Last Thursday President Barack Obama unveiled the Department of Defense's new strategic review, the result of preparation including six meetings he held between September and December last year.
Mr. Obama's intensive involvement was significant, particularly in light of impending cuts in the defense budget and this year's presidential campaign. Republicans traditionally attack Democrats with charges of being soft on defense. Mr. Obama is inevitably caught between a rock and a hard place as he tries to deal also with the basic problems of the economy by trimming budgets and reducing the national debt. He cannot appear to be watering down either the country's defense or its attention to needs in fields such as education, health care and infrastructure.
The Defense Department is already scheduled for $450 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. The Budget Control Act passed last year will add another $500 billion in automatic reductions, starting in 2013, a result of the grisly failure of the congressional supercommittee to agree on more measured reductions.
The tricky part comes when the Pentagon actually has to identify which cuts to make. It shouldn't be that hard, given that the Iraq War is now over and a road map has been arrived at to end the Afghanistan War in 2014. Analysts have pointed to a number of potential areas for cost-cutting. One is the Pentagon's civilian staff: it now numbers 788,000, larger than the U.S. Army. The United States continues to spend more on defense than the next 10 countries, including China, India, Iran and Russia. It also still maintains 150,000 troops in Germany, Japan and South Korea, remnants of 20th-century wars that are now long over.
It would seem that to meet new, legitimate U.S. defense priorities such as potential conflict in cyberspace, the increasing need for intelligence capacities, and the shift in need from heavy ground and naval units to Special Operations forces, it would make sense to eliminate expensive, obsolete pieces of America's military machine. The problem is that each of those will be vigorously protected by the defense industry and other elements in the United States that have a vested interest in preserving them. In addition, of course, it is a presidential election year and each vested interest will be ready to contribute to politicians' campaigns to hang onto its piece of the action.
This is the needle that Mr. Obama is trying to thread, starting with the Defense Strategic Review.
First published on January 9, 2012 at 12:00 am
Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/12009/1202254-192.stm?cmpid=opinion.xml
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