Tuesday, July 2, 2024

HASC Leaders on Fair-Share Budgeting

Who says bi-partisanship is dead?  In this piece, HASC members Randy Forbes (R-VA) and Rick Larsen (D-WA) argue eloquently for an approach to National Security resource allocation that derives primarily from strategic thinking rather than the annual arithmetic problem that guides how money is split among the Services.
 

People like to talk about a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 split in the defense budget.  This is not now true, nor has it been true for some time.  Mostly because only about 80% of the defense budget actually gets split among the services, with OSD skimming off 19% or so for its growing fiefdoms.  What is true is that through multiple strategic reviews, National Military Strategies, QDR's and Bottom Up Reviews--the Department of the Navy, Air Force and Army get a remarkably consistent portion of the defense budget.  The Navy—with two services—gets about 29%, the Army about 25% and the Air Force about 27%.  That’s right.  No matter WHAT military strategy our nation has pursued since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we’ve split the base defense budget in essentially the same way.  

Forbes and Larsen could be taken to task (given their interests in Seapower and Strategic Forces) if this article had been simply vacuous advocacy for building more ships (the kind I write here).  But it isn't.  It is a call from two very influential members of the HASC to try and inject logic and realism into a process that has come to favor consensus purchased with inefficiency.


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