We as a nation face a real dilemma. The budget for our
military is about 3.5% of GDP ($582.7
trillion in the 2017 budget). It is constrained by the Budget Control Act of
2011, which was put in place to try to control the ballooning federal deficit
now that the federal debt has passed $20 trillion. But even so constrained it
is one of the largest items in the federal budget. In fact it is about as large as the money
required to run all the rest of the government except Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid,
and interest on the national debt. It is also about the size of the new money
we borrow each year and add to the federal deficit ($666 billion in 2017). Here
is a chart of how the federal government spends its money, just to get some perspective
on the military’s portion:
In part this high
cost for the military is due to the costs of the decades-long Middle East wars
(about $2.7 trillion thus far), but only in part. It is also big because we
maintain troops and military hardware all around the world to help protect and strengthen
allies, because we train our armed forces continually to keep them effective, which
wears out equipment that needs to be repaired and replaced, because we try to give
our armed forces the best equipment available, and because the US military procurement
process is so abysmally poor that everything costs far more than it needs to.
Despite spending so
much money on our military, we still haven’t given them enough to maintain what
they have, let alone renew aging fleets of ships and planes. According to the
Navy, 53% of Navy aircraft (about 1,700 combat aircraft) are not in flying
condition. They are either waiting for parts or the Navy doesn’t have the money
for the parts. Typically, if things were normal, about 25-30% of the planes
would be in maintenance. 53% is an unusually high proportion, and means the
Navy aviation force is pretty much a hollow force at the moment. And as of June
2017, 37% of the certifications for the crews of cruisers and destroyers based
at the Seventh Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan, had expired, meaning the training of
those crews was not current because the Navy had to keep the ships on station
longer and couldn’t stand them down for crew training and maintenance. The USS Boise,
a submarine, has
been sitting pier-side at Norfolk Naval Base for 53 months because it has lost
its dive certification. By the end of 2018, if things don’t change, at least 5
more US submarines will no longer be certified either. And when ships do
finally get into maintenance they often need so much work that they may spend
years in dry dock.
At the end of the Cold War the Navy had just over 500 ships
in service. Today we have about 275, and a substantial portion of those are
currently unfit for combat operations. There is an often-repeated political
goal of increasing this to about 350 ships to match, among other things, China’s
current shipbuilding program of 350 combat ships by 2020, but thus far not enough
money has been appropriated to meet that goal, nor in fact do we seem currently
to have enough domestic shipyard capacity to meet the goal.
Meanwhile the air force is so short of qualified pilots that
it is recalling up to 1000 retired pilots to fill the ranks. It has an
estimated 2000 unfilled pilot slots just to fly the planes it already has, and
needs to find another 4000 maintenance people to keep them flying. The Marine
Corps has had to go to the aircraft “boneyard” (desert storage area in Arizona
for retired aircraft) to resurrect 23 old F/A-18 Hornet fighters to fill in
their aging aircraft fleet until they get the new F-35 fighters they have on
order. The Marines estimate that 70% of their current fleet of strike aircraft
are no longer airworthy.
So here is the dilemma: the cost of our military is a real burden
on the federal budget, which is already running a hefty deficit, yet even so we
are not spending enough to keep the military functional. Now the object of
having a military in the first place (at least for a non-expansionist nation
like ours) is to deter aggressors. But if we don’t spend enough to keep that
military effective as a deterrent, than we have wasted what we have spent and
might as well not have had a military in the first place. On the other hand,
expensive as an effective military is, it’s a lot less expensive than fighting
a war, and incomparably less expensive than losing that war.
So what could we do to address this problem? Clearly we need to find a way to
do more with less, or as Churchill is reported once to have said “Now that we have run out of money
we have to think.”
Perhaps the first thing we might do is reform the military
procurement process, which is a byzantine process run by a byzantine bureaucracy
(I’ve seen it up close and it isn’t pretty!). Changing the culture of a huge federal
bureaucracy is one of the hardest things to do, but it needs to be done. The procurement
system is why we have a new F-35 fighter that costs about $100 million per
plane and a Zumwalt class destroyer that costs $1.8 billion per ship and an M16
rifle that costs $647 per copy. This is in part because defense contractors
have a natural incentive to raise costs, but it is also due in part to design
by committee in the armed forces, by poor management and oversight, and by the
crazy stop-start-stop-start way Congress funds programs.
And related to that would be efforts to get politics out of
the process, so that for example we can close expensive bases the military doesn’t
need. The Pentagon would like to close down about 22% of its bases, but of
course Congressional delegations fight any closing in their own districts. Similarly,
powerful Senators insist on building weapons (in their districts) that the
military doesn’t want (like the extra new $437 million Littoral Combat Ship the
Senate just pushed into the 2017 budget). But lots of luck getting politics out
of the process!
And then we might
rethink the whole force structure. Build more of fewer types of systems, so as
to get larger volume discounts. We used to build huge battleships to be able to
carry the huge 16-inch guns needed. Now that we have very accurate cruise and
guided missiles, wouldn’t we perhaps do better with a larger number of small, relatively
inexpensive surface ships armed with these missiles rather than fewer large expensive
(and vulnerable) cruisers and destroyers and frigates, or perhaps even a sizeable
fleet of relatively inexpensive (but very quiet) diesel-electric submarines with
vertical launch tubes? Not only would this expanded fleet of smaller ships likely
cost less to build, run and maintain, but it would be far less vulnerable to
swarming attacks, since it represents so many more targets, distributed over a
vastly larger area.
Similarly with
the air force, perhaps we ought to push toward more inexpensive (and
expendable) unmanned vehicles rather than a few very, very expensive manned
fighters. But of course this requires a major change in Navy and Air Force
cultures, and that will be difficult.
Nevertheless, we
have to find some better way of ensuring our national security without bankrupting
the nation, and that will require thinking “out of the box”.
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