The same afternoon President Donald Trump prescribed a $54 billion boost in military spending, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon questioned both the need for such a funding bump and the campaign rhetoric used to justify it.
O’Hanlon, speaking to a forum on Army rapid equipping capabilities hosted by the Lexington Institute on Monday said the notion that the military is “in crisis” or any of the other derogatory terms the president often uses, is simply not true. He called for a moderate Pentagon budget increase as inflation and proliferating threats would require, but not a wholesale expansion of the military for it own sake.
“I think it does need to grow some, partly because I think we actually do know how to spend it well,” he said. “We actually aren’t in crisis today, even after 15 years of war. We have a strained force with a lot of specific problems. We are not in crisis.
Foremost, O’Hanlon argued that both unstable regimes like North Korea and direct competitors like China and Russia could hear senior U.S. leaders describing their military as “depleted” and take their words at face value.
“We don’t want them to take our words literally,” O’Hanlon said. “We don’t want adversaries to actually think we’re unprepared for a response. Now, I know that a when chief, or a general or anybody is in a conversation or in a hearing room and they’re asked ‘Can you respond tomorrow to North Korea or any other crisis?,’ they’re going to say ‘Yes.’ They’ll say we’ll find a way. Of course, it’s true. The U.S. military will always do it’s utmost.”
“I am still nervous about how potential adversaries hear this kind of language,” he added. “Let’s be careful about giving potential adversaries the wrong idea.”
His second argument was that continued rhetoric about the military being “depleted” and “hollow” could cause U.S. taxpayers to become cynical about the Pentagon’s ability to spend any more money than it has. The Pentagon is playing on either side of a $600 billion budget – about 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) – in fiscal 2018.
“It’s not enormous. … We can afford it,” he said. “I think it should grow a bit. … But, if we start telling the American taxpayer that we can get $600 billion or more year for 15 years, or at least for a decade now, and we have a force that’s broken or unready or in crisis, what kind of stewards are we of the taxpayer’s money. Why do we assume that taxpayer is going to continue providing for the nation’s defense?”
Waiting to potentially stymie Trump’s blind payout to the Pentagon is his own pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, former Republican congressman from South Carolina. Mulvaney is on record as ideologically opposed to military spending increases without cuts to entitlement spending and as head of OMB sits in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s assertions that money should be poured into defense to grow the military to some undefined size.
Finally, as the military services work to claw out of the technological deficit they have created over the past 15 years of grinding counterinsurgency wars, O’Hanlon suggested that they cannot both prepare for future wars and rebuild their arsenals at the same time. Readiness and modernization, typically are in competition in any kind of a defense budget, he said.
That competition usually is healthy given sufficient funding. But often one is prioritized over the other out of necessity. In the wars of the past 15 years, full-spectrum modernization has been relegated to the back burner while funds were funneled to prepare and equip troops for the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“It’s very hard to think about anything except getting people out on training ranges, fixing helicopters and tanks today and then thinking about what capability might help in 2018,” he said. “Those are all incredibly important priorities, but they are not going to get us ready for the deterrent mission of 2030, 2040.”