'Devastating' Defense Cuts?

The heavy breathing over the "cuts" to defense spending that will result if the sequester trigger is allowed to kick in over a year from now is just absurd.

As usual, Beltway budget bluster is obscuring rational thought about government spending. Jamie Fly grouses over "Tea Party darling Sen. Rand Paul ... telling reporters that the defense cuts [Defense Secretary Leon] Panetta and the entire uniformed military leadership were warning about were fictional." Yet Mr. Fly studiously withholds from readers Sen. Paul's rationale for making that claim: In point of fact, the cuts are not cuts -- they are reductions in the rate of growth. That is, the familiar Washington spending sleight-of-hand applies to defense just like it applies to everything else: In your house, when you cut spending, you actually spend less; in Leviathan, when you cut spending, you spend more -- just not quite as much more as the blob would spend left to its insatiable devices.

To listen to some of the hyperbole, you'd think Sen. Paul was proposing to reduce the Pentagon to billy-clubs and sling-shots. As Paul told CNN, however, if the sequestration goes forward, defense spending will still increase by 16 percent over the next ten years. This is a "cut" only in the sense that it would otherwise go up by at least 23 percent.

This underscores the point Veronique de Rugy has been so effectively, if inconveniently, making: Under sequestration, the Defense Department would still be spending more money in 2021 than it is spending today. Moreover, that spending increase -- not cut, increase -- comes atop a decade-long spending bonanza in which defense spending spiked by over 40 percent (from $297B in 2001 to $526B today). Furthermore, these increases do not include the added hundreds of billions in war spending -- spending that we would obviously ratchet up again if we had another war (or more) to deal with.

Of course Defense Secretary Panetta and the uniformed military are pining that the planned increase in spending actually amounts to "devastating" cuts as Panetta put it in recent congressional testimony. That is the way government bureaucracy always works, regardless of which agency is involved. There is never such a thing as "enough," and the slightest proposed reduction is resisted with end-of-days hyperbole. But Panetta's letter to Sen. John McCain, leader of the hyperbole chorus, is underwhelming to say the least. The defense budget contains billions in spending that has little to do with national defense. And it is sheer lunacy to think that the same government that gives you Solyndra and the First Lady's travel expense account is a model of fiscal probity when it comes to the $600B per annum that will soon be the Defense Department's threshold spending (i.e., before we ever get to overseas contingency operations, which are funded separately).

National security is the most important function of the federal government, the one thing government should do if it were to do only one thing. I am no come-home-American xenophobe -- I believe the capacity of the United States armed forces to project power globally is the key to international stability. It saves us lots of money in the long run. But our military is so superior to that of China, the biggest threat on the horizon, that the difference is difficult to quantify, and our defense spending continues to outpace China's by more than six-to-one. Niall Ferguson, who worries about what he calls "slashed" defense spending, concedes that our military budget "is larger than those of the next 15 countries combined" -- and most of those countries are our allies. In 2001, when defense spending was about 40 percent less than it is now, we were "only" $5.8 trillion in debt. Now debt is $15 trillion, heading to well over $20 trillion in short order. We cannot continue on this suicide path, and the thought that it can be reversed without touching one of the biggest drivers of government spending is nuts. 

Given the shape we're in, defense spending needs a very hard look -- not with an axe, but at least with a scalpel. If we do not come to grips with that fact, it is hard to see how there will ever be the political will to take an axe to the spending and programs that should be no part of the federal government's business and that are bankrupting us. I concur that it was extremely foolish for Republicans to agree to single out defense as a target for spending reductions in the very likely event that the super committee failed. But the problem is that entitlements and everything else should have been slated for much deeper cuts, not that military spending has to be pared somewhat. And to brand as a catastrophe what we are actually talking about -- not a cut but a more modest spending increase that will still leave us, by leaps and bounds, the most powerful nation in the history of the world -- is ridiculous.