Military cuts

President Obama has announced substantial cuts in US military spending, beginning in the 2013 budget, with additional cuts in prospect from the "sequester" occurring automatically after the failure of the budget commission to agree. Of course, in reality his proposal isn't really "cutting" military spending at all - just slowing it's growth. This is more of the political "smoke and mirrors" we get from Washington politicians.

As I have noted before, we could probably cut the US military budget in half and still have the most powerful military in the world, IF (and it is a big IF) the cuts were made wisely. We currently spend as much annually (about $740 billion) as the next 10 nations put together - including China ($90 billion), Russia ($53 billion), India ($32 billion) and the UK ($64 billion). That certainly seems like overkill to me.

The danger, of course, is that we will not make wise cuts. That we will save or cut weapons programs based on how powerful a few key members of Congress are in defending jobs in their districts. That we will save or cut weapons programs based on the relative influence of key large defense contractors and their lobbyists. That we will adjust the sizes of the various services based on how powerful their Congressional allies are. That we will skimp on pay, pensions and medical care for our service men and women to keep feeding the defense contractors. Or that Republican hawks will prevail and we simply won't cut anything significant, continuing to drive the US economy into the dirt.

Wise cuts would be based instead on a strategic view of our potential future conflicts and enemies. Such considerations as:

1. Control of the oceans remains as important today as it has been for the past few centuries. Something like 80% of world trade moves across oceans, include critical gas and oil energy supplies. The US has an unmatched geopolitical and geographic advantage, fronting on the world's two major oceans. But to exploit that advantage, we need to maintain a powerful navy. Ships aren't as "sexy" as high speed aircraft, but in the end they are probably more important.

Moreover, our ability to rapidly project military power to other parts of the world depends heavily on unchallenged control of the seas. Modern high-tech armed forces require massive logistics support (for example, a typical armored division may use approximately 600,000 gallons of fuel per day), far more than can be delivered simply by airlift, so continuing logistics support by sea is critical, and that means control of the seas.

That said, we probably need to seriously rethink our naval strategy. Current naval strategy is based around carrier groups - one aircraft carrier protected by dozens of smaller ships and submarines. Carrier groups do give us an airfield anywhere in the world, but they are exhorbitently expensive targets, vulnerable to relatively inexpensive anti-ship missiles or torpedoes. It is not clear what would be a better alternative, but at this point in their evolution, most of the enormous acquisition and operating cost of a carrier group goes to protect the vulnerable carrier, while the effective bomb load that can be delivered from the carrier deck hasn't increased than much since World War II.

2. We are more likely to face low-intensity asymmetric conflicts than major wars, and Iraq and Afghanistan have both shown how much a relatively primitive insurgent force can bleed a high-tech army in urban warfare. As the Israelis learned in their last excursion into Gaza in Dec 2008-Jan 2009, high-tech and expensive armor is highly vulnerable to inexpensive anti-tank missiles in urban conflicts. The M1 Abrams tank is a wonderfully advanced weapon system, but at $5+ million each it is a very expensive toy to lose to an inexpensive shoulder-launched anti-tank missile. In the desert in Iraq the tanks were great against Saddam's inexperienced and under-trained armored forces, but we are unlikely to have a turkey-shoot like that again any time soon. It is possible that the massed tank formations envisioned in a Cold War European conflict are out of date in most of today's likely conflicts.

3. Precision guided munition have made a massive difference in our ability to destroy targets effectively. One precision guided munition in Desert Storm could accomplish what took 170 bombs in Vietnam, or 9000 bombs in World War II. In a 1982 Army wargame that matched 30 Abrams tanks against 30 dune buggies with precision guided anti-tank weapons, 27 of the tanks were put out of action immediately, at the loss of only 3 dune buggies. It seems clear that continued investment in advances in this field will pay off handsomely, especially because it massively reduces the required logistic load -- not only are less munitions required, but more significantly, less sorties are required to deliver them, so less fuel is needed, less maintenance and spare parts are needed, less support infrastructure has to be provided, etc. etc..

4. Unmanned aerial vehicles have proven their worth over the past few years. In fact, much as air force types love to fly planes, the manned fighter is probably doomed, and the manned bomber as well. Unmanned airplanes can maneuver through far higher g-forces than a human can stand, and in air combat high-g turns are what wins the battles, especially against increasingly effective air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles. Historically, air bombardment has never proved as effective as its proponents have claimed. And with the advent of long-range cruise missiles with precision guidance, the manned airplane as a weapon delivery platform is probably on the way out. The one exception may be the slow, not-very-sexy, sturdy ground attack plane, like the old A-10 Warthog, useful in low-intensity conflicts, easy to maintain and hard to bring down.

5. I worry about our over-reliance on GPS guidance, and on satellite communications and imagery in general. If I were an enemy force about to face US military power, I would disable these assets any way I could. Many (perhaps most) are probably vulnerable to the powerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) of an stratospheric nuclear blast. It seems to me we should address this issue more thoroughly than we appear to have done (though perhaps more has been done to harden them than the public knows - one can hope!).

6. Finally, it seems to me we need to massively improve our intelligence capability. Our military is so enamored of its high-tech weapons systems that it has neglected to invest heavily in understanding its opponents. And we have paid heavily for that neglect, repeatedly misreading our opponents from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. I would like to see a lot more money put into language and cultural training all the way from senior State Department officials and politicians to the lowest soldier.

If cuts are made from strategic consideration like these, we will still have an effective military. If the cuts are made by the usual Washington political horse-trading, they may seriously compromise our military forces, saddling us with expensive gold-plated weapons systems ill-suited to future conflicts and neglecting important investments that might make our military more effective and less expensive.