags)

I’m still sifting through some of the nuclear headlines from the holiday break and wanted to address the hyperventilating in the blogosphere and the media about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin’s end of the year comments on missile defense.  In a visit to Vladivostok on December 29, Putin stated:

If we don’t develop a missile defense system, a danger arises for us that with an umbrella protecting our partners from offensive weapons, they will feel completely safe….The balance will be disrupted, and then they will do whatever they want, and aggressiveness will immediately arise both in real politics and economics.

The view from the U.S. press seems to be that this means missile defense is the main issue holding up completion of the New START agreement.

Maybe we’re in too much of a “don’t freak out mood” over here at the Center, but I don’t put much stock in Putin’s remarks.  The reality is that despite Russia’s initial positive reaction to the Obama administration’s new approach to missile defense in Europe, it remains deeply concerned about U.S. missile defense plans.  Putin didn’t say anything new…

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Security Matters, Missile Defense, New START, Putin, Russia (all tags)