Some Advice for Republicans on Defense Spending

George Will had a column in yesterday's Washington Post devoted largely to the issues Secretary of Defense Panetta faces with the possibility of sequestration looming.  It isn't a particularly memorable column, save for this little tidbit:

"Time was, when Democrats looked at the defense budget with a skeptical squint, Republicans rallied round it. No more. Few Tea Partyers remember Washington’s hawk-vs.-dove dramas. They live to slow spending, period. They are constitutionalists but insufficiently attentive to the fact that defense is something the federal government does that it actually should do. And when they are told that particular military expenditures are crucial to force projection, they say: As in Libya? Been there, don’t want to do that."

With this statement, Will brings up what appears to be a rising dichotomy within the Republican Party, one in which the old-style R's have a hard time seeing even minor cuts in defense spending as anything other than a threat to our national security, and the new style Republicans who are also strong on national defense, but who question the efficiency and effectiveness with which it is provided. 


I am a partisan Republican,  as some of you know and as the rest of you could find out with a simple Google Search.  I blog elsewhere under the "nom de cyber" of The Conservative Wahoo.  I spent a week in Iowa earlier this summer volunteering on the Romney Campaign.  The overwhelming majority of my political contributions have gone to Republicans.  I pretty much bleed Red.

That said, I truly believe that Republicans are mishandling the debate on defense spending.  I offer this post as food for thought for the Congressional Republicans as they wrestle with how to reconcile strong national defense and fiscal discipline--which should be bedrock Republican principles and which do not necessarily have to be in opposition.

In it, I propose five principles of my own, guiding statements on how Republicans should view defense, strategy and resources.  

PRINCIPLE 1:  It is not now, nor has it ever been, sufficient to "listen to the generals" when it comes to matters of national security.  You are paid to use YOUR judgment to balance needs within the defense establishment and the tension between providing for "the common defense" and promoting "the general welfare". The budget they defend is rarely a reflection of their best military judgment, rather it is the leavings of a process that values consensus over innovation and comity over effectiveness.  Their system and culture demand that they defend it nonetheless.  You have to go deeper, you must make them uncomfortable.  You must force them to link resources and strategy, and you must expose the inefficiency and wasteful spending that flows from a lack of differentiation among the Services and hesitance to make choices.

PRINCIPLE 2:  We can be more secure and spend less money on defense.   Sounds too good to be true, right?  As long as we continue to permit the type of budgeting described in Principle 1 to be the way things get done, we will invariably spend unwisely and inefficiently--while attempting to cover up these sins with vast amounts of money.  Duplication and lack of differentiation--along with the inability to make strategic choices because of risk averse behavior--drive up defense budgets and deprive more strategically important investments of funding that is channeled to less important programs in order to buy consensus.  Take up the mantle of efficient and effective spending--which we as a Party are so fond of elsewhere--and apply it to DoD. Make DoD reform its QDR process, figure out how Goldwater-Nichols has stifled useful Service tension in favor of Jointness--dig.    No Republican worth his salt would stand idly by while HHS or Energy inefficiently wasted money, so why they would enable the behavior at DoD by failing to force real choices is beyond me.  Republicans need to remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990's--and the hysteria of Democrats who felt that spending less on welfare would doom the underclass. They were wrong, and Republicans who will not cut defense today, are just as wrong.  They just need to be as smart about it as they were with welfare reform. 

PRINCIPLE  3:  Military personnel are no more noble or sacrosanct than local firemen, policemen, or teachers.  Republicans across the country have gotten downright giddy as politicians at the state and local level have taken on entrenched interests in the public sector unions, whose lavish pensions and healthcare benefits are seen as horrible drains on public coffers and the result of unusually cozy relationships between union leaders and elected officials.  Yet for some reason, Republicans cannot bring themselves to apply the same flinty scrutiny to military benefits.  This must change--as the resulting costs are not only rising at an astronomical rate,  and they are crowding out investments in new capabilities that are essential to future defense needs.  We have had an All-Volunteer Force for decades now, and the overwhelming majority of people who have served in the Armed Forces have never been in combat.  There is no coherent justification for draft era, wartime expansion policies that have not been seriously questioned.  The rhetoric must be supportive and high-minded, but the result must be the same.  Sky-rocketing costs must be reined in, and the change should begin sooner rather than later. 

PRINCIPLE 4:  If you build it and maintain it, it will be used.  Military forces maintained in combat-ready status are more likely to be employed than those which require time, effort and potentially a call-up to attain readiness.  This reality is not a Democratic or a Republican practice, it is the legacy of post Cold-war world leadership married to a strong executive branch.  While Congress does not make foreign policy, and it does not prosecute wars, it funds both.  Placing more of our combat power in the Guard and Reserve will make its promiscuous use less likely, and will cause decision-makers to employ that which is retained in high readiness more judiciously.

PRINCIPLE 5:  The nation must be prepared to fight and win the war it cannot afford to lose--in order that it may never be fought.  The suppression of untidy insurgencies, the prosecution of Islamic terrorism, and the nimble response to natural disasters are important, but they pale in importance to the necessity to being prepared to fight and win war with a peer or near-peer.  Let's face it--we could walk out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, and our survival as a nation would be little impacted.  Become involved someday in a war with China--for which we were under-prepared--and our very way of life would be could be threatened. 

The defense budget did not cause our current fiscal crisis, and even the draconian cuts under sequestration would have little impact on the true cause of the coming debt crisis-runaway spending on healthcare.  That said, Republicans must return to the virtues of small and efficient government, and they must cease to turn a blind eye to the excesses of the Pentagon simply because it feeds district largess.  Efficiency and strength are not inconsistent, nor are economy and effectiveness. 

Bryan McGrath