Two PDA reports released today dissect an "Unprecedented" spike in defense spending, citing as causes ambitious Pentagon goals, failed reforms, and weak priorities.
Since 1998 the Pentagon has spent more than $6.5 trillion. More than $2 trillion of this sum was above the levels set in 1998. But only half of the added funds were for recent wars and military operations. Among other things, this surge in spending has allowed the Defense Department to re-inflate its workforce to Cold War levels. And almost all the expansion is contractor labor.
These are among the findings of two 18 January reports on the dynamics of recent defense spending from the Project on Defense Alternatives.
"An Undisciplined Defense: Understanding the $2 Trillion Surge in US Defense Spending"
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABR20.pdf
executive summary --
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABR20exsum.pdf
"The President's Dilemma: Debt, Deficits, and Defense Spending"
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABM45.pdf
According to the reports, the boost in spending after 1998 is unmatched over a nearly 60-year period, edging out both the Reagan and the Kennedy-Johnson spending surges. The Obama administration, in a move likely to confound critics and supporters alike, plans to spend more on the Pentagon than any administration since 1948.
"The recent wars are only half the story," says author Carl Conetta, "And their high price tag raises as many questions as it answers." The report finds the recent wars to have cost $792,000 per deployed person per year, while the Vietnam war cost only $256,000, per person/year in today’s dollars.
Part of the reason for the relatively higher cost of current wars is that the United States today relies on an expensive professional military, rather than a conscript one. The cost-structure of today’s military is not well-suited to protracted, labor-intensive wars, concludes the report. Related to this, the proportion of private contractors used today is five times higher than during the Vietnam war.
Also adding to war costs, DoD equipment purchases in the decade before the wars focused too heavily on the legacy systems favored by the services and on long-range strike weapons. So an entirely new round of buying was needed to support counter-insurgency operations.
The reports find that DoD has been generally lax in setting priorities among contending acquisition programs. But the most serious problem cited in the studies was the adoption of ambitious new roles, missions, and strategies for a reduced military after the Cold War ended. A variety of reform and transformation efforts were supposed to make it possible for a smaller military to do more. But these efforts fell short of their promise. So costs rose with ambitions.
Since the mid-1990s, the Pentagon has turned increasingly to private contractors to help fill the gap between ambitious strategies and the available number of military personnel. The report finds that the Pentagon’s contractor workforce has probably grown by 40% since 1989 – while the numbers of military personnel and civilian DoD employees have declined by more than 30%.
To avoid today’s exceptionally high budgets the reports suggest that national authorities would have to be more realistic in setting military missions and goals, more judicious in decisions about going to war, more forceful in pushing for Pentagon reform, and stricter in setting and enforcing budget priorities.
There is a deeper political problem, warns Conetta: "At present, civilian leaders are politically disinclined to push the Pentagon hard or enact tighter budget constraints, and this stance undercuts reform." In reviewing the economic landscape, however, the reports do conclude that fiscal realities may soon prompt a change in attitudes.
"An Undisciplined Defense: Understanding the $2 Trillion Surge in US Defense Spending"
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABR20.pdf
executive summary --
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABR20exsum.pdf
"The President's Dilemma: Debt, Deficits, and Defense Spending"
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABM45.pdf
Monday, January 18, 2010
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
PDA Update -- November 2009
New Publications:
Military Intervention and Common Sense: Focus on Land Forces (Paperback and Kindle editions) (Mobipocket edition) by Lutz Unterseher with preface by Charles Knight and a chapter by Carl Conetta. Ryckschau, Berlin, June 2009. This book focuses on the most challenging set of tasks for today's military interventions: those required for the stabilization of countries seriously affected by civil war or insurgency. Primarily this is a mission for the ground forces and appropriate forces must be designed to be more robust than traditional peacekeepers and less aggressively violent than traditional war fighters.
* Helicopters in America’s post-9/11 wars by Carl Conetta, from Lutz Unterseher, et. al., Military Intervention and Common Sense: Focus on Land Forces, Chapter 6 (Berlin: Ryckschau, June 2009)
PDA in the News:
Rethink Afghanistan a film by the Brave New Foundation, featuring several interview segments with Carl Conetta, 2009.
Military Intervention and Common Sense: Focus on Land Forces (Paperback and Kindle editions) (Mobipocket edition) by Lutz Unterseher with preface by Charles Knight and a chapter by Carl Conetta. Ryckschau, Berlin, June 2009. This book focuses on the most challenging set of tasks for today's military interventions: those required for the stabilization of countries seriously affected by civil war or insurgency. Primarily this is a mission for the ground forces and appropriate forces must be designed to be more robust than traditional peacekeepers and less aggressively violent than traditional war fighters.
* Helicopters in America’s post-9/11 wars by Carl Conetta, from Lutz Unterseher, et. al., Military Intervention and Common Sense: Focus on Land Forces, Chapter 6 (Berlin: Ryckschau, June 2009)
PDA in the News:
Rethink Afghanistan a film by the Brave New Foundation, featuring several interview segments with Carl Conetta, 2009.
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Saturday, August 01, 2009
Is the QDR a fraud...
In preparation for greater attention to defense policy and planning as the fourth Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) approaches completion and publication in early 2010, PDA has renovated its Defense Strategy Review Page, now in much more dynamic format. We expect it will be the go-to place on the Internet for information and debate about the QDR and US defense strategy and budgets. The new site is at:
http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/
The inaugural post of the new site follows:
Is the QDR `a PR stunt' or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy?
by Charles Knight
Last fall I attended a seminar at MIT entitled "Analytical Tools for the Next Quadrennial Defense Review" given by senior analyst who had worked on several QDRs. The QDR is an every-four-years Pentagon study mandated by Congress and meant to review how closely the defense posture and its supporting budget fits with the national strategy. The seminar presenter spent an hour detailing the analytical methods of those who worked on the "force structuring" and policy studies that provide the basis for the QDR review process. That process is ongoing this year in preparation for the release of fourth QDR in early 2010.
After the presentation a former member of the National Security Council who happened to be seated to my right turned to me and said, "[The QDR] seems like a fraud."
More recently Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, referred to the QDR as a "PR stunt" and a "PR exercise" (as reported by Marjorie Censer, Inside the Pentagon, 18 June 2009.) Rep. Abercrombie then went on to offer a less than precise elaboration, saying, "It's all Thunderbird stuff, booms and all that."
I can not be all that sure what the former National Security Council member or Rep. Abercrombie meant by their characterizations of the QDR. But, having followed all four QDRs fairly closely, I can make an educated guess at what they are getting at.
Congress has intended that through the QDR the Pentagon will make a serious attempt to reconcile the national defense strategy to the defense posture of the services and from that presumed point of congruence reconcile it to the defense budget. Policy analysts frequently complain that strategy, posture and budget are dangerously out of whack. If the QDR process addresses this problem and then does the analytical and policy work required for making real advances toward reconciliation then we can judge that it is meeting its stated purpose. If it results in a public document that uses rhetorical flourish in order to mask disjuncture of ends and means and to perpetuate prior posture and budget directions, then it is something like a 'fraud' or 'PR exercise.'
The unfolding 2010 QDR process gives us a good opportunity to look for evidence of either real reconciliation or PR exercise. A few pieces of evidence:
* There are dozens of high level policy professionals and planners in the Pentagon who have more than a cursory responsibility for aspects of the QDR. They work with hundreds of others, some inside the military and many civilian consultants and contractors. Models are built and simulations are run. Task forces and issue teams work the results. No doubt
many of these people would be indignant if you told them their work was simply serving public relations and had little effect on the direction of policy.
* On the other hand, modeling output and even the output of task forces are quite sensitive to starting assumptions and specifications. Senior civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon carefully review input parameters and seek to influence how the particulars of output is summed up and presented to those responsible for the next steps in the process of getting to the final report. "Startling findings" and their policy implications are unlikely to find their way into the document drafts unless senior leadership wants them there.
* Consider also that Defense News has reported that the Pentagon is moving ahead with the FY'11 budget process before the budget work on the 2010 QDR is completed. Minimally, this is suggestive of prior budget and posture decisions running the QDR output, rather than the other way around.
[ The Defense Strategy Review Page will take note of what other evidence emerges pertaining to the question of whether the QDR is 'a fraud', 'a PR stunt', or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy? I invite your comments and viewpoints on this important question. ]
http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/
The inaugural post of the new site follows:
Is the QDR `a PR stunt' or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy?
by Charles Knight
Last fall I attended a seminar at MIT entitled "Analytical Tools for the Next Quadrennial Defense Review" given by senior analyst who had worked on several QDRs. The QDR is an every-four-years Pentagon study mandated by Congress and meant to review how closely the defense posture and its supporting budget fits with the national strategy. The seminar presenter spent an hour detailing the analytical methods of those who worked on the "force structuring" and policy studies that provide the basis for the QDR review process. That process is ongoing this year in preparation for the release of fourth QDR in early 2010.
After the presentation a former member of the National Security Council who happened to be seated to my right turned to me and said, "[The QDR] seems like a fraud."
More recently Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, referred to the QDR as a "PR stunt" and a "PR exercise" (as reported by Marjorie Censer, Inside the Pentagon, 18 June 2009.) Rep. Abercrombie then went on to offer a less than precise elaboration, saying, "It's all Thunderbird stuff, booms and all that."
I can not be all that sure what the former National Security Council member or Rep. Abercrombie meant by their characterizations of the QDR. But, having followed all four QDRs fairly closely, I can make an educated guess at what they are getting at.
Congress has intended that through the QDR the Pentagon will make a serious attempt to reconcile the national defense strategy to the defense posture of the services and from that presumed point of congruence reconcile it to the defense budget. Policy analysts frequently complain that strategy, posture and budget are dangerously out of whack. If the QDR process addresses this problem and then does the analytical and policy work required for making real advances toward reconciliation then we can judge that it is meeting its stated purpose. If it results in a public document that uses rhetorical flourish in order to mask disjuncture of ends and means and to perpetuate prior posture and budget directions, then it is something like a 'fraud' or 'PR exercise.'
The unfolding 2010 QDR process gives us a good opportunity to look for evidence of either real reconciliation or PR exercise. A few pieces of evidence:
* There are dozens of high level policy professionals and planners in the Pentagon who have more than a cursory responsibility for aspects of the QDR. They work with hundreds of others, some inside the military and many civilian consultants and contractors. Models are built and simulations are run. Task forces and issue teams work the results. No doubt
many of these people would be indignant if you told them their work was simply serving public relations and had little effect on the direction of policy.
* On the other hand, modeling output and even the output of task forces are quite sensitive to starting assumptions and specifications. Senior civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon carefully review input parameters and seek to influence how the particulars of output is summed up and presented to those responsible for the next steps in the process of getting to the final report. "Startling findings" and their policy implications are unlikely to find their way into the document drafts unless senior leadership wants them there.
* Consider also that Defense News has reported that the Pentagon is moving ahead with the FY'11 budget process before the budget work on the 2010 QDR is completed. Minimally, this is suggestive of prior budget and posture decisions running the QDR output, rather than the other way around.
[ The Defense Strategy Review Page will take note of what other evidence emerges pertaining to the question of whether the QDR is 'a fraud', 'a PR stunt', or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy? I invite your comments and viewpoints on this important question. ]
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Report on Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq
Quickly, Carefully, and Generously: The Necessary Steps for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq
Full text HTML
Printable Full Text PDF
Executive Summary PDF
From the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, a Commonwealth Institute publication, June 2008.
Preface by U.S. Representative James P. McGovern (MA - 03). Twenty-five initiatives the US can and should take to reduce violence and regional instability as the US leaves Iraq.
Where Do We Go From Here?
New York Times 7 July 2008 lead editorial cites the Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq report above.
Like a Mirage in the Desert: Full Withdrawal May Recede into the Time Horizon
By Charles Knight. Presentation at the United States Institute of Peace panel on The Future of the U.S. Military Presence in Iraq, 25 July 2008 (as prepared). Listen to the Podcast of the panel presentations and the Q&A.
Full text HTML
Printable Full Text PDF
Executive Summary PDF
From the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, a Commonwealth Institute publication, June 2008.
Preface by U.S. Representative James P. McGovern (MA - 03). Twenty-five initiatives the US can and should take to reduce violence and regional instability as the US leaves Iraq.
Where Do We Go From Here?
New York Times 7 July 2008 lead editorial cites the Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq report above.
Like a Mirage in the Desert: Full Withdrawal May Recede into the Time Horizon
By Charles Knight. Presentation at the United States Institute of Peace panel on The Future of the U.S. Military Presence in Iraq, 25 July 2008 (as prepared). Listen to the Podcast of the panel presentations and the Q&A.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Recent Publications
Re-Envisioning Defense - An Agenda for US Policy Debate and Transition
Executive Summary PDF
Printable Full Text PDF
By Carl Conetta, 27 June 2008.
Summarizes problem areas in recent US defense policy as well as several broad topics of debate that touch on them all.
The Role of Force & the Armed Forces in post-Cold War US Foreign Policy: What have we learned? Cautionary lessons for the next administration
Security Policy Working Group symposium at Parsons: The New School for Design, NYC, 10 April 2008.
Presentations: Andrew Bacevich, "The Bush Doctrine: Origins and Demise" (Podcast); Carl Conetta, "Out from the House of War: A Litmus for New Leadership in Security Policy" (printable .pdf format)
Cul de Sac: 9/11 and the Paradox of American Power
Full Text HTML
Printable Full Text PDF
By Carl Conetta, PDA Research Monograph #13, 05 February 2008.
Post-Cold War US security policy evinces a disturbing paradox: it has been delivering less and less security at ever increasing cost. The reasons reside not in the differences between the Bush and Clinton administration, but in their points of similarity.
A Prisoner to Primacy
Full Text HTML
Printable Full Text PDF
By Carl Conetta, PDA Briefing Memo #43, 05 February 2008.
The United States is entering a period of policy transition, but there is a dearth of new thinking regarding security policy. The debate remains paralyzed by 9/11 and mesmerized by military primacy. Progress depends on rethinking the role of force.
Executive Summary PDF
Printable Full Text PDF
By Carl Conetta, 27 June 2008.
Summarizes problem areas in recent US defense policy as well as several broad topics of debate that touch on them all.
The Role of Force & the Armed Forces in post-Cold War US Foreign Policy: What have we learned? Cautionary lessons for the next administration
Security Policy Working Group symposium at Parsons: The New School for Design, NYC, 10 April 2008.
Presentations: Andrew Bacevich, "The Bush Doctrine: Origins and Demise" (Podcast); Carl Conetta, "Out from the House of War: A Litmus for New Leadership in Security Policy" (printable .pdf format)
Cul de Sac: 9/11 and the Paradox of American Power
Full Text HTML
Printable Full Text PDF
By Carl Conetta, PDA Research Monograph #13, 05 February 2008.
Post-Cold War US security policy evinces a disturbing paradox: it has been delivering less and less security at ever increasing cost. The reasons reside not in the differences between the Bush and Clinton administration, but in their points of similarity.
A Prisoner to Primacy
Full Text HTML
Printable Full Text PDF
By Carl Conetta, PDA Briefing Memo #43, 05 February 2008.
The United States is entering a period of policy transition, but there is a dearth of new thinking regarding security policy. The debate remains paralyzed by 9/11 and mesmerized by military primacy. Progress depends on rethinking the role of force.
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