The Pentagon is arguing that reducing its budget by nearly $100 billion would force the department to consider cutting funding for programs “designed to modernize the force and make it more lethal.” But the military may not even need some of these programs, and cutting funding for them now could prevent more waste in the long run.
The thrust of the Pentagon’s arguments against significant defense spending cuts is that paring down some programs would waste money already spent on multiple efforts to accelerate capabilities. The focus here is sunk costs in the short term, but Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord has made it clear that the Pentagon “would be concerned with almost any conceivable way cuts of this magnitude might be imposed, and suggested that steep reductions to defense spending are “uninformed by strategy.”
Republicans reinvigorated public debate about military budget cuts at the beginning of the year with a proposal to address the nation’s debt by reducing government spending to fiscal year 2022 levels. While unpopular even among most Republicans, the proposal prompted House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro to request an analysis from the Pentagon on how deep cuts to defense spending would impact the American people.
The Pentagon’s analysis arguing against significant defense spending reductions warrants critical inspection and skepticism — regardless of whether Congress institutes cuts, and how. The analysis completely disregards the Pentagon’s inability to manage its finances, which reflects the department’s own challenges with strategic planning.
McCord said that defense cuts would waste funding the department has already invested in nuclear modernization efforts and the push to ramp up shipbuilding, among other things. And while cutting funding for programs already in progress is not ideal, maintaining their funding under the guise of preventing government waste does not make them relatively strategic or cost-efficient.
For example, the effort to simultaneously modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad (land, air, and sea) was (and still is) a strategically ambitious and shockingly expensive venture. McCord noted that spending reductions could force up to 40 percent cuts to modernization efforts for the land- and air-based legs, with “significant disruption and delays” to the B-21 bomber specifically.
But sinking more money into the B-21 reflects the Pentagon’s incredible capacity to double down on weapons of little military value in favor of spending for the sake of spending. The bomber has not completed operational testing, and the program is so classified that tracking its cost is nearly impossible. What we do know is that the “thirty-year operations” estimate for 100 B-21s is $203 billion, despite little technical advancement compared to its predecessor, the B-2 — the costs for which famously spiraled out of control in the 1980s. The B-21 is another acquisition boondoggle taxpayers don’t need.
On the shipbuilding front, McCord warned that spending reductions would force the Navy to eliminate a couple capital ships, likely a Virginia-class submarine and a DDG-51 destroyer. While McCord claims that deep spending cuts are “uninformed by strategy,” the same can be said for the DDG-51 destroyer.
The Navy included the destroyer in its annual unfunded priorities list to Congress for fiscal year 2022. These “UPLs” are basically wish lists, or funding requests for programs that the military services would like but aren’t important or strategic enough to include in their formal budget request to Congress. These lists completely undermine the budget process and enable military services to game the system by securing funding without justifying it in the regular process.
The prime example of this budget debauchery is in fact, the DDG-51 destroyer. In fiscal year 2022, the Navy “deliberately underfunded” the ship in its official budget request and requested another one in its wish list.
There’s no denying that eliminating a couple capital ships already in development would waste already appropriated taxpayer dollars, but that doesn’t mean keeping them is less wasteful or more strategic in the long term. And if the Pentagon is truly committed to effective spending, there are other ways for the Pentagon to reduce waste in the acquisition process.
Thankfully, the Pentagon supports one major proposal to eliminate waste, which is to get rid of those wish lists. Ending wish lists would prevent much more wasteful spending than staying the course on programs like the DDG-51 destroyer, for which the Navy has already gamed the budget process.
Shaky justifications for both full-legged nuclear modernization and shipbuilding outside the formal budget process cast serious doubt on McCord’s claim that Pentagon spending is “carefully constructed” to support strategic goals and “take care of our people.”
On the latter point, careful and strategic budget construction means prioritizing the well-being of servicemembers. But about 25.8 percent of active duty personnel experienced some level of food insecurity in 2018. One in six military families are food insecure, and under current law, housing allowances for military personnel count as income, which disqualifies them from food assistance.
To make matters worse, rising housing costs exacerbate food inaccessibility, prompting some members of Congress to push the Pentagon to fully cover commercial housing costs for active duty servicemembers living off military bases with their families.
Still, in the analysis Rep. DeLauro requested from the Pentagon, McCord said that the defense secretary is deeply troubled by the possible harm spending reductions “would inflict on our personnel and their families, and on our ability to recruit.” But the prospect of defense cuts did not create food and housing insecurity among servicemembers, and McCord did not make any indications that the Pentagon is rectifying other longstanding personnel spending issues — like trimming officer bloat, for instance.
To his credit, McCord explains that well-deserved military pay raises in fiscal year 2024 increase fiscal year 2022 military personnel spending costs by $10.3 billion — including more funding for subsistence and housing costs. Spending reductions that protect pay raises would of course require the military to reorient its force structure and/or adjust its strategic objectives. But that’s okay.
As we’ve seen over the past 20 years, the Pentagon rarely delivers new weapons on time or within budget. Defense cuts must be made to weapons system development, not only because there’s evidence that weapons system development does not always support specific strategic goals, but also because servicemembers and military families don’t have a multi-million-dollar lobbying industry backing them up — the contractors that deliver weapons late and over cost do. It’s a big reason why money continues to flow seemingly unabated to an unaccountable and defective acquisition system.
Perhaps the military would have a better time recruiting if it addressed long-standing personnel issues rather than opposing spending reductions that would force the department to finally face the music, on both strategic acquisition and personnel issues. To suggest that spending reductions themselves produce these harms, rather than expose harm already done, is denying the reality of Pentagon spending today.
