Christopher Preble and Charles Knight. Huffington Post, 20 January 2012.
http://defensealt.org/ysCbHQ

Excerpt:

Balance depends on what you are standing on. With respect to our physical security, the United States is blessed with continental peace and a dearth of powerful enemies. Our military is the best-trained, best-led, and best-equipped in the world. It is our unstable finances and our sluggish economy that make us vulnerable to stumbling.

Unfortunately, the new strategy does not fully appreciate our strengths, nor does it fully address our weaknesses. In the end, it does not achieve Eisenhower’s vaunted balance.

__________________________________________________

DefenseTracker.com, 18 January 2012.
http://defensetracker.com/web/?p=1681

Excerpt:

Part of the “Doomsday Mechanism” hysteria spread by Defense Secretary Panetta and his comrade in the budget wars, Cong. Buck McKeon, has been the automaticity of the across-the-boards cuts that sequester would impose on the defense budget next January–in the likely event that the lame duck Congress and its successor next year will both be as dysfunctional as the can of red and blue worms we have now. (The other part of the hysteria is the “horror” of returning to 2007 levels of base budget defense spending.)

It seems that the president has existing statutory authority to modify the sequester mechanism–but not the amount of cuts required.

Philip Taubman. New York Times, 08 January 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/reducing-the-nuclear-arsenal.html

Excerpt:

If the president pushes back against the defenders of the old order at the Pentagon and other redoubts of the nuclear priesthood, he can preserve American security while making the United States a more credible leader on one of today’s most critical issues — containing the spread of nuclear weapons. Like a chain smoker asking others to give up cigarettes, the United States, with its bloated arsenal, sounds hypocritical when it puts pressure on other nations to cut weapons and stop producing bomb-grade highly enriched uranium…

Related:

Defense Strategy Review Page Nuclear Debate

Winslow Wheeler. TIME Battleland, 13 December, 2011.
http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/12/13/is-leon-panetta-the-right-man-to-be-secretary-of-defense/

Excerpt:

Without the inclusion of war spending, the DOD base budget under the “Doomsday Mechanism” is no longer at or near its post-World War II high, but it is also not near any of the historic lows. In fact, it is roughly $38 billion above annual spending during the Cold War…

Stephen M. Walt. Foreign Policy, 01 December, 2011.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/12/01/a_bandwagon_for_offshore_balancing

Excerpt:

…offshore balancing is the right strategy even when our coffers are full, provided that no peer competitors are threatening to dominate key strategic regions. Even during good times, it makes no sense to take on unnecessary burdens or to allow allies to free-ride on Uncle Sam’s hubristic desire to be the “indispensable nation” in almost every corner of the world. In other words, offshore balancing isn’t just a strategy for hard times; it is also the best available strategy in a world where the United States is the strongest power, prone to trigger unnecessary antagonism, and vulnerable to being dragged into unnecessary wars.

Sara Sorcher. National Journal, 29 November 2011.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/insiders-u-s-should-begin-pivot-to-asia-through-diplomacy-not-military-steps-20111128

Excerpt:

President Obama recently announced steps to strengthen the architecture of an American foreign policy with new focus on the Pacific, including plans to deploy 2,500 troops to a base in Australia—all the while insisting that any reductions in U.S. defense spending will not come at the expense of priorities in the Asia-Pacific region. Even as many in Washington warily eye China’s rapidly modernizing military and expanding naval presence in the Pacific, 39 percent of Insiders said the next move is to improve American engagement with Beijing while avoiding any military-related steps.

Paula G. Thornhill. CNN, 23 November 2011.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/23/opinion/thornhill-defense-cuts/index.html

Excerpt:

The nation’s leadership needs a Plan B so that a heroic assumption — or hope — about the unlikelihood of future wars does not inadvertently lead to strategic disaster. This is harder than it seems. Plan B would allow more flexibility to meet what could go wrong in the strategic environment rather than just making budget cuts.

Editor’s Comment:

Plan B is to maintain a good ‘strategic reserve.’ As neo-conservatives like to point out the United States spends only 4.5% of its GDP on its military. If new threats pinch, the U.S. can easily ramp up spending and engage its still considerable industrial and knowledge base. The problem this country faces with a reconstitution strategy is lack of political will. Civilian leaders are loathe to ask the American people to sacrifice. A robust National Guard and Reserve force that is not abused by frequent deployments to unnecessary wars and a societal expectation to pay a tax surcharge in times of national emergency are the fundamentals of what this country needs to be strategically prepared while maintaining a small standing peacetime force. With such a strategic plan the U.S. can be well provisioned for any threat.

Matthew Leatherman. Bloomberg Government, 21 November 2011.
http://defensealt.org/veAUPs

Michael E. O’Hanlon. New York Times, 14 November 2011.
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/1114_defense_budget_ohanlon.aspx

Excerpt:

By keeping a ship abroad for a couple of years and having two crews share that vessel as well as a training ship at home, the Navy could improve its deployment efficiency by up to 40 percent per ship, accomplishing with about three and a half ships what, on average, might have required five. Focusing on the Navy’s large surface combatants, cruisers and destroyers, this approach could theoretically allow roughly 60 ships (with slightly less than half of them deployed abroad at a time) to maintain the global presence that the Navy says it needs, rather than the 94 ships it is currently pursuing.

Loren B. Thompson. Lexington Institute, 11 November 2011.
http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/gen-odierno-breaks-the-code-on-why-weapons-cost-so-much?a=1&c=1171

Excerpt:

Gen. Odierno’s November 2 remarks indicate that he realizes it isn’t just contractors who drive up the cost of programs. The cost overruns are often baked in at the beginning by the baroque demands that the acquisition system imposes on developers. These demands result in long schedule delays, unaffordable unit costs, and weapons features that can’t meet the expectations of appropriators. More importantly, they slow the delivery of better combat systems to warfighters.

Paul Rogers. Open Democracy, 11 November 2011.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/israel-vs-iran-regional-blowback

Excerpt:

The near-unavoidable reality is that out of confrontation Iran will soon acquire a limited nuclear arsenal. This is because even a limited bombing of Iran will create a new dynamic where Iran is at the centre of the post-attack region; will have several new options to impose costs on its opponents; and will go full-tilt for its own deterrent.

Kelsey Hartigan. Democracy Arsenal, 10 November 2011.
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2011/11/if-you-want-peace-stop-clamoring-for-war.html

Excerpt:

If Romney believes that he can waltz into the Oval Office, give a few rough and tough speeches and suddenly Iran will open its doors to IAEA inspectors, well, he’s in for a rude awakening.

Belligerent rhetoric won’t solve the situation with Iran. In fact, most experts will tell you that it will make it worse. Threats of military action, or worse, actual military action, will only play into the hands of Iran’s hardliners…If a U.S. military presence was going to convince Iran to cooperate, I would have thought it would have happened by now.

Brian Phillips. AntiWar.com, 9 November 2011.
http://original.antiwar.com/bphillips/2011/11/08/10-factors-that-may-lead-to-war-with-iran/

Abu Muqawama. Center for New American Security, 13 October 2011.
http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2011/10/looking-trim-defense-budget-start-qdr.html

Excerpt:

Yesterday’s announcement that the Department of Defense will form a “Strategic Choices Group” to identify priorities and risks ahead of $450 billion in potential cuts to the budget is the latest example of the worthlessness of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). A strategic document would necessarily identify risks and priorities, but since the QDR does neither, the Department of Defense has to establish an entirely new working group to do just that.

See also: Is the QDR ‘a PR stunt’ or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy?

Ethan Pollack, The Economic Policy Institute Blog, 20 September 2011. http://www.epi.org/blog/militaristic-foreign-policy-saves-money/

One of the persistent criticisms of President Obama’s fiscal plan is that it counts war spending reductions as savings. Basically, the Congressional Budget Office calculates its defense baseline in part by taking the most recent war supplemental (technically called Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO) and assuming that amount—adjusted for inflation—will be spent each year over the foreseeable horizon. This adds up to about $1.73 trillion over 10 years. The president’s proposal, however, includes only $653 billion in OCO spending over 10 years, for a savings of about $1.1 trillion.

Some critics, however, allege that these savings cannot be counted because the CBO OCO baseline itself isn’t realistic, therefore the savings are not “real.” For example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) argues that counting these savings is a “budget gimmick” that the president uses to “inflate his savings.” According to this critique, another baseline for OCO expenditures should be used—either the president’s budget request or the CBO’s drawdown policy option—which would lower the baseline and make it practically impossible to generate budget savings from reducing war spending.

All due respect to CRFB and the other critics, but this criticism is silly. The CBO OCO baseline isn’t “unrealistic”—rather, it represents the costs of President Bush’s aggressive invasion-centered approach to foreign policy extended into perpetuity. President Obama is, thankfully, in the process of trying to change America’s approach to foreign policy, drawing down troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and moving toward a more multilateral, patient, diplomatic, and most importantly, less expensive approach. Furthermore, the fiscal plan proposes to cap OCO spending, thereby making sure those savings are realized.

President Obama’s foreign policy approach costs less money than President Bush’s, and the budget outlook should reflect those savings.

Editor’s Comment:

It must be a sign of just how bad things are for progressives that EPI now celebrates a big puff of smoke from the Obama administration sent to divert attention from real budget reductions and, in particular, to protect the Pentagon from further cuts in the fiscal battles. Ethan Pollack has worked for OMB, so he surely understands the accounting distortion built into the CBO baseline projections based on current law. Not one person in the world (including those at CBO who prepare the baseline) believes that OCO expenditures will continue to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same level as 2011. That’s why the CBO did a “draw down policy option” – to estimate likely OCO costs. That latter exercise is not “silly”, nor the suggestions that such estimates be the basis for considering budget reduction plans.

Mr. Pollack must also know that President Obama’s FY12 budget submission to Congress contains only $50 billion a year for OCO for future years. Which is it? $118 billion forever or $50 billion forever? You can’t have it both ways.

CBO’s draw down option is surely better for budget (and deficit
reduction) planning that either the unrealistic “placeholder” (which
is simply irresponsible budgeting) or the CBO baseline artifact of
$118 billion forever.

If President Obama wishes to announce a plan to save meaningful
amounts from OCO he would need to announce more rapid withdrawals from Afghanistan… but then no one really believes he is leaving
Afghanistan in 2014. So this is all smoke and mirrors…and progressives should feel terrible about it, not celebrate.

It is disingenuous to claim that the CBO’s baseline OCO is somehow a Bush responsibility. It is simply a methodological artifact of how CBO does its baseline.

President Obama has been in charge for nearly three years and has not brought all the troops home from Iraq and has hardly begun a draw down in Afghanistan. The current year OCO of $118 billion is his responsibility as is the phoney-ness of projecting it forward ten years and then claiming savings from spending “$653 billion…over ten years.” If he was really willing to end the war in Afghanistan soon he might be able to cut that OCO in half and offer $325 billion from reduced future war costs to deficit reduction.

And until this year’s budget imbroglio in Congress forced his hand he
has continued to feed the Pentagon with higher and higher base budgets every year. There is no evidence that President Obama’s “approach to foreign policy…[is] less expensive”… not as far as the largesse offered up to the Pentagon is concerned.

We must not base progressive policy on smoke and mirrors. Such
politics only hurts us in the long run.

Another critique of this budget gimmick can be found at: http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/gordon-adams/2369/how-about-those-defense-savings.

___________________________________________________________

Matthew Leatherman. The Will and the Wallet, 26 July 2011.
http://thewillandthewallet.squarespace.com/blog/2011/7/26/dods-64b-question-where-is-that-64b.html

Excerpt:

“CBO has long said that DoD underestimates program costs including, most recently, its report on the Long-Term Implications of the 2012 Future Years Defense Program. That study concluded that “the difference between the CBO projection and DOD’s estimates for the FYDP is about 2%, or about $64 billion, over the five-year period.” “

editorial. Boston Globe, 30 June 2011.
http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-30/bostonglobe/29722652_1_panetta-pentagon-government-discretionary-spending

When Leon Panetta takes the helm at the Defense Department tomorrow, he will be facing difficult choices about the US military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. But an equally pressing — and potentially even more intractable — problem is the Pentagon’s budget and spending. Outgoing secretary Robert Gates was good at paying lip service to the need to control spending; he noted recently that “the United States should spend as much as necessary on national defense, but not one penny more.’’ But the department’s baseline budget has risen every year since Gates took over — from $450 billion to more than $550 billion four years later. This year alone, the Pentagon is seeking a 3.4 percent increase from its 2010 budget.

It’s not just the wars; they represent less than 30 percent of the Pentagon’s enormous budget request. In the context of other government spending, the Pentagon is a behemoth. For every $100 of government discretionary spending, over $30 goes to non-war defense expenditures. The scope is overwhelming; the need for more than piecemeal cuts of failed systems is urgent.

Gates recently claimed that the Pentagon has already cut $300 billion, but the math suggests otherwise. That money came from programs already scheduled to be terminated. The savings were simply put into other military priorities. After noting that the Navy’s 11 carrier battle groups were excessive, Gates refused to eliminate a single one.

Panetta will need to take a more disciplined and systemic look at the budget. There is no shortage of advice from influential think tanks and independent studies, including last year’s report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a bipartisan group convened by Representative Barney Frank. Their recommendations would trim $960 billion between 2011 and 2020, if only the Pentagon would act on them.

Cutting the number of deployed nuclear weapons by half — to 1,000 warheads — is consistent with a reduced emphasis on nuclear warfare and the efforts of arms control advocates. This move alone would save over $100 billion over 10 years. Reducing conventional forces by 50,000, which would still leave 100,000 personnel deployed in Europe and Asia, is more realistic force structure. Cancelling just a few systems that are neither cost-effective nor essential would save more. The MV-22 Osprey and Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle are long on trouble, and short on capability. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office both have proposed changes to support efforts, such as maintenance, supply, and infrastructure, that could save $100 billion in the next decade.

All this could be accomplished without compromising national security. Panetta needs to push back on the political forces that claim any cuts make the nation vulnerable to various enemies. The deficit is a much greater security risk.

Unfortunately, the Pentagon remains the largest federal agency that simply cannot pass an independent auditor test; when subjected to the normal bookkeeping procedures, it cannot, with any accuracy, track spending, fraud, waste, or redundancy. It has given itself a September 2017 deadline for audit “readiness.’’ That’s not soon enough. Panetta, who, as the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, has a reputation as a rigorous fighter for fiscal discipline. He will need to get the Pentagon’s house in order on day one.

Melvin Goodman. Baltimore Sun, 29 June 2011.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-06-29/news/bs-ed-gates-20110629_1_military-spending-defense-budget-secretary-of-defense-gates

Excerpt:

In his recent lectures, Mr. Gates warned against any freeze in defense spending, leaving Mr. Panetta to deal with weapons systems and military missions that the United States can no longer afford. As the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Panetta presumably understands that the United States, with less than 25 percent of the world’s economic output and more than 50 percent of the world’s military expenditures, will have to curtail certain weapons and missions. The defense budget has grown more than 50 percent in the past 10 years and now exceeds the pace of spending of the Cold War era, including the wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as the peacetime buildup of President Ronald Reagan.

A reexamination of current troop deployments must include the tens of thousands of troops in Europe and Asia more than six decades after the end of World War II; hundreds of bases and facilities the world over; and the excessive willingness to project power in areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, where vital national interests are not at stake.

William Hartung. Huffington Post, 28 June 2011.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-hartung/afghanistan-for-real-savi_b_886241.html

Excerpt:

There won’t be large scale savings from the winding down of the Afghan war until virtually all U.S. forces are withdrawn. Even then there are still likely to be ongoing costs for training, equipping and possibly even paying Afghan security forces, which could cost up to $10 billion or more per year if current rates are maintained. But the vast bulk of the $120 billion per year now being spent on the war will be freed up for other purposes: deficit reduction, or public investments, or some combination of the two.

An end to the Afghan and Iraq wars may also open the way to a more comprehensive public debate on the Pentagon’s $550 billion-plus annual base budget — a sum over four times as large as what we spend on the wars. Politically, making real cuts in Pentagon spending during a time of war is a tough sell, even given our current budgetary predicament. But an end to the wars combined with the pressure from the deficit could lead to real cuts in the Pentagon’s base budget as well, especially if we adopt a new strategy that forswears major wars of occupation or large-scale insurgency campaigns of the kind our nation has waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we cut the war spending and bring the Pentagon’s larger budget into line with reality, then we’ll be talking real money.

Jeff Jacoby. Boston Globe, 22 June 2011.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/06/22/the_worlds_best_policeman/

Excerpt:

…with great power come great responsibilities, and sometimes one of those responsibilities is to destroy monsters: to take down tyrants who victimize the innocent and flout the rules of civilization. If neighborhoods and cities need policing, it stands to reason the world does too. And just as local criminals thrive when cops look the other way, so do criminals on the world stage.

Our world needs a policeman. And whether most Americans like it or not, only their indispensable nation is fit for the job.

Editor’s Comment:

When three-quarters of Americans reject a role of global policeman for the U.S. perhaps they understand something fundamental about policing that Jeff Jacoby doesn’t. A police force without oversight by a judiciary and a guiding body of law is surely a formula for tyranny.

Jacoby would never endorse tyranny, but the avocation to be global policemen by White House occupants who are elected by and responsible to only 10% of the world’s people is a decision to be a vigilante on the global stage. Consider that Americans would be up in arms if China or Russia took it upon themselves to be global vigilantes.

For the leaders of the U.S. to so gladly to take up this role only serves to delay the day when we have capable international judicial and policing institutions. If our leaders attempt to think even a few years into the future it should be clear to them that the practice of vigilantism does not serve American interests.

[A version of this comment was published as a letter to the editor in the Boston Globe, 28 June 2011.]

Winslow Wheeler. Guest Post, 24 May 2011.

The National Defense Authorization bill, H.R. 1540, will be debated by the House of Representatives this week. The bill is the work product of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Chaired by Congressman Buck McKeon, R. – Calif..

The Operation and Maintenance section (Title XLIII) of the bill is one of its largest and most important. “O&M” deals with the support, logistics, maintenance, training and much else needed to enable our armed forces to function effectively. $170.8 billion was requested by President Obama; the committee increased that by $361 million to $171.1 billion. However, to get there the Committee took some detours.

Sprinkled throughout the O&M title the HASC added various earmarks (one minor example: $4.0 million for “Simulation Training Systems for the Army” [p. 430 of the Committee Report]). All of these came to a lot more than the $361 million net add to the bill. The Committee and its staff had to find offsets to help pay for these earmark goodies and other additions.

In past years, the HASC (and the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Defense Subcommittees of both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees) has listed strange sounding reductions in the O&M sections of their bills – “unobligated balances.” These should be technical alterations for money previously appropriated to the various military services for various programs; they become “unobligated” when the planned expenditure does not occur, and they presumably become available for offsets for new spending, or – if the Committee were to be more forthcoming to the taxpayer – return to the Treasury.

For example, on p. 432 of the HASC Committee Report, the tables for Army O&M show a reduction of $384.6 million labeled “Army unobligated balances estimate.” That amount happens to be 1.1% of the president’s request for total Army O&M ($34.735 billion).

The Navy section on O&M in the HASC bill shows a $435.9 million reduction for “Navy unobligated balances estimate.” For some strange reason, that amount also calculates to 1.1% of the President’s request for Navy O&M ($39.365 billion).

Stranger even, the Marine Corps O&M reduction for unobligated balances as also 1.1% ($66 million of a $5.960 billion request).

Same thing for the Air Force; the same 1.1% ($400.8 million from a $36.195 billion request).

None of these are discussed or explained in the text of the committee report; the only “explanation” we get is that they are “Army [or Navy, or Air Force, etc.] unobligated balances estimate.”

That all of these “estimates,” which should be technical in their nature, come to 1.1% reeks of gaming the system. Two relevant questions: Who did it? And Why?

First, I seriously question if these conveniently similar estimates did indeed come from the military services. That would require a rather strange (and specious) amount of coordination by them all to all come to 1.1% of their respective O&M budget requests.

Secondly, why are there no “unobligated balances” in the procurement and R&D titles, which are heavy with the kind of spending that can end up “unobligated”?

Third, why isn’t this money being returned to the Treasury, from whence it came and now belongs if indeed the money is no longer needed by the Defense Department?

There are lots of other questions, but hopefully you get my drift. The offsets the HASC took, calling them “unobligated balances,” are nothing but across the board whacks at one of the most importance accounts in the DOD budget – the one that makes for a well trained and supported military. Why is the HASC doing these across the board cuts, and why are they doing it in O&M?

There are some other “unobligated balance” issues in the bill. The defense wide part of O&M also took a $456.8 million hit from a request of $30.940 billion. This comes to 1.47%. Why does the part that supports the special forces and others take a bigger proportional hit than the other military services?

Also, the Defense Health Program takes a $225 million hit which is “explained” as a “GAO estimate,” but no GAO analysis or other explanation is offered.

The Military Personnel budget that pays military salaries takes a $693 million hit from a $142.828 billion request (.48%). I found no explanation.

Finally, section 2107 permits the Secretary of the Army to use $115 million in previously “unobligated” spending to fund a water treatment facility at Fort Irwin California. Perhaps the House representative from the Fort Irwin area can explain how all this works and how he or she got to fund some spending in the district from these ubiquitous funds.

In my judgment, the HASC, which is charged with oversight of DOD, could use a little oversight itself.

Defense News editorial, 16 May 2011.
http://rempost.blogspot.com/2011/05/us-defense-budget-get-real-pentagon.html

Excerpt:

There is an old Washington saying that no money is less real than out-year money. This means that anything that is beyond the immediate spending bill is purely notional.

Requirement control is a popular method of limiting the costs of new weapons, but it’s equally important to control the growing number of missions.

The first step should be to ensure the roles-and-missions review ordered by Obama slashes unnecessary and costly redundancies in capabilities.

Second, the Pentagon must avoid doing what it did – portraying soft numbers as hard ones that do little other than expose it to criticism.

Lastly, to make wise cuts, the Pentagon must improve its internal financial management processes to pinpoint what it’s spending and how. Without hard data, it’s hard to come up with hard savings.

Carl Conetta. Project on Defense Alternatives Note, 30 April 2011.

Why is our defense spending so high and apparently out of control? Plenty of ink has been spilled addressing this question, including my own short, The Pentagon’s Runaway Budget.

Andy Bacevich may get closer to the key political dynamics in Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable.

There is no better example of the dysfunctional political dynamic governing the Pentagon budget than President Obama’s affirmation (April 13, 2011) of the claim that Secretary of Defense Gates has “already saved” the nation $400 billion in defense expenditure. And there is no better illustration of the poverty of our discourse on this subject than the fact that the claim goes largely unchallenged.

Most of the $400 billion in earlier DoD “savings” that President Obama has attributed to Secretary Gates are not “savings” in the ordinary sense of the word. They do not show up as reductions in DoD budget plans from one year to the next, as shown below. At best, they represent DoD marginally adjusting its programs and aspirations to marginally deal with spiraling cost growth.

Rough analogy: Having said it would deliver a “fully-loaded” Cadillac for a specified price X, and having discovered that this estimated price is entirely unrealistic, a car dealer trims back some of the features and delivers something less for the full promised price. Most consumers would call this a gyp, not a savings.

The alternative would be for DoD to further boost subsequent budget requests to fully reflect cost growth, and let Congress and the Executive reconsider what they wanted to buy. I suppose one could say that DoD has “saved” these authorities from the headache of making this decision. Fully confronting a realistic pricing of current programs might lead to a thorough-going rethink of our defense posture and modernization efforts. But that’s too much to consider.

Now, let’s try to find those $400 billion in “savings”….

THE $400 BILLION

1. Much of the $400 billion that Secretary Gates is claimed to have saved derives from his April 2009 announcement of program cuts. Gates claims that the systems and programs he cut in 2009 would have eventually cost more than $300 billion. However, at least some of this was immediately reprogrammed, meaning: DoD used the savings to buy other things.

April 2009 Gates Defense Budget Recommendation Statement

2. In August 2010 and January 2011, Secretary Gates outlined additional “cuts” and “savings” totaling $178 billion. Of this, $100 billion was immediately reprogrammed to purchase other things or cover other costs. The remaining $78 billion was supposed to be released from the Pentagon orbit to help pay down the deficit. In the August 2010 statement, we find Gates’ claiming that his earlier 2009 effort has already saved more than $300 billion.

August 2010 Gates Statement on Department Efficiencies Initiative

Jan 2011 Gates Statement on Department Budget and Efficiencies

PDA summary chart re: the $178 billion

3. How much (if any) of the earlier “more than $300 billion” in savings was similarly given over for deficit reduction? Looking at actual budget plans, what do we see? The first $300 billion was announced in April 2009 and it might reasonably have shown up as difference between the last Bush budget plan (FY09) and the first Obama budget plan (FY10).

Comparison between these two budget plans is easy for the years 2010-2013:
- Bush FY09 planned total spending for 2010-2013 = 2.155 trillion
- Obama FY10 planned total spending for 2010-2013 = 2.183 trillion

An increase is not a reduction, therefore: no savings apparent in the near years.

4. Obama’s next budget plan (FY11) foresaw a significant increase over his first. So, no savings apparent there either.

5. Only in the next plan – the FY12 plan – do we see a reduction in planned spending between FY12 and FY11 plans. In the nine years that overlap between the FY11 and FY12 plans, we see a reduction of about $233 billion.

But the FY12 plan follows Gates’ second announcement of cuts and savings (summarized in #2 above). So, at least, $78 billion derives from that and not the earlier cuts. Indeed, when we compare the FY12 plan with the FY11 plan for the years 2012-2016, there is a reduction in planned spending of $76 billion. Still no apparent impact from the April 2009 “cuts,” however.

6. Well, as noted above, the total difference between the FY11 and FY12 plan for the years 2012-2020 is $233 billion. 233 minus 78 = 155. This additional planning rollback of $155 billion shows up for the years after 2016. So maybe we’ve found at least $155 billion of the earlier supposed cut? Maybe it just took 2 years to register? Maybe.

“Maybe” because the Obama FY12 budget rolls back planned spending almost exactly to the levels foreseen in the Obama FY10 budget …being the budget that was larger than the final Bush budget and being the budget that showed no impact from Gates’ April 2009 offer. To put it another way: Obama’s FY12 budget simply rolls back the future spending plan he produced in FY11 to the level he had proposed in FY10. The FY12 plan simply disappears the increase proposed in FY11.

7. The other possible (likely) reading of all this is that: (i) None of the original $300 billion “saved” ever left the Pentagon,
(ii) The $78 billion that Gates offered up to deficit reduction is the only “savings” really specified so far to actually show up as a reduction in planned spending, and (iii) The other $155 billion that the FY12 plan subtracts from the FY11 plan involves as yet unspecified cuts and efficiencies.

Editor’s Commentary

13 April 2011 (revised and updated 16 April 2011)

In President Obama’s April 13th “deficit speech” he says:

Just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense. Over the last two years, Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again.

What might “do that again” mean?

Actually contribute $400 billion from projected Pentagon budgets to deficit reduction?

That would require the Pentagon to take in and spend $400 billion less. But it is very difficult to identify much actual contribution to deficit reduction in the first $400 billion in Pentagon savings President Obama refers to and believes can be repeated.

Let’s take a quick look at the components of that first $400 billion working backward through time.

This past January Secretary Gates announced $78 billion in cuts over five years. In February when the President’s FY12 budget appeared all but $70 billion of this as regards deficit reduction evaporated. $68 billion was consumed by the special Overseas Contingency Operations (war) budgeting as the FY11 projected placeholder of $50 billion was replaced by the FY12 real OCO budget of $118 billion. Another $2 billion in the savings appears to have simply vanished in the five year budget projections, perhaps due to those pesky “rounding errors” that plague Pentagon budgets.

In 2010 Secretary Gates announced $100 billion in “efficiency” savings. He was quite forthright at the time, saying that he was keeping all the savings within the Pentagon to pay for other requirements. So we can’t legitimately count those toward deficit reduction, and presumably the President did not count those toward the $400 billion that has been saved.

So that leaves about $322 billion in Pentagon savings the White House needs to account for.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 17 February 2011 Secretary Gates said:

…over the last two defense budgets submitted by President Obama, we have curtailed or canceled troubled or excess programs that would have cost more than $330 billion if seen through to completion.

Connecting this to President Obama’s speech Defense News reports (13 April 2011) that:

Of the $400 billion already saved, $330 billion is supposed to come from Gates’ cuts to weapons programs – for example the cancellation of the Army’s Future Combat Systems program and the Air Force’s Next-Generation Bomber, both of which Gates terminated in the 2010 budget. However, those two programs have been replaced: The Army is developing the Ground Combat Vehicle, and the Air Force has launched a scaled-back bomber program.

“Supposed” and “However” are the key words in the preceding paragraph. To be real savings that contribute in any meaningful way to deficit reduction the the program cancellations would have to lead to a declining Pentagon budget topline… and not be replaced by some other expenditure.

Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center assesses the $330 billion savings claim in a 5 November 2010 post this way:

Gates has not cut $330 billion from defense. When he announced hardware cuts, he said the out-year savings were estimated at $330 billion, but he didn’t cut a nickel from the projected defense budgets; he wants, as he has clearly said, to use those savings for other investments, not give them back to the taxpayer. And the figure is way too big, anyway, because he terminated the F-22 and the C-17 cargo plane when neither one of them was in the long-term budget (he has been trying to let both programs arrive at a normal death, as planned, and Congress keeps getting in the way.) It is even more too big because his savings figure did not net out the alternative investments he proposed for the same missions, like replacing the terminated Future Combat Systems (FCS) vehicle with a new Army vehicle R&D program. So a big kerfuffle over a non-number, but no big cut in defense here.

To date the Pentagon or OMB have not produced any accounting of these supposed savings from Secretary Gates’ program cancellations which indicate where they come out of the topline. Meanwhile it would be wise to substantially discount their value when thinking about overall Federal spending.

What we know for sure is that Pentagon budgets continue to rise despite the “savings.” The Pentagon and the Administration might argue that the Pentagon budget would have grown faster if Secretary Gates had not made those “courageous” program cuts. Possibly. But that “would have been” is simply not the same as actually contributing to deficit reduction which requires real cuts in the topline of the Pentagon budget.

In terms of cutting the topline of the Pentagon budget, when we remove the long-awaited reductions in war costs, we can count just $8 billion that Secretary Gates has given up to deficit reduction in the five year defense plan (FYDP) through FY16.

Looking out ten years there are more savings in the President’s projections. My colleague Carl Conetta finds $164 billion less Pentagon spending in the overlapping four “out years” (FY17-20) when comparing the President’s FY11 and Fy12 budget submissions.

We might speculate that this is where we realize some of Secretary Gates’ $330 billion in savings, but it would be only speculation…

So far no one in the Administration has demonstrated in sufficient detail how the Pentagon will contribute much of anything toward reducing the Federal deficit, rounding errors notwithstanding.

18 November 2010

Dear Co-chairman Bowles and Co-chairman Simpson:

We are writing to you as experts in national security and defense economics to convey our views on the national security implications of the Commission’s work and especially the need for achieving responsible reductions in military spending. In this regard, we appreciate the initiative you have taken in your 10 November 2010 draft proposal to the Commission. It begins a necessary process of serious reflection, debate, and action.

The vitality of our economy is the cornerstone of our nation’s strength. We share the Commission’s desire to bring our financial house into order. Doing so is not merely a question of economics. Reducing the national debt is also a national security imperative.

To date, the Obama administration has exempted the Defense Department from any budget reductions. This is short-sighted: It makes it more difficult to accomplish the task of restoring our economic strength, which is the underpinning of our military power.

As the rest of the nation labors to reduce its debt burden, the current plan is to boost the base DOD budget by 10 percent in real terms over the next decade. This would come on top of the nearly 52 percent real increase in base military spending since 1998. (When war costs are included the increase has been much greater: 95 percent.)

We appreciate Secretary Gates’ efforts to reform the Pentagon’s business and acquisition practices. However, even if his reforms fulfill their promise, the current plan does not translate them into budgetary savings that contribute to solving our deficit problem. Their explicit aim is to free funds for other uses inside the Pentagon. This is not good enough.

Granting defense a special dispensation puts at risk the entire deficit reduction effort. Defense spending today constitutes over 55 percent of discretionary spending and 23 percent of the federal budget. An exemption for defense not only undermines the broader call for fiscal responsibility, but also makes overall budget restraint much harder as a practical economic and political matter.

We need not put our economic power at risk in this way. Today the United States possesses a wide margin of global military superiority. The defense budget can bear significant reduction without compromising our essential security.

We recognize that larger military adversaries may rise to face us in the future. But the best hedge against this possibility is vigilance and a vibrant economy supporting a military able to adapt to new challenges as they emerge.

We can achieve greater defense economy today in several ways, all of which we urge you to consider seriously. We need to be more realistic in the goals we set for our armed forces and more selective in our choices regarding their use abroad. We should focus our military on core security goals and on those current and emerging threats that most directly affect us.

We also need to be more judicious in our choice of security instruments when dealing with international challenges. Our armed forces are a uniquely expensive asset and for some tasks no other instrument will do. For many challenges, however, the military is not the most cost-effective choice. We can achieve greater efficiency today without diminishing our security by better discriminating between vital, desirable, and unnecessary military missions and capabilities.

There is a variety of specific options that would produce savings, some of which we describe below. The important point, however, is a firm commitment to seek savings through a reassessment of our defense strategy, our global posture, and our means of producing and managing military power.

■ Since the end of the Cold War, we have required our military to prepare for and conduct more types of missions in more places around the world. The Pentagon’s task list now includes not only preventive war, regime change, and nation building, but also vague efforts to “shape the strategic environment” and stem the emergence of threats. It is time to prune some of these missions and restore an emphasis on defense and deterrence.

■ U.S. combat power dramatically exceeds that of any plausible combination of conventional adversaries. To cite just one example, Secretary Gates has observed that the U.S. Navy is today as capable as the next 13 navies combined, most of which are operated by our allies. We can safely save by trimming our current margin of superiority.

■ America’s permanent peacetime military presence abroad is largely a legacy of the Cold War. It can be reduced without undermining the essential security of the United States or its allies.

■ The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed the limits of military power. Avoiding these types of operation globally would allow us to roll back the recent increase in the size of our Army and Marine Corps.

■ The Pentagon’s acquisition process has repeatedly failed, routinely delivering weapons and equipment late, over cost, and less capable than promised. Some of the most expensive systems correspond to threats that are least prominent today and unlikely to regain prominence soon. In these cases, savings can be safely realized by cancelling, delaying, or reducing procurement or by seeking less costly alternatives.

■ Recent efforts to reform Defense Department financial management and acquisition practices must be strengthened. And we must impose budget discipline to trim service redundancies and streamline command, support systems, and infrastructure.

Change along these lines is bound to be controversial. Budget reductions are never easy – no less for defense than in any area of government. However, fiscal realities call on us to strike a new balance between investing in military power and attending to the fundamentals of national strength on which our true power rests. We can achieve safe savings in defense if we are willing to rethink how we produce military power and how, why, and where we put it to use.

Sincerely,

This letter reflects the opinions of the individual signatories. Institutions are listed for identification purposes only. The letter is the result of a joint effort by The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and the Project on Defense Alternatives.

Editor’s Commentary

There are at least as many reasons to think that significant real reductions in defense spending will be hard to achieve as there are reasons to doubt that significant revenue increases will be found or that substantial reductions in entitlement spending will happen. “Political realities” are indeed daunting for any of the options the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will consider. If there were quick, easy and obvious decisions to be had there would be no need for the Commission.

Political realities change over time in part because underlying realities eventually change political calculation. Such is the case with defense spending. After more than a decade of rapid growth there is likely to be some retrenchment in the middle of this decade, notably by 2015.

The likely path of defense spending this decade was recently forecast by the high-tech industry association Tech America Foundation in their DoD Topline Forecast 2011-2020.

Tech America’s forecast is for a real reduction in the base Pentagon budget (not including Overseas Contingency Operation war supplemental funding) of 9% or $45 billion (USD 2011) in 2015 relative to the 2011 base budget.

When taking into account the Pentagon’s preferred budget path this decade of at least 1% real annual growth, Tech America forecasts a reduction in defense spending by 2015 of 16%.

Tech America’s forecast of Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) war supplemental spending during the decade is also important to consider. Since FY10 (President Obama’s first budget) there has been an OCO war supplemental DoD budget line for FY12-FY15 of $50 billion per year. The OCO war supplemental in the FY11 budget is $159 billion.

Although the actual OCO war supplemental might come down in FY12, with the military operational demands in Afghanistan remaining elevated it is unlikely the OCO war supplemental will come down even $50 billion, let alone $109 billion in FY12. Tech America forecasts OCO war expenditures of $122 billion in FY12.

These likely under-budgeted OCO war supplemental costs should be counted as probable additions to the national debt beyond those already projected by the government.

Tech America’s forecast is for the OCO supplemental to be $122 billion in FY12, $102 billion in FY13, $69 billion in FY14 and $57 billion in FY15. That adds up to $150 billion more than is budgeted in the Five Year Defense Plan… an un-budgeted addition to the national debt.

For the target year of the federal budget reaching “primary balance” in FY15, the forecast OCO war supplemental will add $7 billion to the problem that the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform faces in attempting to balance the budget in that year.

Adam J. Hebert. Air Force Magazine, November, 2010.
http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2010/November%202010/1110edit.aspx

Excerpt:

…ill-advised calls to cut the Pentagon budget follow as predictably as the tides. Without credible analysis of strategy or requirements, critics are once again declaring defense spending to be out of control.

Editor’s Comment:

In his editorial Security Isn’t Cheap Adam J. Herbert cites the work of the Sustainable Defense Task Force as a case in point of critics of Pentagon spending recommending cuts “without credible analysis of strategy or requirements.” As a member of the task force I differ over the credibility of our analysis. But let me speak to where I agree with Mr. Herbert:

• “Security is not cheap.” In fact it is extremely expensive. When the country is hit with a financial disaster we owe it to the country and our military to reexamine our national security strategy and make sure priorities are clear and that our military investments are cost-effective. In the last twelve years of Pentagon budgets the planning has proceeded as though there is no resource constraint. Unfortunately, that is true of the last QDR as well. Those days are clearly over – Secretary Gates has said as much.

• “A well-trained, well-equipped, professional military is not cheap. If the nation wants it to cost less, the nation will probably have to ask it to do less.” Exactly. Since the end of the Cold War the U.S. military has steadily advanced its global reach and engagement. Missions have proliferated, including many that should be done by civilians in the State Department and other agencies. Significant numbers of U.S. troops still remain in Europe, even though there is no military threat to Europe that allies can’t handle. The most important take-away lesson from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that long low-intensity land wars are not cost-effective uses of U.S. military power and should be avoided whenever possible. Hopefully we can all agree there should never again be such a “war of choice.”

• “There are certainly ways to reduce defense spending…” Yes, and one that will save around $45 billion in Air Force modernization accounts is available in a choice about how to modernize the fighter fleet. The Air Force has decided to replace its aging F-16s with just about the most expensive new fighter one can dream up, the F-35. In today’s fiscal environment either the Air Force will end up with a lot fewer of these planes than planned, or they will choose to get ahead of the budget crunch and modernize with new block versions of the still best of class F-16s and limit the buy of F-35s this decade to a few squadrons for high-intensity air-superiority missions. If serious air competition emerges a decade from now we can then roll out production of F-35s (or perhaps a less costly follow-on to the F-16), planes presumably much improved with ten years or more of further fighter technology development.

Daniel Goure. Early Warning Blog, Lexington Institute, 03 September 2010.
http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/future-defense-budget-choices-require-clear-strategic-priorities

Excerpt:

The United States cannot afford and the people will not pay for a military that can do battle with uncertainty.

As a consequence of the need to do battle with uncertainty, emphasis was placed on a military that can cover all bases and do all things. This would not be a wise strategy even if resources were unconstrained. Not all threats are equal. Nor are all interests equally important. Finally, it is possible to make reasoned and reasonable judgments regarding how the future security environment will unfold and define a set of demand signals that would require shifting strategic priorities.

In the past, when U.S. leaders refused to make choices they allowed the military to shrink symmetrically, by cutting every program or service a little. That approach is self-defeating. It makes no sense to keep a so-called full spectrum military but continually reduce it in size.

Editor’s Comment:

Relevant passages from the archives ($3 trillion later):

Carl Conetta and Charles Knight. “Dueling with Uncertainty”, February 1998.
http://www.comw.org/pda/bullyweb.html

There is no escape from uncertainty, but there is relief from uncertainty hysteria. It begins with recognizing that instability has boundaries — just as turbulence in physical systems has discernible onset points and parameters. The turbulence of a river, for instance, corresponds to flow and to the contours of the river’s bed and banks. It occurs in patches and not randomly. The weather also is a chaotic system that resists precise long-range forecasting, but allows useful prediction of broader trends and limits.

Despite uncertainty, statements of probability matter. They indicate the weight of evidence — or whether there is any evidence at all. The uncertainty hawks would flood our concern with a horde of dangers that pass their permissive test of “non-zero probability.” However, by lowering the threshold of alarm, they establish an impossible standard of defense sufficiency: absolute and certain military security. Given finite resources and competing ends, something less will have to do. Strategic wisdom begins with the setting of priorities — and priorities demand strict attention to what appears likely and what does not.

The world may be less certain and less stable today than during the Cold War, but it also involves less risk for America. Risk is equal parts probability and utility — chances and stakes. With the end of global superpower contention, America’s stakes in most of the world’s varied conflicts has diminished. So has the magnitude of the military threats to American interests. This permits a sharper distinction between interests and compelling interests, turbulence and relevant turbulence, uncertainties and critical uncertainties. And this distinction will pay dividends whenever the country turns to consider large-scale military endeavors, commitments, and investments.

Among the visions that guide present policy, one is absent conspicuously: a world in which economic issues have displaced military ones as the central focus of global competitions and concerns. Failing to engage this prospect, the recent defense policy reviews are oblivious to the opportunity cost of military spending. And it is this lapse that gives license to their speculative methods and overweening goals.

The United States continues to invest more of its national product in defense than does its allies, more than the world average, and much more than its chief economic competitors. By disregarding the requirements and consequences of increased global economic competition, present policy makes an unacknowledged bet about the future: The Soviet Union is gone and no comparable military challenge to the West exists, except as distant possibility. Nonetheless, the American prospect depends as much as ever, if not more, on the specifically military aspects of strength. Of this much, the uncertainty hawks seem certain.

Capitol Visitors Center, 11 June 2010.

Laura A. Hall. Budget Insight, 27 May 2010.
http://thewillandthewallet.squarespace.com/blog/2010/5/27/obamas-national-security-strategy-how-will-it-be-managed.html

Excerpt:

On the military side, no clear prioritization of missions. As in the QDR, the NSS provides no priorities among military missions, but repeats a long shopping list that could drive force structure and budget expectations even higher than they are now.

Christopher Ford. Remarks presented to a side event at the 2010 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, New Paradigms Forum, Hudson Institute, 20 May 2010.
http://www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=250

Excerpt:

… as present-day disarmament debates shift from a focus specifically upon nuclear weaponry to a broader focus upon full-spectrum military asymmetry, the disarmament discourse is characterized by competition between two conceptual paradigms that are quite incompatible even when their respective adherents seem to agree upon the importance of nuclear disarmament.

Let’s explore this a bit. Even as it seeks to pander to the conventional wisdom of the disarmament movement by attempting to purchase nonproliferation cooperation with concessions on disarmament, the Obama Administration seems to have embraced – as did the Bush Administration before it, though far less emphatically and flamboyantly – a vision of nuclear reductions and potential future disarmament profoundly at odds with much of the conceptual framework that underpins this conventional wisdom. Fundamentally, to the extent that there can be said to be a vision of disarmament progress prevalent among U.S. policy making elites, it is one that assumes and values military asymmetries favoring the United States.

It is not merely that the Obama Administration sees the development of improved nuclear weapons production capabilities as being essential to American reductions, as part of a strategy of substituting potential weapons for actual ones as America’s strategic “hedge” against future problems. It is in fact that non-nuclear U.S. military advantages are embraced as a way to facilitate reducing, or perhaps even replacing, U.S. reliance upon nuclear weapons: developing PGS or other technologies to supplant nuclear weapons in some missions previously thought to require them; improving BMD against proliferation threats; and relying upon robust conventional power-projection capabilities to maintain the solidity of trans-oceanic alliances that have traditionally relied in part upon forward-deployed U.S. nuclear weapons. No one in today’s White House would admit as much, of course, but this agenda – spelled out with some candor in the new 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) – owes as much to the doctrinal vision of President Bush’s 2001 NPR as it does to the ideology of the nuclear abolition movement.

At issue is a real clash between conceptual paradigms about the nature of the global security environment and how best to maintain international peace and security within it. On the one hand, there is a paradigm that one might call “peer-group multilateralism.” It is an ethic of collective action among equals in which countries come together through multilateral (and preferably global and universal) institutions in order to address common challenges. This is a profoundly democratic vision, at least with respect to relations between countries. (Actual democracy for real populations of human beings is an entirely different question, alas.) In it, no one has any particular special privileges, and no one suffers “discrimination” except when misbehavior brings upon miscreants the wrath of the international community – expressed, of course, through formal and collective means. This multilateralist and quasi-democratic paradigm is reflected, for instance, in the consensus negotiation procedures of the CD, and in the one-country-one-vote formula of the U.N. General Assembly. Even where bodies are structured so as to permit slightly more effective decision-making through smaller size, these principles may yet be seen in provisions for rotating states through seats on the IAEA Board of Governors or in the non-permanent ranks of the U.N. Security Council.

In this paradigm, asymmetry of power is philosophically offensive. To prevent or undermine such asymmetry, majoritarian procedures – if not indeed consensus rules – are designed and expected to impede traditional “power politics” and to enable all to participate more or less equally in decision outcomes. Action against common threats is understood as a collective movement both expressing and predicated upon international solidarity, and upon all countries’ shared and axiomatically coequal role in preserving peace and security. By the same token, action not pursued with such a collective or at least majoritarian imprimatur is improper action. In a sense, therefore, the multilateral process is felt to create outcome legitimacy.

On the other end of this conceptual continuum lies a paradigm that one might call the “predominant actor model.” By this account – the essential features of which are evident in the thinking of multiple U.S. administrations, transcending party identification – multilateral institutions operating on the basis of formal equality among near-peers provide an important but sometimes an inadequate means of addressing challenges to international peace and security. It is not necessarily that such institutions fall always or entirely down on the job, but that they are ill-equipped to handle, on their own, the full panoply of international threats that might arise (e.g., on account of collective action problems, the high capital costs and high returns to experience in global power-projection capabilities, or psycho-political dynamics of risk-aversion or anti-militarist fashion).

According to this second model, the security system needs a predominant actor capable of shouldering disproportionate burdens and leading the community’s reaction to pressing challenges, and around whom serious systemic responses to some of the gravest challenges can crystallize – particularly, though not exclusively, where the employment of military force is at issue. In effect, this model presumes that international security is to some extent a public good that will be, in economic terms, under-produced, to the detriment of all, if a predominant actor does not sometimes take the reins. In contrast to “peer-group multilateralism,” outcome legitimacy is, in this model, basically process-exogenous, in that certain steps are assumed to be necessary for the preservation of global order and other critical values of the system, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the strongest player stepping in to ensure that these steps are taken. (Indeed, if other actors seem unable to do what is needed, it would be wrong for the predominant power not to intervene.) Other states’ actual consent to such initiative is desirable, but secondary; the key point is that what is needed actually gets done.

The United States tends to see itself as playing this predominant role, with its military power and capabilities underpinning the stability of the present global order and system of economic relations. Having inherited from Britain the baton of securing global sea lanes vital to international commerce – and having added to this a broad modern array of global security responsibilities, ranging from providing the power-projection “muscle” behind humanitarian intervention to fighting nuclear weapons proliferation, and from providing security reassurances to far-flung allies to countering access-denial strategies in outer space – Washington sees itself as having a vital role in the international system precisely on account of its disproportionate military power.

One model thus sees military asymmetry as profoundly subversive of global peace and security, and ultimately regards its erosion as being a requirement for the full success of nuclear disarmament. The other model regards a degree of asymmetry, at least in the right hands, as being essential to global order irrespective of whether or not nuclear weapons exist – and perhaps even especially valuable in preparing to confront the challenges of some hypothetical future in which major conflicts can no longer be “deterred” by nuclear weapons because such devices have been eliminated.

Editor’s Comment:

This is an important challenge to the nuclear disarmament “community”.

Christopher Ford, a nonproliferation official in the second Bush administration, is a consistent critic of “universalism” in international affairs and of the what he considers to be “faux” democratic process in international security institutions and fora. Whatever the validity of his doubts in these regard, what must not be denied by disarmament advocates is the reality that the “predominant actors” in the U.S. security establishment, both military and civilian, firmly believe that the U.S. should be the predominant actor on the world stage and are therefore predisposed to share most of Christopher Ford’s doubts (and perhaps allergy) about universalism and inter-national democratic practice.

More about these important issues later.

Michael Krepon. Arms Control Wonk, 08 April 2010.
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2690/treaty-signings

Excerpt:

Despite claims to the contrary, New START does not inhibit the growth of U.S. conventional power projection capabilities that, unlike nuclear weapons, are militarily useful on battlefields. Nor will New START impede ballistic missile defense programs…

Editor’s Comment:
… and that is why, despite the rhetoric of the moment, this treaty doesn’t do much to advance us toward the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons. Unbounded conventional military power and missile defenses for Western rich nations are not compatible with the establishment of a global international security regime sufficiently reliable to support the abolition of nuclear weapons.

For more on this problem see my comments on Vice President Biden’s speech at the National Defense University, 18 February 2010.

James Carroll. Boston Globe, 15 March 2010. Hosted on the CommonDreams website.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/15-5

Excerpt:

… experts who warn of a coming “cascade of proliferation,” one nation following another into the deadly chasm of nuclear weapons unless present nuclear powers find a way to reverse the current. The main burden is on Russia and the United States, which together possess the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, but President Obama deliberately made himself central to the challenge when he said in Prague, “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Although usually considered apart, the broader US defense posture has turned into a key motivator for other nations to go nuclear. The current Pentagon budget ($5 trillion for 2010-2017) is so far beyond any other country, and the conventional military capacity it buys is so dominant, as to reinforce the nuclear option abroad as the sole protection against potential US attack.

Travis Sharp. Nukes of Hazard, 05 March 2010.
http://www.nukesofhazardblog.com/story/2010/3/5/162522/3909

Excerpt:

It would help the Pentagon, the Congress, defense experts, and the American public if DOD published an analytically defensible record of its spending by strategic mission.

Editor’s Comment:
Yes, indeed.

Will Marshall. AOL News, 05 March 2010.
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/debate-on-the-right-nuclear-weapons-track/19385662

Excerpt:

Obama reasons that, by holding up its end of the bargain, the United States can strengthen global nonproliferation norms and intensify pressure on Tehran and other regimes that may be thinking about acquiring nuclear weapons. And as White House officials have stressed, the nuclear “zero option” is a policy aspiration, not something anyone believes is achievable anytime soon.

Christopher A. Ford. AOL News, 05 March 2010.
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/debate-waiting-for-obamas-policy-on-nukes/19385644

Excerpt:

… but remarkably, for all his nuclear posing, no one knows what Obama’s nuclear weapons policy actually is. So far, his administration has done little of real import. Obama seeks a modest new arms-reduction treaty with Russia but contemplates cuts that would not have been too shocking from the Bush administration — which, in fact, actually began these negotiations in 2006. The administration also wants to reattempt ratification of the nuclear test ban defeated in the Senate in 1999, although the treaty’s Senate prospects are dimming. As a result, at this point Obama’s “transformative” arms-control agenda looks like President Bill Clinton’s from the mid-1990s.

George C. Wilson. Government Executive, 05 March 2010.
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=44743&sid=61

Excerpt:

I spent months in 1997 going behind the scenes at the Pentagon and Congress to find out about all the wheeling and dealing that went into the writing of the QDR that year. “I had high hopes for the QDR,” Gen. Ronald Fogleman, former Air Force Chief of Staff, told me. “In my view, for the QDR to be a success there was going to have to be some fairly significant realignment among the [armed] services.”

But Fogleman said his hopes for meaningful reform were dashed when the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, sent a two-star general to Fogleman’s office to deliver this message: “The chairman would like to have the QDR turn out to be as close to the status quo as we can make this thing work. His message is: ‘We don’t need any Billy Mitchells,’” the general said, referring to Army Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell, who revolutionized the use of air power by demonstrating in 1923 how bombers could sink Navy warships.

a compilation, Defense Strategy Review Page, 03 March 2010 .
http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/obama-nuclear-policy-a-debate

Excerpt:

This debate began when Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group wrote a February 10, 2010 commentary for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I posted his commentary on this site and wrote a response. I then invited a variety of leaders of nuclear disarmament efforts and specialists in nuclear issues to respond to the Mello-Knight exchange.

In all there have been ten contributors to this debate which touches on many important points of agreement and disagreement. This is a discussion that needs to continue among experts, activists, and the wider citizenry.

Obama Nuclear Policy Debate Participants to date:

Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group
Charles Knight, Project on Defense Alternatives
Martin Senn, U. of Innsbruck
Bill Hartung, Arms and Security Initiative, New America Foundation
Paul Ingram, BASIC
Jonathan Granoff, Global Security Institute
Todd Fine, Global Zero
John Isaacs, Council for a Liveable World
Robert G. Gard, Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation
Matthew Hoey, Military Space Transparency Project

Carl Conetta. Foreign Policy in Focus, 03 March 2010.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_pentagons_runaway_budget

Excerpt:

Following the collapse of Soviet power, America’s leaders set more ambitious goals for the U.S. military, despite its smaller size. This entailed requiring the armed services to sustain and extend their continuous global presence, improving their readiness and speed, increasing peacetime engagement activities, and preparing to conduct more types of missions quickly and in more areas. Recent U.S. strategy has looked beyond the traditional goals of defense and deterrence, seeking to use military power to actually prevent the emergence of threats and to “shape” the international environment. U.S. defense planners also elevated the importance of lesser and hypothetical threats, thus requiring the military to prepare for many more lower-probability contingencies.

Gordon Adams. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 02 March 2010.
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/gordon-adams/assessing-the-qdr-and-2011-defense-budget

Excerpt:

…there is a core assumption in the QDR and defense budget that near-term missions are going to last forever, particularly counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and stability operations. The case for this projection seems to be based on the idea that Iraq and Afghanistan are the model for future U.S. military operations. Here the QDR and defense budget miss the point completely. Iraq and Afghanistan were wars of choice, designed to overthrow a regime and rebuild those countries. Which other countries will we need to invade and rebuild in the future? Neither the QDR nor the budget provides any answers, calling into question the logic behind this premise.

Matthew Hoey is the founder of the Military Space Transparency Project (MSTP) and a former senior research associate at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) where he specialized in forecasting developments in missile defense and military space technologies. He responded on 02 March 2010 to the Mello-Knight exchange of views on nuclear disarmament and the Obama administration.
________________

President Obama’s hopes to begin the long march toward a nuclear free future are not limited to just words, though I understand how some may believe this to be the case. Upon closer examination, the President is taking the critical first steps in an effort to go beyond his address at Prague. The President is in the process of negotiating a new arms control treaty with the Russians, and it is highly likely that he will be pursuing even deeper cuts in the future. He has also made efforts to expand and strengthen the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Where are the results? Why have we not seen action? When will the nuclear threat begin to wane–even if it happens ever so slightly?

This is a very informative thread, and I have enjoyed reading all of the entries. What Charles [Knight] has initiated here serves as an example of how if we draw upon all of the myriad arguments before us, we are sure to paint a more nuanced picture of the road to consensus and cooperation. The same could not be truer in regard to our domestic political and international diplomatic climates as well. Parties in all corners have legitimate disputes and concerns, and until these are all fully addressed in a courageous and aggressive new fashion it is my belief that our drive towards zero will never get in gear. Here are my thoughts on how we can get moving.

One step would be for both American and Russian defense industries to gradually be converted into commercial industries – in the current global economy this would be slow to begin but would eventually reap tremendous benefits. Such a transition would even free university students from the confines of military contractors as a leading option for employment, ensuring that this generation of young people would not be bound to the archaic practices of the military industrial complex. The ripple effects on cooperative defense would be tremendous. As it is, our overall military capabilities are already unrivaled. Such reductions in military spending and subsequent reinvestment in new technology would not in fact lessen our strategic dominance, since cooperative defense would diminish the move-countermove dynamic that has long undermined disarmament efforts. Then taking into consideration cooperative defense and the promotion of one another’s security, our mutual economic potential would be enhanced further, thus strengthening our international relationship to an unprecedented level.

This would not be a cooperative security agreement limited to just sharing military and launch data; such a partnership would also extend into a shared strategic defense. In this era where the war on terror and the threat from extremism is the focal point of nations such as the US and Russia—ever posed with internally-based security threats and intrusions by radicals who would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapons in a major city—this simply makes sense.

The pursuit of missile defense to guard against incoming threats is the single greatest impediment to progress – this is the lynch pin, and under the banner of reducing national security threats it does nothing more than increase them. It is a fool’s pursuit. Should the United States pull back from its BMD aspirations in concert with the initiation of cooperative defense discussions, real progress toward reducing the threat of a missile attack against the US could begin. This would also help to motivate the US and Russia to find common ground in regard to Iran during this heady time. With the world’s two military superpowers acting as enhanced security and economic partners, it is more likely that this leadership by example would take hold and could spur the beginning of a global trend over the long run.

Spending has long been unrestrained within the nuclear complex and the national labs. This is a perennial phenomenon—the effect of unwavering pork barrel spending and lobbying by elected officials in cahoots with the defense industry to bring home jobs to their home districts. This cannot be undone without disastrous results. The US economy is addicted to the defense dollar and must be weaned from it gradually. This would come in the form of a transition away from the development of destructive technology and towards the development of beneficial technologies, for example, alternative energy solutions or emerging technologies that would enhance space exploration. Far too many working American families rely upon the defense budget and the nuclear dollar. If consensus for disarmament efforts is to extend across the aisles of Congress and the Senate, this must be understood and honored. If not, we face divisions and a squandered opportunity that may not present itself again.

Once such a transition takes place, a type of economic vacuum effect could commence where free markets, capitalism and innovation driven by new technology could lift the US and Russian economies out of the mud that is the threat of nuclear annihilation. This vacuum effect was not possible in years past, and is actually enabled by the current economic crises and the need for new industries that would contribute to economic recovery and job creation. It does not require any more courage, concessions or clarity to pursue a world without nuclear weapons through such avenues than what is needed to cling onto weapons that can and will someday kill millions.

When placed side-by-side, exchanges and the resulting debates regarding the increase in the nuclear complex budget versus the White House’s current policy positions beg for such a solution. In fact, if such a solution is initiated cautiously through careful consideration of the needs of all parties, it could ripple across the economy help to address our greatest global challenges. This could be accomplished while progressively extracting more and more American and Russian scientists from the nuclear gadgetry industry and channeling their enormous individual and collective talents into a more prosperous direction.

Barack Obama and Dimitri Medvedev have the courage and clarity to understand and express their willingness to discuss a world without nuclear weapons. Progress will require a steadfast commitment to courage in the face of the defense industry and the clarity to see that thousands of Russian and Americans rely on these industries and will need jobs that provide the means to support their families. Cooperative defense will lead to the beginning of a transition from massive defense spending to productive civilian investment that stands to benefit all.

Offering concessions and placing cooperative defense on the table while viewing the road ahead in a broader context should get the discussion moving in a direction that turns words into additional actions. As long as the United States refuses to give up missile defense in Eastern Europe we will remain at a standstill.

It was Dr. Randall Forsberg who opened my mind to this way of thinking. She taught me about how cooperative security could be used as a vehicle for peace. Her words that follow, written in 1992, ring today with a renewed poignancy:

The end of the Cold war represents a turning point for the role of military force in international affairs. At this unique juncture in history, the world’s main military spenders and arms producers have an unprecedented opportunity to move from confrontation to cooperation. The United States, the European nations, Japan and the republics of the former USSR can now replace their traditional security policies, based on deterrence and unilateral intervention, with cooperative policies based on minimum deterrence, non-offensive defense, nonproliferation, and multilateral peacekeeping.

There are four important reasons to make this change, and make it quickly:

First, massive resources are at stake. With a cooperative security policy, the United States could cut the annual military budget… A peace dividend on this order is exactly what we need to revitalize the economy and meet the backlog of needs in housing, health, education, environment and economic infrastructure.

Second, the cooperative approach to security is prerequisite to stopping the global proliferation of armaments and arms industries. The prospect of proliferation has become the single greatest military threat to this country and to the world…

Third, the choice by the major industrial nations either to perpetuate a US-dominated international security system or to develop a more cooperative system will have far-reaching political ramifications at home and abroad… here in America, the change would help reverse the nasty mixture of cynicism, violence, and racism that has increasingly pervaded our society since the first Reagan Administration made increases in military spending at the price of national debt and deep cuts in domestic programs.

Last but not least, a cooperative approach to security is likely to be far more effective than the traditional approach in reducing the incidence and scale of war. Despite these enormous stakes, Congress and the Administration have, until recently, refused even to consider substantial cuts in post-Cold war defense spending, much less seize the unprecedented opportunity to develop a cooperative security system. [Randall Forsberg, "Defense Cuts and Cooperative Security in the Post-Cold War World", Boston Review, May 1992]

Should President Obama choose to accept this torch I believe that we can achieve the goals outlined in Prague within our lifetime.

Matt Eckel. Foreign Policy Watch, 01 March 2010.
http://fpwatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/nuclear-weapons-in-twenty-first-century.html

Excerpt:

Though American leaders try not to say it out loud too often, one of the reasons Iran’s nuclear program is unsettling to Washington is that it constrains the ability of the United States to topple the Iranian regime by force, should push come to shove. As a global hegemon, having the ability to wave our conventional military around and implicitly threaten recalcitrant middle powers with conquest is something America likes to be able to do. It’s much harder if the recalcitrant middle power in question can credibly threaten to take out a couple of allied capital cities. Israel’s nuclear program was originally founded on this logic, as was that of France.

Mark Thompson. Time Magazine, 24 February 2010.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1967353,00.html

Excerpt:

Let’s repeat that: even without a superpower rival like the Soviet Union — with its arsenals of nuclear weapons, fleets of tanks and armadas of warships, all manned by 10-foot-tall Red Army troops — the U.S. is now spending more preparing for war against, well, who knows, than we spent readying to fight Moscow. And the Obama Administration has made it clear that defense spending is going to continue to increase, even as fiscal pressures — for bailouts, health care, infrastructure — inexorably mount.

As far as the eye can see, U.S. taxpayers will be spending one-third more to maintain the U.S. military than their parents and grandparents paid for the nation’s Cold War force.

John Isaacs and Robert G. Gard, Jr. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 24 February 2010.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/the-obama-disarmament-paradox-rebuttal

John Isaacs: The executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Isaacs represents the center’s sister organization, Council for a Livable World, on Capitol Hill. His expertise is in how Congress works, especially when it pertains to national security issues such as nuclear weapons and missile defense. Previously, he served as a legislative assistant on foreign affairs to former New York Democratic Rep. Stephen Solarz.

Robert G. Gard Jr.: A consultant on international security and education, Gard is the chair of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation’s Board of Directors. He also is a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. Previously, he served as president of the Monterey Institute of International Studies and as director of the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center. During a military career that spanned three decades, he was an assistant to the secretary of defense and president of the National Defense University.

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Greg Mello’s recent Bulletin article “The Obama Disarmament Paradox” distorts the Obama administration’s nuclear agenda by making unjustified assumptions that discredit President Barack Obama’s historic commitment to seek a nuclear-weapon-free world. Obama has committed to such a goal several times–both before and after his election in November 2008. But Mello calls that a “vague aspiration” rather than a commitment. Yet the evidence he provides to support his assertion isn’t persuasive.

In fact, the president has advocated for numerous initiatives in a comprehensive nonproliferation program. These include winning U.N. Security Council endorsement for a nuclear-weapon-free world; negotiating a new arms reduction treaty with Russia, which Obama considers an interim agreement toward further reductions; preparing a Nuclear Posture Review consistent with reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategy; pledging to secure all loose nuclear materials over a four-year period; and taking an active role at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.

As President Obama stated during his seminal Prague speech on nuclear disarmament, achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world is a long-term goal that might not be achievable in his lifetime, but that doesn’t minimize the necessity of taking interim steps to reduce the likelihood of nuclear proliferation.

Mello sees Obama’s requested increase in the fiscal year 2011 budget for stockpile stewardship and the construction of new facilities at the nuclear laboratories as a commitment to the production of new nuclear weapons. Yet the administration has made clear that there are no such plans underfoot; the 2011 budget request states unequivocally that “new weapons systems will not be built.” As such, the president’s requested increase in nuclear expenditures should be viewed in the context of seeking ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and further nuclear weapon reductions.

More largely, there is nothing inconsistent between a vision of a nuclear-weapon-free world and ensuring a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear deterrent in the interim, including refurbishment of aging systems, providing the labs with facilities to replace their deteriorating physical plants, and maintaining the essential expertise that the scientists at the labs provide. Nor does such a deterrent require “unending innovation,” as Mello claims. Our current nuclear weapons inventory, validated by extensive testing, is more than adequate to deter the use of nuclear weapons against the United States, our troops abroad, and our allies, provided sufficient resources are dedicated to the Stockpile Stewardship Program.

Mello also seems to forget that the pursuit of a nuclear-weapon-free world is both national and international law; the NPT, which the United States has ratified, includes a commitment to seek nuclear disarmament. Not to mention that the treaty has an important practical component: Its non-nuclear weapon states have conditioned treaty cooperation on the NPT’s nuclear weapon states fulfilling their obligations under Article VI to move toward full nuclear disarmament.

Thus, the “vision” of a nuclear-weapon-free world is essential as context for “the various nonproliferation initiatives” in Obama’s plan to reduce dangerous threats to our national security–e.g., nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

President John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 nuclear test ban speech at American University is famous not only for its rhetoric but also for its follow-through: Kennedy’s words led to the end of aboveground nuclear testing. While it is legitimate to be skeptical about how successful Obama will be in implementing his disarmament agenda, let’s hope Mello and others will wait to see how the follow-through progresses before they judge him too harshly. Anything else would be unfair.
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Greg Mello responds to John Isaacs and Robert Gard:

A “commitment” to a goal that a speaker says he may not achieve in his lifetime (let alone in his administration, the only germane period) is by definition an aspiration at best. If that “commitment” isn’t concrete and specific it is vague. Such were Obama’s very few words in Prague (and since) pertaining to disarmament. There have been no significant actions.
I am interested in action — ours and the government’s — not “hope.”

In your reply, you simply reiterate the Administration’s themes on these points.

If you look over what you wrote, you will see that you freely conflate disarmament with nonproliferation issues and initiatives. You’re not alone; many people do. I suppose that’s the idea. These are quite different things, obviously. Preventing others from acquiring a nuclear deterrent has precious little to do with getting rid of my own. I nowhere argue against sound, just, and legal measures to prevent nuclear proliferation.

I think you err significantly when you say “the pursuit of a nuclear-weapons-free world is both national and international law.” It is the achievement, not the pursuit, of this goal that is a binding legal requirement, unanimously confirmed by the International Court of Justice. Attempting to substitute an alleged aspiration (and that ominously vague), for achievement is a big step down from logic and law, a grave political disservice. This is all the more true when this alleged aspiration comes from the very temporary leader of the world’s largest and most aggressive military power, and is then followed by a very large increase in nuclear weapons spending.

I never said that a nuclear deterrent required “unending innovation.” I suspect we agree that the reverse is true. What I said was quite different: that the “deterrence of any adversary” to which Obama referred was unachievable, and therefore its pursuit implied unending innovation. I think investment itself, together with an ideology of technical “progress” – often expressed through fads like the quest for greater device “surety” – creates the hope that a “credible” nuclear deterrent, a deterrent that is relevant to “any” adversary as well as one that is “safe” and “secure,” can someday finally be achieved. Nuclear weapons will never be safe, secure, and they will never deter “any” adversary.

There’s many reasons why our leaders engage in this kind of crazy talk, and none of them are pretty.

Disarmament aside, the warhead complex, especially at the physics labs, is riddled with waste and unnecessary programs and missions, which help drive down morale and scientific quality. I and many others believe the complex is grossly over-funded (by at least 40%) for the mission of maintaining the present arsenal indefinitely. Much smaller arsenals, right on down to zero, would be quite desirable from every perspective, and cheaper. The U.S. arsenal can be unilaterally reduced to much lower levels without any loss of U.S. “security.”

If Obama wants to decrease the role of nuclear weapons in national security, and expects anybody to believe him, he must actually do so. Instead, building thousands of significantly upgraded bombs (a process already underway) with new requests to develop and produce more kinds of upgraded bombs, and the factories to make them, isn’t disarmament at all. It’s the modernization of everything for the long run – warheads, delivery systems, factories, everything.

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Robert Gard and John Isaacs continue the exchange:

It’s gratifying to learn that Greg Mello agrees with us on the desirability of both sound measures to prevent nuclear proliferation and a “much smaller” U.S. nuclear arsenal. For our part, we agree with him that the increase in funds programmed for the nuclear laboratories is excessive, although we don’t see any inconsistency between ensuring a safe, secure, reliable, and effective nuclear stockpile and reducing its size.

We may have a basic disagreement regarding deterrence. It’s not clear whether Mello’s quote of deterring “any adversary” includes non-state actors or only nation states. If he is referring to nation states only, we believe even extended deterrence can be accomplished without “unending innovation” and with a smaller stockpile. If his definition includes non-state actors bent on terrorism, no amount of innovation or real investment can deter them from using a nuclear weapon should they acquire one.

We certainly concede the point that most measures designed to reduce the likelihood of nuclear proliferation wouldn’t qualify as disarmament, but they may facilitate reductions in nuclear stockpiles, which would qualify as disarmament.

Finally, let’s return to the basic issue of President Obama’s commitment to seeking, as a goal, a nuclear-weapon-free world. Even if it is an “aspiration,” that doesn’t reduce its importance. Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligates the nuclear weapons states, including the United States, “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament.” And although Mello might not consider the action “significant,” Obama did chair a U.N. Security Council meeting with other heads of state that resulted in a resolution affirming the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world. Additionally, to meet our obligation under Article VI, Obama has stated his intent to follow up the new START treaty with negotiations involving all of the nuclear powers to reduce stockpiles of weapons.

Coming full circle, these actions taken are essential to obtain the cooperation of the non-nuclear weapons states in measures to reduce the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation, which both we and Mello favor.

by Carl Conetta and Charles Knight. Defense News, 21 February 2010.

During the past decade, the U.S. Defense Department has enjoyed a rise in its budget unprecedented since the Korean War. With President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget request, it is up nearly 100 percent in real terms from its post-Cold War low. But few observers believe that this level of spending can continue in light of the mounting national debt. So it is wise to think now about options for savings.

A way to begin is to ask, what has driven budgets so high? Obviously, the wars are part of the answer. But they account for only 20 percent of today’s expenditures. And they are the least likely targets for economizing.

It is more fruitful to reflect on the shortcomings in past efforts at defense reform. Can we do it better? It is also worth thinking about the practice of force modernization during the post-Cold War period, which has been distinctly undisciplined.

The end of the Cold War presented a unique opportunity – as well as a manifest need – for the structural reform of our defense posture. The force reductions of the 1990s necessarily risked decreased efficiency, due to the loss of economies of scale affecting support activities and equipment acquisition. The standard solution to such problems is to restructure as one gets smaller, matching reductions in size with a reduction in complexity – a practice the DoD did not, for the most part, follow.

Although smaller, DoD and the services have largely retained or even increased their complexity. For instance, there are today 50 major commands either one step above or below the service level – not much different from during the Cold War.

In our recent study of budget trends, we identify a dozen areas where significant changes had been proposed in the 1990s. These involved service roles and missions, consolidation of various support and training functions, and recentering budget and acquisition planning at the joint level.

In addition, the need to reform DoD’s acquisition, logistics and financial management systems has been evident for a long, long time. However, only two reform initiatives – competitive sourcing and military base closures – were pursued far enough to yield significant annual savings, and these have not amounted to more than 4 percent of the defense budget.

There also was hope in the mid-1990s that a “revolution in military affairs” might lead to new efficiencies. We would reap more bang for the buck by means of increased battlefield awareness, improved logistics, increased capacities for standoff precision attack, and the networking of units within and across services.

In some areas, such as precision attack, capability has dramatically increased. Theater logistics also have improved. But nowhere has the revolution in information technology led to manifest and substantial savings. Rather than supplant-ing legacy capabilities and platforms, the new technology has mostly just supplemented them.

In prospect, the evolution of net-centric warfare might reduce the need for redundant capabilities. But progress toward the services sharing a common nervous system has been slow and mostly involved special operations units and precision ground attack. Generally, net-centric capabilities exist as an anemic overlay to traditional service-centric structures and assets.

DoD and the services have faced little pressure to economize or transform during the past decade. This is also evident in equipment acquisition.

We can discern three distinct acquisition trends at work in recent decades. First, there are legacy programs that came forward from the Cold War period with considerable institutional momentum. Second, there are programs reflecting the revolutionary potential of new information technologies. Finally, there are adaptive programs, such as the recent mass purchase of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, that correspond to new mission requirements.

In an ideal world, the imperative to adapt to new missions and circumstances would draw on the revolutionary potential of new technologies to rewrite or supplant legacy programs. But this has not happened.

Too much of the $2.5 trillion in modernization funding since 1990 perpetuated the status quo circa 1990. Transformational acquisition was mostly restricted to producing supplements, such as Predator drones, to the legacy arsenal. And adaptive acquisition was largely delayed until field experiences forced a flurry of ad hoc efforts beginning six years ago.

The Pentagon’s central authorities have done too little, too late to compel the integration of modernization efforts along adaptive lines. Legacy, transformational and adaptive modernization have lurched forward together, but poorly integrated and competing for resources. And yet, even though modernization spending now surpasses that of the Reagan era, no one is happy with the result.

For 10 years, Congress and the White House have been permissive when it comes to defense spending; this has undercut any impetus for reform and prioritization. Obama’s decision to further boost the defense budget suggests that this dysfunction will persist for a while, but this, too, is a bubble that will burst. Preparing for that eventuality means revisiting options for structural reform and getting clearer on our strategic priorities.

Todd Fine organized and developed the Global Zero campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons as a program officer at the World Security Institute. He is currently working to establish the Iran Data Portal at Princeton University. He responded on 18 February 2010 to the Knight-Mello exchange of views on nuclear disarmament and the Obama administration.

___________________

Fine:

President Obama’s exceedingly generous budget request for the nuclear weapons labs has boiled long-simmering anxieties about the concrete policy impact of his frequently expressed “vision” for “a world without nuclear weapons.” Aligning with the prominent series of op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, Obama repeated this earnest aspiration consistently throughout the campaign for the presidency, and in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and April 2009 policy speech in Prague.

Given the ambition of this vision in practical terms, and, of course, the now apparent serious interest in its achievement by predecessor Ronald Reagan, it is not surprising that long-time advocates have expected policy proposals that would explicitly move in this direction. Yet, these budgeting numbers signal an overall regression. They will further institutionalize the development of new weapons and will make restructuring the labs toward other functions more difficult.

The failure to assure advocates began at the rhetoric’s root. Despite the welcome credibility they have given the anti-nuclear cause, the op-ed authors – George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and William Perry – had a burden to consider how other countries perceive the size and activities of our weapons laboratories. At the same time in 2007 that American anti-nuclear lobbyists and activists were feverishly working to block funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) in Congress, Kissinger forwarded an analysis by Shultz and Hoover fellow Sidney Drell to Sen. Pete Domenici supporting investments in the program. And although Nunn declared that he was opposed to the RRW, he signaled his acceptance for large-scale increases in lab funding in the foursome’s third op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on January 19, 2010. Unlike the previous op-eds, which were enthusiastically endorsed by others and received with much fanfare by the press, this one seemed clinically designed to give their reputational blessing to the upcoming budget numbers.

Chief nuclear negotiator under President Reagan, Max Kampelman, who has claimed that he originally prompted George Shultz to return to the question of elimination, has advocated a bold path to zero using multilateral processes in the United Nations. Indeed, outlining the divisions among the foreign policy elite, the Global Zero campaign was initiated by a number of attendees of the Shultz-led Hoover Institution meetings who were dissatisfied with the extreme focus on short-term “steps” instead of the explicit practicalities of achieving the ultimate goal. And following that, the policy program of Global Zero itself has revealed a split between the advocates of immediate multilateralization of the strategic arms control process and others who propose that a decades-long series of U.S.-Russia agreements expand into a multilateral process.

These assorted divisions among the elite may come to the fore at the May NPT Review Conference as other nations test the United States’ new-found commitment to the treaty’s stated objective of disarmament. Given the current crises involving Iran and North Korea and the shortening window of Obama’s dynamism on the world stage, if the President fails to inspire others to adopt his “vision” and work toward elimination concretely, he may miss a singular opportunity. If CTBT, which is symbolic despite its limitations, is not ratified by the conference date, these budget requests alone may devastate U.S. credibility. And as Greg Mello’s logic indicates, other nations are unlikely to be impressed with the scale of the START follow-on treaty, and there are not yet any indications that the posture review language on “the role” of nuclear weapons will be that momentous in terms of practical implications.

In order to blunt these concerns and sincerely recommit to the vision, there are a number of policy proposals the Obama administration could potentially advocate going into the review conference:

1. A funded international program that would initiate cooperative research into verification technologies and enforcement strategies that would be required in a world of “global zero.”

2. The initiation of an international audit of all existing nuclear weapons and material.

3. Sponsorship of initial discussions on a timeline for negotiations and targets involved in the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

However, as Charles Knight mentioned with respect to international concerns about the United States’ superiority in conventional weapons, these actions would only be a start. Given the terrifying overall budget projections and the abject failure of our military contracting and procurement processes, the United States needs to reformulate its entire defense posture and budget. In order to convince states like Russia and China to approach low numbers of nuclear weapons, it might even be necessary to consider multilateral treaty restrictions on general conventional forces and on specific advanced weapons systems like Prompt Global Strike. If the elimination aspiration is sincere, then these concerns are unavoidable and should be seriously studied and contemplated.

Max Kampelman, the symbolic initiator of the present return to abolitionism, has spoken powerfully of what real leadership by an American president, especially when morally confident and unabashed, can accomplish. President Obama’s rhetoric on the elimination of nuclear weapons apparently inspired some enough to award him the Nobel Peace Prize; if he is sincere, he owes it to the younger generation to present a clear path to elimination, if not in his lifetime, then in ours.

Barry Blechman. New York Times, 18 February 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19blechman.html

Excerpt:

Here’s how a global nuclear disarmament treaty could work. First, it would spell out a decades-long schedule for the verified destruction of all weapons, materials and facilities. Those possessing the largest arsenals — the United States and Russia — would make deep cuts first. Those with smaller arsenals would join at specified dates and levels. To ensure that no state gained an advantage, the treaty would incorporate “rest stops”: if a state refused to comply with a scheduled measure, other nations’ reductions would be suspended until the violation was corrected. This dynamic would generate momentum, but also ensure that if the effort collapsed, the signatories would be no less secure than before.

Editor’s Comment:
There is something missing in this measured disarmament scheme which invalidates it as a path to full nuclear disarmament. Blechman makes an erroneous assumption shared by too many nuclear disarmament advocates. He assumes that nuclear weapons are a class of weapons that can be dealt with in isolation from the problems of international security and insecurity. Nuclear weapons cannot be separated strategically from the context of the conventional military power they supplement.

Note the following phrase in the above excerpt from Blechman: “To ensure that no state gained an advantage…” His prescription applies only to nuclear weapons and presumes no adjustments to conventional military power. In those conditions some states stand to gain considerable advantage from nuclear disarmament.

Imagine the case of Russia in Blechman’s staged draw down of nuclear forces with the U.S. As Russia approaches zero nuclear weapons they become more and more vulnerable to superior U.S. conventional military power.

Without parallel and compensatory reductions and adjustments in conventional forces and strong political assurances weaker nations such as Russia will never agree to give up all their nuclear weapons.

Careful schemes of balanced nuclear weapons disarmament of the type that Blechman argues for cannot by themselves get us to zero nuclear weapons. Compensating for the national insecurities arising from imbalances in conventional military power must be part of any formula for full nuclear disarmament. We need to work toward an international security regime that delivers the reassurance of fifty years without international aggression and military intervention. After that period of peace nuclear nations might be ready to go to zero.

Joe Cirincione. Huffington Post, 17 February 2010.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione/obamas-nuclear-decision-d_b_465223.html

Excerpt:

… democracy does not apply to nuclear weapons policy. It never has. No nation has ever had a vote on whether to go nuclear. These decisions are made in secret. They don’t have to be.

Jonathan Granoff is president of the Global Security Institute. He responded on 15 February 2010 to the Mello-Knight exchange of views on nuclear disarmament and the Obama administration.
Jonathan Granoff is the author of Memo to Obama: Nuclear Weapons, which appeared in Tikkun Magazine, January-February 2009.

__________________

Jonathan Granoff:

Was President Obama outplayed by DOD and DOE? They have posed a very clever analysis. If progress is to be had on nonproliferation, such as support for a test ban, then modernization and the ability to strengthen the capacity to improve the arsenal seems to be the cost. Does this still allows them to say that the modernization “might require testing someday?” This will be an enormous benefit for those who want to stop the test ban. Will it not be like the Clinton administration’s deal with Stockpile Stewardship where he thought funding it would generate their support for the test ban but did not gain the full out support of DOE?

I am consistently surprised by how naive politicians appear when challenged by strategic military planners. So, I state this as an example where it appears that President Obama really wants to make progress (not necessarily on disarmament, but certainly on nonproliferation) and even here he is getting cul de sacked.

Or, is he fully aware of the strategy being played out. Does Mr. Mello think he was being deceptive in the Prague speech, or just a bit cute?

Regardless, the current programs being funded that Mr. Mello highlights will certainly make achieving any strengthening of the nonproliferation aspirations of the Administration at the upcoming NPT very difficult. They certainly do not seem to be consistent with a commitment to disarmament.

I sincerely hope I am wrong and look forward to hearing from some of the people in the current Administration whom I respect very much, such as Ambassador Rice and Assistant Secretary of State Gottemoeller.

Greg Mello responds to Jonathan Granoff:

Among your other interesting points, you raise this question: “Does Mr. Mello think he [Obama] was being deceptive in the Prague speech, or just a bit cute?” I would say neither. The substitution of an aspiration for a commitment or promise is a rhetorical device so normal these questions don’t arise. Both the speaker and the audience expect some sort of ritual acknowledgment of our common aspirations. The gap between those aspirations and our actual practice is fairly embarrassing; many members of the audience are looking for some sort of fantasy bridge between the two. They don’t want bad news, they want “hope.”

Somehow we have gone from “I will put a chicken in every pot” to “I will seek to put a chicken in every pot.” There is less accountability in the second formulation, which may be especially helpful in a time of contracting national prospects — in which contraction, the increased nuclear military spending I am criticizing plays a central symbolic role. Our hopes are greater than the realities available to service them. We, and our donors and supporters, want Santa Claus.

Paul Ingram is the executive director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC). He responded on 15 February 2010 to the Mello-Knight exchange of views on nuclear disarmament and the Obama administration.

Ingram:

Everyone knows that in this tough world of realist nuclear politics it does not pay to be naïve. What is less frequently recognised is that in a world of global threat it can be equally dangerous to play an extreme game of zero trust.

So we have to go through this strange and difficult world navigating a constant and complex series of considered calculations, making judgments based upon evidence and previous experience, what we can trust and what we cannot. That goes as much for those of us trying to influence decision-makers as much as for officials making decisions over foreign policy.

So when a President gets up and makes a speech that contains within it commitments to a world free of nuclear weapons, proposing a number of initiatives, and looking forward to concrete commitments in the near term, it pays to be hopeful, but not gullible. And we have the first test of this hope in the very near future when the President comes to publish a version of his long awaited Nuclear Posture Review.

Let me say at the outset that I am not intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Obama Adminsitration’s game plan, with the NPR, the START follow-on negotiations, these investments. I don’t like these investments in the infrastructure [weapons complex] any more than Greg. I think they are a waste of US taxpayer’s resources, and America and the world would be better off without them, with existing budgets devoted to further winding down the infrastructure, clean-up and the like.

But there remain several reasons for treating Obama’s nuclear diplomacy, and these investments, seriously:

1) It is a new departure. Now, bask in that fact, but I agree with Greg, this is hardly a cause for great celebration.

2) There are no obvious electoral benefits in this for Obama beyond the concrete international results that pertain. Few Americans will vote differently on this, unless President Obama actually delivers upon this agenda and appears come the next election as a President that delivers on the international scene. In actual fact, if the agenda were a cynical one, he will more likely end up seen as a President big on promises and weak on delivery – whether he is genuine or not, this is a likely and very depressing outcome.

3) The view that is being taken by the Administration over the need for this level of extra investment may be misguided, but it does hold a certain level of internal consistency. Let’s be honest, few things in politics are pure and simple, black and white. Even the JASON report, when pointing out that the warheads were in good shape, said that the infrastructure itself was under severe strain through lack of investment and the challenge of attracting talent into the profession. The belief that we need to reduce slowly and multilaterally whilst maintaining a nuclear force well into the future may be frustrating to many of us, and highlight the fact that we still live in a world where governments have not yet understood the need for more radical shifts in their postures, but it does not contradict the vision. And let’s be clear here, commitment to the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, whilst only the first step, is an important one nevertheless. And if you were based in France, you’d know what a big step it was.

4) Perhaps most important, the Obama Administration, and we ourselves, need to consider strategically how we can realistically bring the majority of Americans, Russians, and God knows, the Indians, Pakistanis and Israelis along with us (everyone these days focuses on the Iranians but trust me, they are easy in comparison). It is not effective simply to state positions and push through initiatives against majority opposition, even when you are the most powerful man in the world. You still have to convince Congress, the Americans people, and then colleagues abroad, in a huge complex web of inter-relationships that are not conducive to rational debate, let alone instruction. It takes gentle engagement, openness to others’ perspectives, appreciation of diversity, team work and many other cooperative skills beyond policy work to build the process necessary for disarmament. And that takes building confidence. And that probably requires the sort of investment we are witnessing today.

William D. Hartung is Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. He responded on 15 February 2010 to the Mello-Knight exchange of views on nuclear disarmament and the Obama administration.

______________

Hartung:

Obama’s aspirations go beyond just his statement at Prague. He is in the midst of negotiating a new nuclear arms
reduction treaty with Russia, with a possible follow-on seeking deeper cuts; he has committed himself publicly to pursuing ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a treaty banning the production of bomb-making materials
(the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty); he is hosting a nuclear security summit of scores of nations to work on plans to secure or destroy “loose nukes” and bomb-making materials; and he hosted a meeting of the UN Security Council (the first U.S. president to do so) to reinforce disarmament pledges of numerous key players.

Some of these changes can occur without major restructuring of U.S. conventional forces (new reductions with Russia and new nuclear security measures, for example).

Everything beyond that will require substantial changes first, as Charles suggests, not only in U.S conventional forces and posture but in regional politics in security dynamics in South Asia (India and Pakistan) and the Middle East (Israel, Iran, and host of related questions, including an Israeli-Palestinian setttlement). And current actions such as boosting spending on the nuclear weapons complex need to be reversed.

Many of these factors are rarely or not fully discussed by many — but not all — of the advocates of “getting to zero.”

So, I guess I agree with many of the points made by Charles and Greg, but I’m not ready to give up on the prospect of some significant changes in nuclear policies and postures. My sense is that we should applaud Obama’s commitments and then hold him to his word, not presume that progress is impossible.

Steve Clemons. TPM Cafe, 13 February 2010.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/13/several_years_ago_i_met/

Greg Mello. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10 February 2010.
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/the-obama-disarmament-paradox
Greg Mello is the executive director and co-founder of the Los Alamos Study Group.

______________

Last April in Prague, President Barack Obama gave a speech that many have interpreted as a commitment to significant nuclear disarmament.

Now, however, the White House is requesting one of the larger increases in warhead spending history. If its request is fully funded, warhead spending would rise 10 percent in a single year, with further increases promised for the future. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the biggest target of the Obama largesse, would see a 22 percent budget increase, its largest since 1944. In particular, funding for a new plutonium “pit” factory complex there would more than double, signaling a commitment to produce new nuclear weapons a decade hence.

So how is the president’s budget compatible with his disarmament vision?

The answer is simple: There is no evidence that Obama has, or ever had, any such vision. He said nothing to that effect in Prague. There, he merely spoke of his commitment “to seek . . . a world without nuclear weapons,” a vague aspiration and hardly a novel one at that level of abstraction. He said that in the meantime the United States “will maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies.”

Since nuclear weapons don’t, and won’t ever, “deter any adversary,” this too was highly aspirational, if not futile. The vain search for an “effective” arsenal that can deter “any” adversary requires unending innovation and continuous real investment, including investment in the extended deterrent to which Obama referred. The promise of such investments, and not disarmament, was the operative message in Prague as far as the U.S. stockpile was concerned. In fact, proposed new investments in extended deterrence were already being packaged for Congress when Obama spoke.

To fulfill his supposed “disarmament vision,” Obama offered just two approaches in Prague, both indefinite. First, he spoke vaguely of reducing “the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” It’s far from clear what that might actually mean, or even what it could mean. Most likely it refers to official discourse–what officials say about nuclear doctrine–as opposed to actual facts on the ground. Second, Obama promised to negotiate “a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [START] with the Russians.” As far as nuclear disarmament went in the speech, that was it.

Of course, Obama also said his administration would promptly pursue ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an action not yet taken and one entirely unrelated to U.S. disarmament. The rest of the speech was devoted to various nonproliferation initiatives that his administration planned to seek.

On July 8, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced their Joint Understanding, committing their respective countries to somewhere between 500 to 1,100 strategic delivery vehicles and 1,500 to 1,675 deployed strategic warheads, very modest goals to be achieved a full seven years after the treaty entered into force. Total arsenal numbers wouldn’t change, so strategic warheads could be taken from deployment and placed in a reserve–de-alerted, in effect. The treaty wouldn’t affect nonstrategic warheads. It wouldn’t require dismantlement. As Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists has explained, the delivery vehicle limits require little, if any, change from U.S. and Russian expected deployments.

Ironically, it’s possible that the retirement PDF of 4,000 or more U.S. warheads under the Moscow Treaty and other retirements ordered by George W. Bush may exceed anything Obama does in terms of disarmament. As for the stockpile and weapons complex, Bush’s aspirations were far more hawkish than Congress ultimately allowed. Real budgets for warheads fell during his last three years in office. Now, with the Democrats controlling the executive branch and both houses of Congress, congressional restraint is notable by its absence. What Obama mainly seems to be “disarming” is congressional resistance to variations of some of the same proposals Bush found it difficult to authorize and fund.

Last May Obama sent his first budget to Congress, calling for flat warhead spending. At that time, the administration was still displaying a measured approach toward replacement and expansion of warhead capabilities.

That said, in last year’s budget the White House did acquiesce to a Pentagon demand to request funding for a major upgrade to four B61 nuclear bomb variants–one of which had just completed a 20-year-plus life-extension program. Just one day before that budget was released a grand nuclear strategy review previously requested by the armed services committees was unveiled. It was chaired by William Perry, a member of the governing board of the corporation that manages Los Alamos, and recurrent Cold War fixture James Schlesinger. [Full disclosure: Perry is also a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors.]

The report’s recommendations for increased spending and weapons development quickly began to serve as a rallying point for defense hawks–surely the point of the exercise. Overall, it was largely a conclusory pastiche of recycled Cold War notions, entirely lacking in analysis and often factually wrong. But neither the White House nor leading congressional Democrats offered any public resistance or rebuttal to its conclusions.

More largely, opposition to nuclear restraint within the administration quickly emerged from its usual redoubts at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Pentagon, STRATCOM, and interested players in both parties in Congress. Plus, Obama left key Bush appointees in place at NNSA while the Pentagon added some familiar faces from the Clinton administration, leaving serious questions about the ability of the White House to develop an independent understanding of the issues, let alone present one to Congress.

Either way, potential treaty ratification is surely a major factor in White House thinking. Senate Republicans, as expected, are demanding significant nuclear investments prior to considering ratification of any START follow-on treaty. Democratic hawks, especially powerful ones with pork-barrel interests at stake such as New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, also must be satisfied in the ratification process. All in all this makes the latest Obama budget request a kind of “preemptive surrender” to nuclear hawks. So whether or not the president has a disarmament “vision” is irrelevant. What is important are the policy commitments embodied in the budget request and whether Congress will endorse them.

Investments on the scale requested should be flatly unacceptable to all of us. The country and the world face truly apocalyptic security challenges from climate change and looming shortages of transportation fuels. Our economy is very weak and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The proposed increases in nuclear weapons spending, embedded as they are in an overall military budget bigger than any since the 1940s, should be a clarion call for renewed political commitment in service of the fundamental values that uphold this, or any, society.

Those values are now gravely threatened–not least by a White House uncertain about, or unwilling or unable to fight for, what is right.

Editor’s Comment:

Mello does a good job of explaining why there will be little progress toward nuclear abolition during the Obama administration. Further he makes a good case that the current administration seems to be headed towards feeding the nuclear weapons complex to a greater degree than Bush was able. Who’d of thought!

But Mello misses on a couple points. One is that he dismisses too quickly the nuclear abolition aspiration Obama stated in Prague. Those few words may have little affect on policy, but they do mark a return to the rhetoric of all atomic age administrations up until George W. Bush markedly abandoned such aspirations. What is the value of that rhetoric? Mostly it gives credence to those who organize around abolition — something of value, but not much.

Secondly, Mello states that when Obama spoke of…

…reducing “the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy” it’s far from clear what that might actually mean, or even what it could mean.

Actually, this statement of Obama’s refers to something quite specific and important. The U.S. has been advancing for several decades to an unprecedented level of conventional force dominance over all other nations (see Bernard I. Finel on strategic meaning of U.S. conventional military power). At this point the U.S. can anticipate gaining even more strategic advantage if it can convince other nations to join in disposing of nuclear weaponry (for an official statement of this strategic formula see Vice President Biden’s speech at the National Defense University on 18 February 2010.) This is indeed quite an aspiration!

This connection of conventional dominance to nuclear dominance brings me to the other shortcoming of Mello’s article. Nuclear abolition will be impossible without a significant restructuring of the international (in-)security system. Why would Russia or China eschew nuclear weapons or N. Korea and Iran abandon efforts to obtain them while these nations remain utterly vulnerable to U.S. conventional strike?

Leaders of popular efforts for nuclear disarmament almost never acknowledge this strategic problem. That’s a disservice to their cause, because it leaves a major obstacle to disarmament in place with no plan (or even awareness of the need for a plan) to remove it.

The eventuality of an agreement to abolish nuclear weapons will require the U.S. to first draw down its conventional military power. And concurrent to a deep draw down of US conventional military power there must be a build up of international structures which can take up more and more of the responsibility for global security.

Such a transfer of power and responsibility will probably happen someday, but we are certainly not presently on that path. That is one more “change” that Obama is not pursuing, not even aspirationally.

Greg Mello responds to the editor’s comments:

I think your comments are excellent. Let me begin with the second one, with which I wholly agree. Our work here at the [Los Alamos] Study Group has emphasized nuclear weapons issues in part because of our geographic, and hence political, locus adjacent to the two largest nuclear weapons laboratories.

The barrier to nuclear disarmament posed by military policies and investments that express an aspiration for “full spectrum dominance” on a global scale is almost certainly insuperable. Nuclear disarmament is only consistent with a quite different conception of national security than we now have and with a quite different economic structure internally as well. The good news — and I think we have to make it good where it may not appear so at first glance, since we have no other choice — is that our empire is failing.

Your first point, which relates to the symbolic value of Obama’s disarmament statements, is also sound, but here I think that symbolic value is greatly outweighed by the passivity and compliance which his statements have engendered in civil society. The actors and forces which could and should be forcefully working for disarmament have been themselves disarmed by what amounts to propaganda.

Hypocrisy may be the homage paid to the ideal by the real, but it is not leadership, it is not honest, and it will not produce anything of value in this case. At the moment, it is allowing the nuclear weapons establishment to do what it could not accomplish previously: increase production capacity and provide greater, not lesser, endorsement of nuclear weapons in all their aspects, both materially and symbolically.

Obama’s disarmament aspiration, so called, is a faint echo compared to the full-throated endorsement of nuclear weapons it is enabling.

Sandra I. Erwin. National Defense, March 2010.
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/March/Pages/DefenseWatch.aspx

Excerpt:

The government’s own defense gurus are warning that it is not a question of if, but when the United States will lose its military superpower status.

These ominous predictions, by all accounts, are hard to fathom. The Pentagon’s budget this year is the highest since World War II — and accounts for almost half of what the world’s militaries spend.

But with the nation drowning in debt, it isn’t difficult to see how the financial burdens of superpowerdom may be too much to bear. The United States, some experts warn, would be wise to restrain military spending in order to regain its financial strength.

Joseph Cirincione. Foreign Policy, 06 January 2010.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/06/a_false_nuclear_alarm?page=0,0

Excerpt:

Policy experts, however, expect the new budget to be released in February to fully fund the nuclear weapons complex and support both the United States’ science-and-engineering base and its nuclear stockpile. Vice President Joe Biden — pilloried in the Journal’s editorial — is personally leading this effort, meeting with the leaders of U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, military chiefs, and top experts to forge a budget and strategic consensus.

There is, in fact, a broad, bipartisan consensus on a new nuclear security strategy that would prevent nuclear terrorism, prevent new nuclear-armed nations, and steadily reduce Cold War nuclear weapons stockpiles. Many conservatives support an approach that would maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenal for as long as nuclear weapons are needed.

editorial, Wall Street Journal, 05 January 2010.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704039704574616263692875836.html

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration continues to negotiate with the Russians over a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), but one big question is whether it can get the result through the U.S. Senate. A group of Senators is telling the White House that it will have little or no chance of success unless it also moves ahead with nuclear-warhead modernization.

J. Sigger. Arm Chair Generalist, 31 December 2009.
http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/12/why-coin-will-fail-in-afghanistan.html

Meteor Blades. Daily Kos, 30 December 2009.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/30/820467/-A-Leak-About-the-Phantom-Army

Excerpt:

…the Afghan National Army is a farce; there’s little chance of turning it into a cohesive fighting force; and there’s zero chance of doing so on a speedy timetable…

H.D.S. Greenway. Boston Globe, 16 December 2009.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/16/afghanistans_never_ending_challenge/

Excerpt:

The enemy, then as now, always rallied to the reliable call of “jihad’’ against the infidel invaders no matter who they were. Of all the tribes, those of the Pashtuns were the most feared.

The motives for fighting in Afghanistan were fear, prestige, and retribution. The British feared Russian expansion, and always sought to put their man on the throne to do Britain’s bidding. Retribution always followed military setbacks, and national prestige was used as the reason to fight on. British control over Afghanistan was thought necessary for the defense of India.

Russia followed the same scenario, fearing that if Afghanistan’s pro-Communist government should fail, it would endanger Russia’s Muslim regions.

The United States invaded Afghanistan out of fear of Al Qaeda, and retribution for 9/11. And today you often hear the national prestige argument that we cannot let the Holy Warriors believe they can defeat a second superpower. More and more, America’s Afghan policy is tied into protecting the stability of Pakistan, once part of British India.

Loren B. Thompson. Lexington Institute, 14 December 2009.
http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/budget-moves-buoy-defense-industry

Excerpt:

First, even before President Obama decided to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, the administration had already decided to spend more on overseas contingencies in 2011 that the $130 billion it planned to spend in 2010. Second, Jason Sherman of insidedefense.com reported this month that the White House will support increasing the regular defense budget (not including overseas contingencies) by $14 billion above what was planned for 2011, meaning it will rise from the $542 billion forecast in May to $556 billion. Third, Vago Muradian of Defense News reported this weekend that total increases above the May plan for the regular defense budget across the 2011-2015 spending period will reach $100 billion.

Editor’s Comment:

Looks as if the Obama administration’s plan to reduce Federal expenditures on war (contingency) operations and to hold increases in the base Pentagon budget to dollar inflation have come unraveled at less than a year into the budgeting plan and the administration. It is a shame, because it is so unnecessary.

Andrew J. Bacevich. Los Angeles Times, 03 December 2009.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevich3-2009dec03,0,3209129.story

Excerpt:

So the war launched as a prequel to Iraq now becomes its sequel, with little of substance learned in the interim. To double down in Afghanistan is to ignore the unmistakable lesson of Bush’s thoroughly discredited “global war on terror”: Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism

David Bromwich. Huffington Post, 02 December 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/the-afghanistan-parenthes_b_377141.html

Excerpt:

… the president spoke as if Al Qaeda were the name of a distinct, finite, searchable entity that can be subdued by an intensification (lasting exactly 18 months) of American fighting in the country that was once its camp. As for the Taliban, whatever else they may be, they are native to Afghanistan. This cannot be said of Al Qaeda, but it cannot be said, either, of the soldiers, trainers, advisers, and contractors sent by the United States.

There is a misjudged air of precision in the idea of a renewed and extended war that closes at 18 months because that “benchmark” was settled in advance. How can anyone be sure that the scale of so entangling a mission, with so many pitfalls, will fit neatly into the shape of a year and a half?

response by Michael Brenner to question posed by James Kitfield on National Journal Expert Blog, 19 November 2009.
http://security.nationaljournal.com/2009/11/are-american-muslims-a-threat.php#1393085

Excerpt:

…all it would take to restore sanity is some slight reflection on our dismal performance everywhere we have tried our hand at manipulation in the Greater Middle East since 9/11. We have been consistently arrogant, incompetent, corrupt – in all senses, callous to the pain inflicted on the natives and ourselves alike, and abject failures.

Stephen M. Walt. Foreign Policy, 16 November 2009.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/16/building_on_2_blunders_the_dubious_case_for_counterinsurgency

Editor’s Comment

Walt makes a fundamental strategic point. The Bush wars involved operational and grand strategic errors, so why institutionalize a shift in defense planning that in effect has the U.S. military prepare for more strategic errors by our leadership? Why not opt to correct the error? It is really an elemental point of strategy: Don’t compound error!

I understand how military professionals who have been ordered to take on foolish strategic missions might feel that counterinsurgency theory is an attractive way out of their tactical and operational dilemmas. But there is really no excuse for civilian leaders, including Sec Def Gates, chasing the mirage of COIN as if it were an answer for our current problems dealing with the consequences of a disastrous Bush national security strategy. Change the strategy and there will be no need for investments in COIN!

Adam L. Silverman. Sic Semper Tyrannis, 12 November 2009.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/11/conceptualizations-of-insurgency-and-its-effects-on-the-counterinsurgency-policy-process.html

Excerpt:

Given the reality that the US faces in Afghanistan; the historic lack of functional centralized government, exceedingly high number of societal elements, many of which are geographically isolated or semi-isolated, the illegitimacy of the current Afghan government, and the fact that groups we are fighting are not all insurgents makes successfully reaching the COIN end state of tethering Afghan society back to the Afghan state very, very difficult. The debate on the use of COIN really needs to be focused in on this difficult set of Afghan circumstances and whether they allow any chance for a positive counterinsurgency outcome.

Dave Anderson. News Hoggers, 06 November 2009.
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2009/11/full-spectrum-dominance-and-coin.html

Excerpt:

COIN does not decrease the chance of future interventions; it instead probably increases the chance of future interventions and invasions as it is a “solution” that is “proven to work” as long as not too many questions are raised about either what “working” means or the initial rosy scenario assumptions that are made to sell the invasion.

Charles Kupchan and Steven Simon. Financial Times, 03 November 2009.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1e98cbae-c8c6-11de-8f9d-00144feabdc0.html

Alissa J. Rubin. New York Times. 31 October 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/weekinreview/01RUBIN.html

Gian P. Gentile. New York Times, 31 October 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/opinion/31iht-edgentile.html?_r=1

Excerpt:

History shows that occupation by foreign armies with the intent of changing occupied societies does not work and ends up costing considerable blood and treasure.

The notion that if only an army gets a few more troops, with different and better generals, then within a few years it can defeat a multi-faceted insurgency set in the middle of civil war, is not supported by an honest reading of history.

Algeria, Vietnam and Iraq show this to be the case.

Paul Rogers. Open Democracy, 29 October 2009. Hosted on the Commondreams website.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/03-6

Excerpt:

If there is a way ahead, it rests not on short-term calculations about troop numbers but on a larger reassessment by the Barack Obama administration of the entire US security posture in the middle east and southwest Asia. This will have to do more than crisis-manage the dire problems inherited from George W Bush; what is needed is no less than a move beyond military-led thinking to an integrated understanding of what security in the 21st century actually is.

Michael A. Cohen. The New Republic, 29 October 2009.
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/disputations-false-dichotomy

for Biddle article see: http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/is-there-a-middle-way-biddl

Excerpt:

In poker terms, Biddle’s argument is the equivalent of betting all your chips on an inside straight draw. And then doing it again on the next hand.

Michael T. Klare. Tom Dispatch, 26 October 2009.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175131/michael_klare_the_great_superpower_meltdown

Excerpt:

How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.

article references http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/global-trends-2025

Paul McGeough. The Age, 24 October 2009. from an address at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/afghan-insurgency-given-new-life-by-their-enemies-20091023-hd58.html

Excerpts:

Afghans do want governance – they want good governance. But they have been ripped off every time it’s been within their grasp. And the worst rip-off has been in the last eight years, because democracy and good governance were the gifts offered by the West – by governments that supposedly knew about these things.

In their refusal to back Kabul or the Coalition, Afghans are not saying yea or neigh on the Taliban in isolation – the call they make as they try to go about their daily existence, is on the credibility of the Taliban as compared with that of the Karzai government and the Coalition.

It’s too late for McChrystal to make protecting the most-threatened sections of the Afghan population the key objective, because both the Kabul Government and the coalition lack credibility in the eyes of the people. In the absence of any significant Afghan government presence, much beyond Kabul, it is American military and aid workers – and those from several other coalition countries – that are seen as the face of government and as keepers of the cash, of which there is not enough and which takes forever to translate into meaningful development.

Stephen M. Walt. The Nation, 21 October 2009.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/walt