Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pledged to restrain military spending. Predictably, members of Congress, industry lobbyists and military commanders are all pushing back. This is a battle well worth fighting. If anything, he needs to be even more ambitious.
The Pentagon’s budget has doubled in the last decade to nearly $550 billion, not including the extra $159 billion this year to pay for two wars. There is no way to address the nation’s deep fiscal crisis or its security threats without a more rational approach to defense procurement and tough choices on personnel policies.
Mr. Gates has already taken some sound preliminary steps. He has canceled or cut back several dozen unneeded weapons programs, a projected long-term savings of $330 billion, and ordered the military services and Pentagon agencies to find $100 billion in administrative cuts and efficiencies over the next five years.
His latest proposed savings, outlined last week, are modest — despite the political fire they are drawing. He is calling for closing the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. (it allocates forces around the world and encourages the services to work together on the battlefield). That could mean the loss of 2,800 jobs for military and civilian workers supported by 3,000 private contractors at an annual savings of $240 million. Mr. Gates also proposed a 30 percent cut over three years on contractors who provide support services to the military, placed a freeze on the number of workers in his office, and said he planned to eliminate at least 50 posts for generals and admirals and 150 for senior civilians, and shut down two Pentagon agencies that employ 550 more people.
Far more important, and politically difficult, is Mr. Gates’s vow to rein in military health care spending: the annual bill rose from $19 billion to $50 billion over the last decade. Active-duty members of the military rightly do not pay for care. Annual premiums for retirees, $460 per family, have not risen in 15 years and must be increased.
A task force commissioned by Rep. Barney Frank and a bipartisan group of colleagues estimates that raising retiree premiums (it referenced an earlier study that talked about gradually increasing them to about $1,100 a family, still far below commercial rates), plus charging an enrollment fee for a program that provides a wraparound policy for Medicare-eligible retirees, could save $6 billion annually.
Mr. Gates, a savvy Washington insider, is trying to pre-empt even deeper cuts. He still wants to ensure an annual spending increase 1 percent over inflation for the foreseeable future. That is still too much.
He needs to jettison more poorly performing, redundant or anachronistic weapons systems, including nuclear weapons. Once the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the administration must look at trimming troop strength, beginning with the Navy and the Air Force.
Since the 9/11 attacks, Congress has given the Pentagon pretty much everything it has requested, with few questions asked. So it is good news that some members are now looking more critically at the Pentagon budget. In its recent report, Mr. Frank’s task force — the Sustainable Defense Task Force — concluded that the Pentagon could cut $960 billion between 2011 and 2020 without harming essential security. The president’s deficit commission must do the same. The military budget is 20 percent of federal spending and 50 percent of discretionary spending. There is no way to address the deficit without deeper cuts in defense spending.