Congress will soon take up the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2017. The NDAA is an annual bill that sets policies and budgets for the U.S. Department of Defense. This bill and the defense appropriations bill are Congress’s two annual major pieces of defense legislation.
The Status of the U.S. Military
Years of budget cuts have resulted in a smaller and weaker military. The Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Index of U.S. Military Strength graded the U.S. military’s capability, capacity, and readiness and found that as a whole it is only “marginal.” In fact, both the Army and the Air Force dropped in their ratings from the previous year due to capacity and readiness cuts. In short, our military today is not able to adequately provide for America’s national security needs.
Unfortunately, rebuilding America’s military strength is not as simple as increasing the budget for a year or two. Rebuilding a unit, buying new equipment, or increasing a unit’s readiness can take years. At the same time, America faces growing diplomatic and security challenges. There is a gap between what America needs to do and what it is capable of doing. That’s why Heritage experts have proposed a “gap strategy,” which focuses on three things: making America the engine of global economic freedom, strengthening enduring alliances, and beginning to rebuild the military. In the NDAA, Congress can work on the last two — rebuilding defense and strengthening alliances — but rebuilding defense must be the top priority.
Beginning to Rebuild America’s Military
The first overarching priority for the NDAA should be rebuilding America’s military power. As Congress develops the NDAA, six principles should guide its members’ work:
1. Restore capacity, particularly of U.S. ground forces. Cutting military capacity, such as the number of ships, planes, or soldiers, is often attractive as it can quickly produce significant savings. Pursuing immediate savings, however, comes at significant long-term expense: Rebuilding military capacity will take longer and cost even more. Even more importantly, the U.S. military is already too small and further capacity cuts will severely impact its ability to conduct missions around the globe. Senior military leaders like the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Army nominee believe that growing threats require a larger force.
2. Prioritize readiness for all the services. Readiness — a measure of how prepared a military unit is for combat — is achieved by pilots flying necessary hours, ground forces conducting necessary training, and sailors and their ships steaming a sufficient number of days in support of fleet exercises. In tight budgets, the military’s readiness often suffers, as training and maintenance can be cut more easily than personnel or long-term contracts. Lower readiness levels means that either the United States has fewer planes, ships, and soldiers to send on a mission, or service members are sent into danger without the proper equipment and training. Congress should increase defense spending with explicit guidance that an increased amount should be directed to improving readiness.
3. Shift initiatives from the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account to the baseline defense budget. The OCO account has been increasingly used, by both the Pentagon and Congress, as a means of circumventing budget cuts and spending caps imposed on national defense. While the desire to increase defense spending is a good one, it should be done through the normal defense budget, not through OCO. The OCO account (and its predecessors) were established in response to specific new threats and are technically considered “emergency” spending to circumvent spending caps. The Department of Defense now submits an annual OCO request along with their base budget request. The defense budget should be increased to fully incorporate OCO needs without decreasing the underlying defense budget. As outlined elsewhere, the FY 2017 defense budget should be at least $600 billion plus the full costs of OCO.
4. Increase funding for updating nuclear weapons and missile defense systems. Growing ballistic missile threats and other nations’ nuclear weapon capabilities make S. nuclear weapons and missile defense capabilities essential. A modern, flexible and capable nuclear weapons posture is vital to keeping the United States safe, allies assured, and enemies deterred.
5. Provide stability for modernization programs. The United States must continue to invest in improving its current military capabilities and developing future capabilities. The military did not invest in modernization sufficiently during much of the past two decades, and significant modernization investments were also squandered due to mismanagement and misguided priorities. As a result, many old platforms, such as 50-year-old KC-135 tankers, 35-year-old Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles, and the Navy’s entire fleet of ballistic missile submarines, are simultaneously approaching the end of their functional capacity. Funding stability and strong management and oversight are vital to achieving the necessary modernization.
6. Increase the national defense budget. While the NDAA is primarily a policy bill, it also establishes budgets. From FY 2011 to FY 2015, total national security spending (budget function 050, including overseas operations) dropped by 24.9 percent in real terms. While that period included dramatic force reductions in Iraq and Afghanistan, recent events around the world and the operating tempo of the U.S. military show that this dramatic cut was misguided. Under the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 (BBA), defense spending increased slightly for FY 2016; thus, the FY 2011–FY 2016 change is now only a 23.5-percent real cut. Unfortunately, the BBA cap reduces inflation-adjusted defense spending in FY 2017, so the gap from FY 2011 grows back to 24.5 percent in real terms. The defense budget under the BBA is not sufficient to support the military that this nation needs. For FY 2017, the national defense budget (function 050) is now capped at $551 billion, plus $59 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding. Instead, Congress should increase the base defense budget to at least $600 billion in FY 2017 with the full cost of overseas operations added on top.
Of course, there are all kinds of defense issues addressed in the NDAA beyond these six principles. In a recent paper for the Heritage Foundation, my colleagues and I started with these six principles and developed a series of specific policy steps that should be taken in the NDAA, such as not prematurely retiring aircraft or ships, improving the military healthcare system, retaining common sense restrictions on transfers of Guantanamo Bay detainees, and cutting non-defense research funding that is often stuck into defense bills.
In the NDAA, Congress can also take serious steps to strengthen America’s alliances. The paper outlines a range of steps aimed specifically at America’s relationships with countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, such as returning to the 2012 force structure levels in Europe and supporting the South China Sea Initiative created by last year’s NDAA.
The defense authorization bill regularly carries hundreds of provisions and sometimes cracks a thousand pages in length, so a single paper can’t address every possible topic. As in every year, the NDAA this year will include debates about a range of policy and programmatic topics and probably some that defense experts won’t expect (such as last year’s sage grouse debate). But members of Congress should keep two simple goals in mind for the NDAA: begin rebuilding America’s military, and strengthen America’s alliances.
Justin T. Johnson is the senior analyst for defense budgeting policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense.
Photo credit: Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro, U.S. Navy
Can we stop with the nonsense for a moment that we actually need to increase the defense budget? We spend more than any other country in the entire world. Not only do we spend more than any other country in the world, the amount we spend is more than dozens of countries even generate in revenue decades, let alone a single year. Just think about that for a moment.
Now I’m not calling for drastic cuts either, nor I am saying defense spending shouldn’t be a priority, however asking for an increase in spending is not the solution either. There’s no question that we need to replace aging equipment, because it’s at the end of its service life or because it’s been worn out from the last 15 years of conflicts, however all the charts and figures aren’t going to change the fact that no where in this proposal, do you mention cutting costs, reducing waste, eliminating redundancy across the services and saving money on programs we don’t need, so we can afford to modernize and replace systems.
The first response should never be to increase spending and it’s high time we look at the DoD like a business that needs to manage its finances, rather than one that simply has an open check book to do whatever they want. Before we decide which systems we need to replace and modernize how about we address the real elephant in the room and recognize the Cold War ended, the Middle East isn’t our only area of concern, so how should the Department of Defense be organized in the 21 Century.
This leads to a whole series of questions that nobody wants to address, because it may mean organizations are shutdown permanently, which rarely happens in the federal government. It’s time for a new organizational paradigm and we need answers to these tough questions or there will never be true reform within the DoD and the battles over the annual budget will always boil down to a slight of hand bean counting exercise of cutting a percentage of the budget, number of personnel or units of equipment, rather than addressing the real functional needs.
Some questions our senior leadership needs to address include:
• Do we actually need to be structured the same way we have been since the end of World War II?
• Do we really need all the organizations under the DoD umbrella that are often performing the same function?
• Do we need five separate services?
• Do we need all the supporting organizations?
• Can we consolidate common core functions such as finance, logistics, medial, supply to name a few?
• Should the Reserve force and National Guard be restructured?
The toughest challenge for the DoD is to admit that the Cold War has been over for 25 years, the Korean war ended over 60 years ago and it’s been 70 years since the end of World War II, which means it’s time to reconsider our roles in NATO and our overseas bases and deployments to Europe, South Korea and Japan. It’s time we let Europe, South Korea and Japan stand on their own as sovereign nations should. That doesn’t mean we can’t be allies or continue joint training, but there is no rational reason to have US military facilities in Europe, South Korea and Japan in 2016. To that end the units overseas can be deactivated with personnel transferred to other units. Shutting down overseas operations would be part of the overall restricting and reduction in force, the bases and support facilities can be handed over to the host nation or sold if their associated costs were not already being subsidized. Equipment at these facilities that could fall under foreign military sales could also be sold to the host nation and incorporated into their active/reserve units or put into long term storage. A separate issue is that the members of NATO need to re-evaluate the organization’s purpose in 2016 and beyond, and whether or not it needs to be reorganized, reduce its operations or be shut down all together.
Our bases in the Middle East and Africa also need to be reevaluated and while it is in our global interests to promote stability in both regions, it may be time to take a back stage and let our allies lead that charge, while we provide assistance as required.
On the home front, It’s time for a top down review of every organization that falls under the prevue of the DoD. Many people are not aware that the DoD is more than just the service components Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corp(which includes active, reserves and national guard) and includes four national intelligence services: the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), other Defense Agencies including: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI), Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Defense Legal Services Agency, Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) , Defense Security Service (DSS), Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA) as well as the National Defense University (NDU) and the National War College (NWC) just to name a few.
While all of these organizations are funded within the DoD budget requests, this does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department’s payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and intelligence-gathering spending by NASA.
There won’t be any changes in strategy or budget planning until there is a thorough review of each and every agency, department and units within all the DoD. And outside committee and review panel needs to be convened to conduct these reviews, write up a full report with financial analysis and recommendations on cost saving measures. Basically the DoD needs to be treated like a business, operations are being audited and redundant groups, functions are going to be shut down and there will be reductions in personnel, equipment, facilities and operating expenses, which will reshape the force for the next century, not the past century.
Simply requesting that the budget be cut by 5% or reducing the inventory by 1 aircraft carrier or 20 aircraft or closing 10 bases, is no longer a viable option as it’s not addressing the root cause of why the budget is in its current state.
The review committee will be able to an objective look at functions/organizations within the DoD and provide recommendations. Let’s use R&D as an example; there is the Naval Research Lab (NRL), Army Research Lab (ARL), Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), The Office of Naval Research (ONR), and The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and The Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) also support DoD related R&D. The first question to answer should be, do we need seven different organizations, all with facilities across the country or would one joint facility be able to perform the same function more efficiently? This will lead to recommendation on how we could eliminate redundant projects between the organizations, and eliminate layers of management. They would need to evaluate how much money is going into these organizations, how many projects are the same and how many projects go from the R&D stage to a practical fielded solution.
Until a review process like this is completed, how can we honestly say we need to increase spending? How do we really no what systems will need to replace or what new systems need to be developed? Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option, defense is only one piece of the federal budget and maintaining a strong and secure nation requires us to spend money in other areas as well such as critical infrastructure, energy and security.
Great article, problem now is who is going to implement this process / analysis ? No one that comes to mind is going to do any cutting that is necessary, it is going to take a groundswell from the people to protest. But by the time that happens it will be too late. American Government has been driving the bus while the nation has been asleep.