Should national security be a bargaining chip in budget negotiations? The New York Analysis of Policy and Government continues its examination of this debate.
Writing in Questia, Lawrence P. Farrell Jr. noted: “…any debate about defense spending must address the strategy issue. An assessment of needed military capabilities flows from the national military strategy…Most pundits ignore this critical link, and much of the discussion that takes place in the media fails to note that analysts, in some very significant ways, redefine strategy for the purposes of their arguments. In some cases, this is explicitly defined, but in others, it is implicit and one wonders if the pundits are even aware of the difference between their analyses and the official national strategy.”
A 2015 Heritage analysis by Justin T. Johnson explained: “Instead of arguing the merits of a particular military spending level, much of the debate [revolves] around Democratic opposition to increasing defense spending without proportional increases to non-defense spending. The usual arguments for cutting defense spending will likely pop up as well. But what’s really needed is a more thoughtful debate… The first step is determining the vital interests of the United States. What must we, as a country, protect?…The next step is figuring out what threatens these vital interests…The third step is figuring out how to protect America’s vital interests from both the threats of today and those of the future.
“Once you have a strategy, you need to develop the tools to implement that strategy. For the military, this means figuring out the capabilities and the capacity needed to execute the strategy…Answering questions of capability and capacity will lead directly to a defense budget… [However] Since the imposition of the Budget Control Act in 2011, the base defense budget (excluding war costs) has gone down by 15 percent in real terms, while the threats to U.S. vital interests have, if anything, increased.”
“The prior administration, Congressional Democrats, and Republican budgets hawks adopted the sequester which effectively cut defense spending. The results were disastrous. When President Obama prematurely withdrew American forces from Iraq, it allowed ISIS to become a regional power. The former president gave in to Moscow’s demands on anti-ballistic missile defense, and Putin increased nuclear weaponry. Obama refused to confront either Russia or China over aggressive acts in Europe and the Pacific, and these U.S. enemies dramatically ramped up their threats worldwide and expanded their armed presence throughout the planet. Obama withdrew, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, American tanks from Europe, and Putin proceeded to invade and threaten his neighbors.”
President Obama hoped to “Reset” Russian American relations by essentially ceding the lead in military power to Moscow. His New START treaty gave the Kremlin, for the first time in history, a more powerful nuclear arsenal than Washington. He dramatically weakened the U.S. military presence in Europe.
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President Obama’s attempt to “Reset” relations with Russia was actually the centerpiece of his foreign and defense policies.
Writing in the Moscow Times, Sergei Karagonov opined on what he believes was the flawed concept of Mr. Obama’s reset, even from the Russian perspective: (the perspective of American critics is that it gave too much to Russia without gaining anything substantive in return) “…the U.S. proposed nuclear weapons reductions as the primary mechanism of the diplomatic reset…But progress soon stalled with Russia rejecting U.S. proposals…In the hope of breaking the deadlock, Obama signaled his willingness to compromise. But Putin had little reason to reciprocate, not least because agreement on the issue would have opened the door to further nuclear arms reductions. Moreover, members of Russia’s military and political elite hoped to use some of the country’s oil revenues to deploy a new generation of ICBMs…By focusing on nuclear disarmament and new START, Obama’s reset strategy remilitarized the U.S.-Russia relationship while marginalizing issues that could have reoriented bilateral ties toward the future. In this sense, the initiative was doomed from the start, and the whole world has suffered as a result.”
What was manifestly evident was Mr. Obama’s desire to downsize of the U.S. military, regardless of external factors. Indeed, despite the reduction of U.S. defense spending as a percent of the GDP and the federal budget to historic low points, and rising, dangerous threats from abroad, the U.S. military was forced absorb massive new cuts.
During the Obama Administration, in 2014, former Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) outlined how deeply American forces had been cut. The U.S. Navy was reduced from 546 ships to 285; The U.S. Army was reduced from 76 brigades to 45; and The USAF lost about half of its fighter and bomber squadrons. Remember, in the intervening years since then, U.S. armed forces have become older, absorbed more years of use, and endured further inadequate budgets.
The bleeding continues, as American aircraft and naval vessels become increasingly unsafe due to a lack of parts and maintenance, and our personnel become exhausted from excessive workloads mandated by the reduced numbers of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Meanwhile, the threats from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and terrorists increase.