Foreign Policy In Focus

This strange animal called sequestration is certainly wreaking havoc with our customary ideological boundaries. 

If you’re an advocate, Iike I am, for revamped federal priorities that shift resources from a bloated Pentagon budget toward neglected domestic priorities, your take on this animal can’t be simple. You say cutting everything indiscriminately is a bad way to run a government (this view is nearly universal). You oppose the cuts in the domestic budget that will leave us with fewer food safety inspectors, medical researchers, Head Start teachers, and airport baggage screeners on the job. But you can reel off long lists of ways to cut waste in the Pentagon budget to the levels prescribed by sequestration, and show that these cuts will leave us completely safe.

But you also know that the whole conversation is focused on the wrong topic. It’s past time to shift this conversation away from austerity and toward investment to create jobs, as clear majorities of voters said in November was what they wanted.

Now let’s look at the Washington Post’s blogger who says he writes “from a liberal perspective,” Greg Sargent. On Wednesday he went at the Republican position on sequestration, wielding a new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. The report found that the single most important cause of increased income inequality in recent years is the favored tax treatment given to capital gains and stock dividends — i.e. what the rich have used to get richer.

The Democrats, as Sargent points out, want to change this, taxing the rich and using the proceeds to replace the sequester cuts. The Republicans want to stick with sequestration and keep this favored treatment for the rich.

But all of this puts the Republicans, says Sargent, in the position of “openly conceding that the sequester will gut the military.” It’s a concession that Sargent appears to be taking at face value. Or at least not calling into question.

Gut the military? That’s what the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been saying any chance they get. Sequestration would “invite aggression,” says lingering Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. It will “put the nation at greater risk of coercion,” says the Joint Chiefs Chair, Martin Dempsey. When asked at a recent congressional hearing which nation might coerce us, though, he couldn’t say.

In fact, sequestration will not “gut” our military. Our military budget has nearly doubled since 2001. Sequestration would take it back to the level it was in 2007 — when we were still fighting two wars. Adjusted for inflation, it would leave that budget higher than its Cold War average — when we had an adversary that was spending roughly what we were on its military. Now, as Michael Cohen notes in The Guardian, the closest thing to a peer adversary we have is China, and we are spending more on research and development of new weapons than the Chinese are spending on their entire military. We spend more on our military, in fact, than the next 14 countries put together.

After the longest period of war in our history, we are due for a defense downsizing. Sequestration would create a shallower downsizing than any of the previous postwar periods since World War II. We can do this, and we should. We need the money for other things.

As sequestration threatens to confuse us all, let’s be sure to stay clear on that, at least.

"In crisis lies opportunity" is more than just a cliché (and we're not just talking about Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.)  For instance, what could be a better time than the recess-depression in which we're mired to rethink the whole concept of a growth economy, which has become unsustainable in the face of climate change and dwindling resources? At the very least, it's a chance to trim our defense budget. In fact, it might not be foremost in the minds of most Americans, or even of much consolation, but cuts to our nuclear-weapons program constitute a silver lining to our economic crisis.

If you'll recall, earlier this year, the New START treaty was held hostage by Senate Republicans under the direction of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). By way of ransoming it, the Obama administration forked over a proposal to spend $88 billion during the next decade on nuclear-weapon modernization. (As if to show the futility of that approach, while it was ultimately passed, Kyl still didn't vote in favor of New START.) That figure represents a 20 percent increase above funding levels proposed during the Bush administration.

Equally as sad, as Hans Kristensen wrote at the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Security Blog:

… the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks, in part, to a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [Even stranger, this] "fake" counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.

Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty.

Confidence building is nice and all. But it's been 62 years since both the United States and the former Soviet Union (and then Russia) have possessed nuclear weapons,  25 years since the pivotal Reykjavík nuclear summit, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War. We're still just trying to build confidence?

Meanwhile, what does disarmament look like when it's not just pecking at the inside of its egg struggling to emerge? Regular readers of Focal Points know that we track the progress of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament organization that monitors the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (the heart of the Manhattan Project during World War II) and is today managed by a Bechtel-led consortium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

In recent years, the mission of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been to halt the progress of a Soviet-era-sounding project called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility (CMRR), intended, in the words of the Los Alamos National Laboratory itself, to perform "analytical chemistry, materials characterization, and metallurgy research and development," for the production of nuclear pits.

Upon first hearing the phrase, a nuclear pit might sound like a dump for nuclear waste and old warheads. But, as in the pit of a fruit, it's an origin of life -- where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear warhead. You can be forgiven if you're surprised that, in light of President Obama's renowned Prague disarmament speech and New START, however watered down, we're still creating these obscure objects of destruction. Especially considering that 14,000 pits have been recovered from warheads that have been retired.

Physicist and nuclear policy authority Frank von Hippel recently testified in a lawsuit that the LASG filed against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . . But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of … pit aging, "Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years."

Of course, that's as much bad news -- these infernal engines will be around for another century unless they're dismantled -- as good news. Meanwhile, the CMRR project is now expected to cost between $4 and $6 billion. In order to halt or at least stall it, the LASG filed a case against the NNSA seeking a new Environmental Impact Statement (as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act) to address, among other things, seismic concerns about the project. While that case was dismissed, the LASG is not only appealing it, but filing a second lawsuit toward the same end. In the latest LASG newsletter, Executive Director Greg Mello writes (emphasis added):

On December 15, House and Senate conferees issued their "megabus" appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2012. [Passed in the Senate and House, though 86 Republicans defied Republican leadership and voted against it. -- RW] … the bill appropriates only 63% of the requested funds for the [CMRR], slashing $100 million (M) from the $270 M proposed spending level in the project. … CMRR and [a project in proximity to it] were the only NNSA Weapons Activities construction projects cut. … The proposed CMRR cut is 90% of the total proposed cut in new NNSA construction. NNSA's other proposed massive project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), slated to be built at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Site in Tennessee, was not cut at all.   

We have no wish to slight the forces arrayed against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee project. But we can't help but conclude that, along with current economic climate, the Los Alamos Study Group made the difference in slowing progress of the CMRR.

As Mello writes, the funding cut "can be fairly described as one of the few concrete policy accomplishments of the entire arms control and disarmament community in the United States over the past couple of years." Never mind your garden-party treaties that are guaranteed not to offend -- when the construction of a facility designated for the manufacture of nuclear-weapons components is blocked, that's disarmament you can taste and feel.

In its final stages, debate over the supercommittee has boiled down to squeezing new revenues out of millionaires vs. cutting the social safety net. The largest portion of the discretionary budget, however, funds the military — and that fact has been mostly obscured in this equation. With the panel in its final death throes, military spending is emerging from the shadows in the form of “defense sequestration.” This is the requirement that failure would trigger $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, half of which would come from the Pentagon's coffers.

Scare tactics don’t tend to produce entirely sensible legislation, and this one is no exception. Yet can these cuts be made with no sacrifice to our security? Emphatically, yes.

The Pentagon and its allies in industry and Congress are warning us over and over that this “doomsday” scenario will leave us weakened and vulnerable. They're ignoring several pretty important facts. The “sequestration” cuts, added to those already planned, would bring our military spending, in inflation-adjusted terms, to its 2007 level. Was anyone talking about doomsday then?

Thirteen straight years of military increases, moreover, have more than doubled the Pentagon's base budget (excluding war spending), bringing it to its highest level since World War II. And these increases have actually expanded the gap between U.S. military spending and the rest of the world. At the beginning of this period, we were spending about a third of the world’s total. Now we're spending about half.

Even if sequestration cuts across all military programs, this sort of ham-handed approach is safely doable. Our blank-check approach to military spending in this century has created waste in every program, waiting to be trimmed. Even as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta works to protect his budget at the expense of all others, his Pentagon remains the only federal department that can't pass an audit of its books.

The Project On Government Oversight has calculated that simply cutting back by 15 percent on the privatization of military functions that has occurred in this period would save $300 billion over 10 years.

Is sequestration the best way to manage a defense drawdown? No. For one thing, the best way would make choices based on how much we need to spend, on what, to keep us safe. A new security strategy could allow us to question, for example, the need for our current “forward presence,” which has between 105 and 125 ships cruising around three oceans nearly all the time, and target savings accordingly in the naval budget. Sequestration bypasses this kind of thinking.

Nor would the sequestration “haircut” do anything good for our enduring unemployment crisis. Military cuts, it is true, will have a smaller impact on jobs than other cuts in the domestic discretionary budget. A study by economists at the University of Massachusetts found that $1 billion in military spending sustains about 11,000 jobs as compared to about 17,000 from an equivalent amount of spending on clean energy. Let's cut spending on military programs we don’t need and invest those savings in job creation by making things we do need.

This is the kind of vision laid out in a new report from my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies. It outlines a set of cuts to those military programs we don’t need, and combines that with fiscal reforms and pollution taxes. The result would be more than $800 billion we can invest in building the kind of country we all deserve.

Last week Barack Obama announced that he wants to cut $400 billion in military spending and said he would work with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs on a “fundamental review” of U.S. “military missions, capabilities and our role in a changing world” before making a decision. 

Spokesman Geoff Morrell responded by hinting that Gates was displeased with having to cut that much from his spending plan.  Gates “has been clear that further significant defense cuts cannot be accomplished without future cuts in force structure and military capability,” said Morrell, who volunteered that the Secretary not been informed about the Obama decision until the day before.  

But it is difficult to believe that open display of tension between Obama and Gates was not scripted. In the background of those moves is a larger political maneuver on which the two of them have been collaborating since last year in which they gave the Pentagon a huge increase in funding for the next decade and then started to take credit for small or nonexistent reductions from that increase.    

The original Obama-Gates base military spending plan – spending excluding the costs of the current wars – for FY 2011 through 2020, called for spending $5.8 trillion, or $580 billion annually, as former Pentagon official Lawrence Korb noted last January. That would have represented a 25 percent real increase over the average annual level of military spending, excluding war costs, by the George W. Bush administration.  

Even more dramatic, the Obama-Gates plan was 45 percent higher than the annual average of military spending level in the 1992-2001 decade, as reflected in official DOD data. 

The Obama FY 2012 budget submission reduced the total increase only slightly – by $162 billion over the four years from 2017 to 2020, according to the careful research of the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA). That left an annual average base military spending level of $564 billion – 23 percent higher than Bush’s annual average and 40 percent above the level of the 1990s.

Central to last week’s chapter in the larger game was Obama’s assertion that Gates had already saved $400 billion in his administration. “Over the last two years,” he said, “Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again.”

The $400 billion figure is based primarily on the $330 billion Gates claimed he had saved by stopping, reducing or otherwise changing plans for 31 weapons programs. But contrary to the impression left by Obama, that figure does not reflect any cut in projected DOD spending. All of it was used to increase spending on operations and investment in the military budget. 

The figure was concocted, moreover, by using tricky accounting methods verging on chicanery. It was based on arbitrary assumptions about how much all 31 programs would have cost over their entire lifetimes stretching decades into the future, assuming they would all reach completion. That methodology offered endless possibilities for inflated claims of savings.

The PDA points out that yet another $100 billion that Gates announced in January as cost-cutting by the military services was also used to increase spending on operations and new weapons program that the services wanted. That leaves another $78 billion in cuts over five years also announced by Gates in January, but most of that may have been added to the military budget for “overseas contingency operations” rather than contributed to deficit reduction, according to the PDA. 

Even if the $400 billion in ostensible cuts that Obama is seeking were genuine, the Pentagon would be still be sitting on total projected increase of 14 percent above the profligate level of military spending of the Bush administration. Last week’s White House fact sheet on deficit reduction acknowledged that Obama has the “goal of holding the growth in base security spending below inflation.”   

The “fundamental review” that Obama says will be carried out with the Pentagon and military bureaucracies will be yet another chapter in this larger maneuver.  It’s safe bet that, in the end, Gates will reach into his bag of accounting tricks again for most of the desired total.

Despite the inherently deceptive character of Obama’s call for the review, it has a positive side: it gives critics of the national security state an opportunity to point out that such a review should be carried out by a panel of independent military budget analysts who have no financial stake in the outcome – unlike the officials of the national security state. 

Such an independent panel could come up with a list of all the military missions and capabilities that don’t make the American people more secure or even make them less secure, as well as those for which funding should be reduced substantially because of technological and other changes. It could also estimate how much overall projected military spending should be reduced, without regard to what would be acceptable to the Pentagon or a majority in Congress.  

The panel would not require White House or Congressional approval. It could be convened by a private organization or, better yet, by a group of concerned Members of Congress. They could use its data and conclusions as the basis for creating a legislative alternative to existing U.S. national security policy, perhaps in the form of a joint resolution. That would give millions of Americans who now feel that nothing can be done about endless U.S. wars and the national security state’s grip on budgetary resources something to rally behind.

Three convergent political forces are contributing to the eventual weakening of the national security state: the growing popular opposition to a failed war, public support for shifting spending priorities from the national security sector to the domestic economy and pressure for deficit and debt reduction. But in the absence of concerted citizen action, it could take several years to see decisive results. Seizing the opportunity for an independent review of military missions and spending would certainly speed up that process.  

(Pictured: Grover Norquist.)

Of all the changes one can expect to see in Washington this year, at least one might be welcome. “Divisions have opened among Republicans,” reports the New York Times, “about whether, and how much, to chop Pentagon spending that comes to more than a half trillion dollars a year.”

Irked by an agreement between the Pentagon and President Obama to trim the growth in Pentagon spending by $78 billion over the next five years, Rep. Howard McKeon (R-CA) has announced that he “will not support any measures that stress our forces and jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the Times also reports that Rep. McKeon was “the single biggest recipient in the House of campaign contributions from military aerospace companies and their employees” during the 2010 campaign.

In any case, McKeon has encountered an intra-party resistance to his posturing that might have been unthinkable as recently as one Congress ago. Some freshman Tea Party Republicans, notably retired Army colonel Rep. Charles Gibson of New York, have insisted that the defense budget should be no more immune to the austerity fever sweeping through Washington than any other federal department. In word if not yet in deed, they are joined by Reps. John Boehner and Eric Cantor, traditionally pro-military members of the Republican leadership.

The debate is almost entirely over deficits, and it frequently includes unfortunate detours into cries for draconian service and entitlement cuts. But it is a healthy one.

I recently attended a CATO Capitol Hill briefing on the subject of the 112th Congress and the military budget. Sitting under-dressed in a well adorned room full of Blackberry-toting Hill aides, it was easy enough to feel uncomfortable. But the substance of the speakers’ remarks -- the need for deep cuts to the military budget and an accompanying strategic adjustment of just how we expect to use our armed forces -- was enough to make one feel right at home.

CATO scholars Benjamin Friedman and Chris Preble discussed recommendations from their 2010 report “Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint,” in which they outline more than $1 trillion worth of cuts over the next years. Friedman noted that there are three ways to seek cuts in military spending.

The first way is to identify those ubiquitous “efficiencies,” i.e., cutting a handful of needless procurements to reinvest money in “boots on the ground.” This is the preferred approach of Robert Gates and indeed receives a great deal of bipartisan lip service -- which is precisely why it is least likely to be effective. Such an approach is merely a bureaucratic contrivance to stave off more meaningful cuts.

The second way is what Friedman calls the “Nike” approach: just do it. We might look upon President Obama’s proposed $78 billion in diminished growth as following this tack: if cuts are imposed, the armed services will simply have to identify their true priorities. Austerity is, after all, a fine auditor.

But the only truly effective way to achieve meaningful spending reductions, and the way advocated by Friedman and Preble, is to advocate a more restrained foreign policy. They note the litany of expectations that American policymakers have of the armed forces: “containing” China, building democracies in failed states (not to mention toppling them in the first place), providing for defense commitments to economically developed states in Western Europe and Northeast Asia, protecting sea lanes, and so forth.

Friedman and Preble posit that if we were to reevaluate what was actually necessary for a secure country, even one that remains very much engaged with the international community, we could very well determine that most of these undertakings are unnecessary, and -- though they didn’t use the word -- imperial. Our delusions of grandeur have become shockingly expensive in recent decades, and taxpayer-funded power projection no longer seems like a sustainable investment.

Also speaking at the event was the famed (and perhaps notorious) tax reform advocate Grover Norquist. Though Norquist devoted a sizable portion of his remarks to off-hand deadpanning about “liberals” and “the left,” he eventually made his way toward an incredibly salient point: in order to achieve serious progress toward cutting the military budget, such a conversation needs to penetrate into Republican circles.

Citing the unfortunate but not altogether inaccurate perception that so-called “moderate” voters are more inclined to take Republicans seriously on national security matters than Democrats, Norquist argued that Democrats have failed to tackle defense spending precisely because they fear Republican attacks on the issue. Implicitly, in order for Democrats to get serious about slashing the Pentagon budget, they need to be provided the space afforded by a real Republican debate on the subject. And that is what may finally be happening, even if it looks a tad like a circus.

What regrettable moments we might avoid if future Democrats actually perceive this space! No more Hillary Clintons casting cynical votes to authorize wars of aggression. No more John Kerrys complementing “anti-war” platforms with calls to increase force strength. No more awkward after-the-fact arguments from progressives about how we should have had more troops, better equipment, an actual exit strategy, a more battle-ready military, or whatever other inane thing. Maybe next time they’ll just say NO.

So, Democrats, be advised: Republicans are having this discussion, and some of them may even be more serious about it than you are. In an age where bipartisan consensus dwells chiefly in federal pay freezes and corporate tax cuts, it’s refreshing to note that a credible left-right nexus exists on the imperative of draining the Pentagon swamp. Moreover, this nexus lies not only in reducing the deficit but, somewhere at least, in reining in an imperial war machine that threatens our democracy and imperils the planet.