Republican presidential candidates touched briefly on Pentagon weapons-buying–including fixed-price contracts and Navy shipbuilding–during their Saturday night debate. Some observers, though,want to hear more from the GOP field on defense budgeting.
Going into Saturday night’s national-security-focused debate, the eight Republican candidates for the presidential nomination had already shared some of their military views.
Frontrunner Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, had called for supporting the military “with the best training, equipment, technology and infrastructure necessary to keep them in a position to win.” Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney–who joins Cain and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich atop recent polls of voters–in October unveiled a 43-page defense strategy that calls for halting defense cuts, setting the Pentagon budget at a floor of 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product, and boosting Navy shipbuilding to 15 ships per year. All of the major GOP candidates have, in the very least, posted summaries of their national-security views on their websites.
Saturday night’s primetime debate, hosted by CBS News and National Journal in Spartanburg, S.C., was the first Republican showdown focused exclusively on foreign policy and national security. However, while the size of the defense budget and weapon-system spending were mentioned, they were not the hottest debate topics, which ranged from Iran’s nuclear plans to troop levels in Afghanistan and relations with Pakistan.
Jamie Fly, executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI ), said the debate was better than he expected, but “needed more talk of defense spending.”
“Unfortunately, given that almost everything discussed (Saturday) related to America’s military capabilities, the candidates did not spend much time discussing perhaps the paramount threat to our national security: cuts to the defense budget,” Fly wrote on a National Review blog.
He noted that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who was invited to ask a question at the debate in his state, chose to question the candidates about deficit reduction. Fly, for his part, argued such a “focus on domestic issues at a national-security debate is emblematic of the myopic view that many in the Tea Party have shown toward the problems facing the United States.”
Gingrich seized on a question during the debate about thinking “outside the box” to discuss Navy shipbuilding, which Romney also has mentioned on the campaign trail.
The former House speaker said he would “apply a Lean Six Sigma (engineering approach) to the Pentagon to liberate the money to rebuild the Navy.”
“We need a capital investment program and this administration is shrinking the Navy to a point where it’s going to be incapable of doing its job worldwide,” said Gingrich, who standing in the polls recently improved.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) also fielded a defense-contracting-related question at the debate. Asked how defense spending should be handled during the debt crisis, she said “the military is also able to have expenditures reduced,” suggesting the Pentagon enter into more fixed-price contracts with businesses.
Bachmann said that modernization is needed and troops must be “fully resourced.” Still, savings can be found, she maintained, by examining “how we finance procurement.”
“Today we have a situation where we reward those who are designing and making our weaponry based upon the length of time they take to produce it; we don’t do that anywhere else,” she said. “So rather than having a cost-plus-fee (setup), we need to have a fixed-cost system. We’ll save money.”
Looking ahead, the defense industry would fare better under a GOP than a Democratic president, according to a top consultant.
“Research indicates that weapons spending tends to be higher when Republicans control the White House and/or the Senate,” Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute in Virginia, said yesterday. One statistical analysis, he added, shows Republican control of the government “is the single strongest predictor of rising weapons outlays.”
“Based on what candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have said on the campaign trail, the defense industry would fare far better under a Romney or Gingrich administration than in an Obama second term,” Thompson told Defense Daily.
The Republican contenders also will face off at a debate on foreign policy and national security hosted by The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and CNN in Washington on Nov. 22.