AirSea Battle - A Strategy of Tactics?

AirSea Battle is gaining public notoriety, even as an official description is yet to exist. AirSea Battle is now part of general answers and specific questions in Congressional hearings suggesting there is some anticipation on Capitol Hill what exactly this widely touted but never officially discussed series of ideas might be.

The focus of AirSea Battle appears to be to counter the growing challenges to US military power projection in the western Pacific and Persian Gulf, although in public use AirSea Battle is now used almost exclusively in the context of China.

CSBA described AirSea Battle as A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept. The use of the term "operational" implied AirSea Battle is intended to be developed as a battle doctrine for air and sea forces. Milan Vego recently took this one step further in Proceedings and recommended AirSea Battle be developed as one of several operational concepts for littoral warfare, although I think there is room to develop AirSea Battle doctrine for joint operations in several different geographic conditions.

All we really know about AirSea Battle is that we don't know a lot more about it than we do know, so every time someone writes about AirSea Battle from a position of some authority as to what AirSea Battle actually is - it's worth noting. In the latest example, we learn a lot.

A new Armed Forces Journal article by J. Noel Williams titled Air-Sea Battle is perhaps the most important contribution to the AirSea Battle discussion to date, because it starts a valid public discussion with criticisms of AirSea Battle - criticisms that cannot be ignored or dismissed. The article should be read in total - it's worth it. Because the article is very long difficult to cover in a single blogpost, I'm going to focus on only a few specific aspects of the article that stick out to me; a few of the criticisms and the implied competing doctrines.

Criticisms of AirSea Battle

This paragraph contains a lot of room for more discussion. The author's argument is that AirSea Battle doctrine appears to be a symmetrical approach to Chinese military capabilities. It should be noted that AirSea Battle doctrine is specifically being developed as an asymmetrical approach to Chinese area and access denial capabilities.

AirLand Battle posited an asymmetric approach in relation to the Soviet Union. AirLand would attack all echelons of the Soviet force with aviation and long-range fires because NATO was badly outnumbered on the ground. In contrast, ASB is symmetrical, pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike. Since ASB is by definition an away game, how can we build sufficient expeditionary naval and air forces to counter Chinese forces that possess a home-court advantage? Is it prudent to expect the weapon magazines of an entire industrial nation to be smaller than those of our Navy and Air Force deployed more than 3,000 miles from home? What happens when the vertical launch systems of our ships and the bomb bays of our aircraft are empty?

Logistics is going to be a challenge in any military campaign where an enemy has the capacity to strike at our lines-of-communication, so in that sense the logistics points are not really a compelling argument for me against AirSea Battle. Logistics is a challenge in any military endeavor that can be applied to any doctrine. It is fair to note logistics is a huge challenge for the US today in Afghanistan, and hardly a major challenge specific to any single theater of war. I do like the last question though, because it is a question Congress needs to be asking all the time as budget pressures force difficult choices on Navy force structure.

The bigger question here is whether AirSea Battle doctrine represents a symmetrical apprach of "pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike." I think the authors statement represents a fair question, but I am hesitant to agree with the author that this conclusion is accurate. Any battle doctrine between the US Air Force and US Navy should build towards a precision fires regime, so I am unclear as to why that is implied a problem with AirSea Battle. Furthermore, because AirSea Battle is supposed to be a battle doctrine - a joint US Navy and USAF operational concept - the authors strategic level argument fails because it compares tactical methods as symmetrical comparisons. Just because Taliban forces and US Army forces in Afghanistan might both employ accurate, precision fires, that doesn't mean both sides are engaged in symmetrical warfare on the battlefield. How forces are used on a battlefield is often much more important to measuring the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of combat than the weapons forces utilize on a battlefield, and I have yet to see much discussed on that aspect of AirSea Battle doctrine development.

A military confrontation with China would be the biggest national security challenge since World War II, yet ASB advocates suggest it can be handled by just two of the four services. To the outside observer, this is astonishing; to the insider skeptic, it is absurd. Many ASB advocates I have talked with or have heard speak on the subject follow the logic that we will never conduct a land war in China, therefore long-range precision strike is the only practical alternative. What is missed in this line of thinking is that there are other, more fundamental choices that also don’t require a land war in China. It would appear there is an unstated assumption by many that conflict with China must include a race across the Pacific to defend Taiwan; many war games over the past decades have solidified this point of view. Unfortunately, this assumption is outdated. Chinese capabilities now, but especially 10 years from now, simply preclude a rush to Taiwan and would require a very deliberate campaign similar to that described in the aforementioned CSBA report to gain access. Without ground forces and with limited magazine capacities, what happens once we get there? What now, lieutenant?

I have heard everything mentioned in that paragraph discussed myself in person by those who are developing AirSea Battle doctrine, and I myself found what was said by AirSea advocates both "astonishing" and "absurd." The parochial, shortsighted nature of AirSea Battle that fails to include ground forces as a capability in major war is so thoroughly shortsighted that even as a hard Navy partisan I have a hard time believing AirSea Battle doctrine development has as much support as it does. The parochial nature of the AirSea Battle discussion informs me, an observer, that AirSea Battle is nothing more than an idea to advance a political agenda for the Navy and Air Force, and by political I am speaking specifically about justification of budgetary investments.

Competing Doctrines

Army Col. Gian Gentile, writing in Infinity Journal, expresses similar concerns about the impact of optimizing the Defense Department for counterinsurgency operations — in other words, optimizing for the opposite end of the spectrum recommended by ASB. The logic of the criticism is the same, nonetheless, since optimizing forces for an uncertain future is a prescription for getting it badly wrong. Gentile argues that counterinsurgency has become a “strategy of tactics.” He explains that when nations “allow the actual doing of war — its tactics — to bury strategy or blinker strategic thinking,” it leads to disaster, such as in Nazi Germany, where the German Army’s tactical excellence in Blitzkrieg could not rescue the regime from its fundamentally flawed strategy.

It is possible that, like Blitzkrieg, the U.S. could prevail in the tactics and operational art of ASB and still suffer strategic defeat.

So what’s the rub specifically? ASB initially was conceived as a way to increase interoperability between the Air Force and Navy through increased training and improved technical interoperability. Given the overlaps in their strike capabilities, especially in aircraft, it makes perfect sense for the two most technical services to work closely to ensure interoperability. But like its progenitor, AirLand Battle, ASB has progressed to an operational concept to address a specific military problem. While AirLand Battle was conceived to counter the Soviet Union, Air-Sea Battle is billed as the answer to growing anti-access/area-denial capabilities generically, but as everyone knows, specifically China.

CSBA described AirSea Battle as "A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept," so I am unclear how ASB progressed into an operational concept when ASB was actually introduced as an operational concept. Operational concepts are what drive doctrinal development, so if a service was going to develop battle doctrine the logical starting place would be to develop an operational concept. Am I missing something here?

I agree with Col. Gian Gentile that counterinsurgency has become a "strategy of tactics," kind of. It is more accurate to say that the US military developed a population centric operational concept intended to address a specific battlefield problem in Iraq, and the operational concept drove development of counterinsurgency doctrine. That operational concept and subsequent doctrine became tactics employed by troops on the battlefield that through trial and error, led to a wealth of lessons learned on the battlefield and ultimately, a political victory by means of military power that our national leaders could live with.

What followed the successful execution of a population centric operational concept, often generically described as "COIN" although it is much more than just counterinsurgency, was an intellectual Enterprise consisting of a politically diverse group military and policy intellectuals, and it was that intellectual Enterprise (or industry) - through open source intellectual rigor and debate - that began a process of broadly articulating strategic and policy ideas and recommendations based on the experiences and lessons learned from the successfully employed battlefield tactics.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the author frames AirSea Battle as akin to being a competing doctrine to COIN, pitting a high end warfare AirSea Battle doctrine represented by the US Air Force/US Navy against a small wars COIN doctrine represented by the US Army/US Marine Corps. This competition is political, which is another way of saying it is almost entirely intended to influence budget decisions. I tend to think that would explain why US Army leaders see a future where intervention is required in small states that are more likely to be unstable as a result of the rise of regional powers; and why US Navy leaders see a future where rising regional powers leads to instability throughout the world suggesting the focus should be on deterring hostilities and maintaining escalation control between major powers.

There is not a national security policy that settles this debate, or said another way, the National Security Strategy of the United States (PDF) is so broad, generic, and ultimately useless that almost any version of the future use of military forces is accurate, and the the DoD can do just about everything and anything and meet the strategic guidance.

Which leads me back to reminding folks that since we enacted Goldwater-Nichols, the military services don't actually do strategy. The military services are responsible for the development of tactics and doctrines for forces that get pushed up to the strategic level - which is the COCOMs, who develop and execute strategies from the political policies of US civilian leaders. Because the military services are not effectively engaged in strategic development as a result of Goldwater-Nichols, and all they really develop themselves anymore is doctrine and tactics, the services attempt to leverage the doctrines they develop to influence politically up to strategy and policy. The services manage budget and tactics/doctrine, so for them it is only logical to match budget to doctrine/tactics, not budget to strategy/policy.

COIN and now AirSea Battle are representative of how doctrine becomes advocated in political form for purposes of justifying the budgets of the services. Goldwater-Nichols has built a wall that separates strategy (COCOMs) and budget (Services), and the results are that 25 years later the nation has yet to develop a coherent national security policy or strategy that meets the challenges of the 21st century.

Budgets controlled by the services get aligned with doctrine/tactics resulting in the US military being remarkably brilliant tactically but unquestionably adrift strategically. My concern is, and I think the article by J. Noel Williams suggests, that while AirSea Battle may be a smart development for the US Air Force and US Navy towards a joint battle doctrine; AirSea Battle will also be the next military operational concept forwarded as a political idea that acts as a substitute for the absence of a coherent 21st century national security policy.

You know that strategic process Secretary Panetta discusses that will guide budget decisions? We are going to look globally incompetent if that "strategy" reads like it was informed by a doctrine rather than a policy.

Roughead's Last Week - Interview With Defense News

Chris Cavas of Defense News has done what we might call a parting interview with ADM Gary Roughead. These are the last two questions, but the whole interview is worth a read.

Q. When do you see the first LCS moving to Singapore? 2014?

A. You will see LCSs in the western Pacific sooner than that. And they’ll deploy with combat capability.

Q. As you leave office, what’s your assessment of the division of responsibilities between the Navy’s uniformed and civilian leaders, defined by the Goldwater-Nichols act?

A. From the very beginning, I put a focus on acquisition, because I knew that if we did not get stability on shipbuilding and aviation, it was going to be very problematic. There was no question we were going to come to a downturn on my watch — that was a function of just looking at defense budgets and how they cycle. I will admit that I didn’t see the severity of the economic pressures that struck the country.

I also believed that the perceptions and interpretations of Goldwater-Nichols as it applied to service chiefs and acquisition, that we in uniform had stepped away without the imperative to step away. I think we read too much into Goldwater-Nichols.

I set requirements, and I take that very seriously. I believe that in the requirements side we had become not ambivalent, but less exacting. If we came across a good idea we’d simply add that requirement on with little regard for how it would perturb the acquisition cycle. And we tended not to think in terms of what costs would come back around a couple of years later to bite a successor in the butt.

I also have the budget. I told my folks that we have an obligation to make sure we’re getting what we wanted. There were a couple of things that were very helpful. One is, I had the privilege and pleasure of serving under two secretaries who are very open to this collaborative approach. And in Sean Stackley, we have probably the best person in acquisition you’re going to find. The other thing we have going for us is very strong systems commanders.

If you go back three years, I brought all my ship program managers into a room, all my requirements folks into the room, and we had one of the best conversations for well over half a day that I’ve had. It was remarkable. You had conversations like, is that what you wanted me to do? I thought you wanted me to do this.

The point being that even though you can interpret into Goldwater-Nichols this bifurcated system, it need not be that way. What you saw over time was the CNO staff and the secretary and the acquisition executive coming together on things like LCS and saying we’ve got to fix the program; how do we fix it? And no one individual has all the levers.

I would say these perceived gaps have been closed down. I think that what has happened is that a really good environment has taken place between the acquisition organization. I think we’ve improved that significantly.

It is interesting to note ADM Rougheads opinions on this subject. We are years away from knowing if perceived gaps have been closes, or if the acquisition organization has improved significantly, but we do know one thing for sure - ADM Roughead was the successor as CNO who was bit in the butt by the constant requirement creep pushed by previous CNOs, so it is easy to see where he is coming from on this.

Also noteworthy - the interview focused on legacy, not the future.

Goldwater-Nichols: 25 Years Later. Call For Papers

October will mark the 25 year anniversary of the Goldwater Nichols Act, the most important DoD reorganization in the lifetimes of most of us. To mark the anniversary I would like to encourage our many readers to contribute articles regarding their thoughts of Goldwater-Nichols. I am under the firm belief that a review of Goldwater-Nichols at this point in time could in fact be useful both for the Congressional audience of this blog as well as the military leadership audience of this blog as both struggle with the current fiscal challenges facing the United States.

With the intent and genuine desire to get folks motivated to give an opinion on Goldwater-Nichols 25 years later, I figured I would start by giving some of my own thoughts on the subject.

I believe a brief history of Goldwater-Nichols can be given by noting there are three phases of Goldwater-Nichols as they have influenced modern American military history: the first five, the next ten, and the last ten.

The First Five refers to the first five years from 1986-1991. In 1987-1988 the major military operation at the time was Operation Earnest Will from July 24, 2024 through September 26, 2024 which also overlapped with Operation Prime Chance. While these operations were mostly naval centric with the protection of tankers, Operation Prime Chance also focused on preventing Iran from disrupting shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. The use of Army special operations helicopters and special forces from USSOCOM was only a small part of the operation, but nonetheless led to several integration activities so that Army aviation elements of the 160th SOAR could operate from and communicate with Navy ships. While this may seem like a seemingly trivial event, it was an early important first step for interoperability between the two military services following the Joint services mandates of Goldwater-Nichols.

In December of 1989 President George Bush ordered Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama where dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed. Operation Just Cause marked another significant Joint services operation that included elements of the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, and US Marine Corps. A lot of operational lessons were learned in Operation Just Cause regarding the logistics requirements for the Air Force in supporting both Army and Marine units, not to mention several early lessons in joint operations between the services, particularly in regards to communications. A lot of those lessons came in handy only 8 months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

With the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 through mid-March of 1991 the United States and coalition partners put on one of the most impressive displays of military power the world had ever seen by completely crushing what was at the time an Iraqi Army rated fourth in size in the world. While mostly an American military operation, the size of the operation with over half a million people involved in the coalition combined with the scope of the destruction rained upon Iraqi military forces was stunning and solidified positive views in Washington related to the merits of Goldwater-Nichols. In the end, more Americans had died from friendly fire in the first Gulf War than by enemy fire, and that drove the necessity for the US military to fully integrate joint service commands towards interoperability and Jointness. The changes made under Goldwater-Nichols specific to the COCOMs was also validated and solidified as a result of the first Gulf War largely thanks to the CENTCOM commander at the time - Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. The key point as it relates to Goldwater-Nichols is that General Schwarzkopf was able to develop a strategy from policy, call up forced from the individual services, and develop and execute a campaign plan under a Joint forces with a high degree of success.

Two large Joint services campaigns in five years, both with a high degree of military success, had proven Goldwater-Nichols a success.

The Next Ten years from 1992-2001 was spent better integrating the military services under what some now refer to as Jointness. The United States military, under rules for a Joint construct set forth by Goldwater-Nichols, became the most lethal operational military force in the history of human conflict. While political talking heads ran around in the 1990s discussing questionable theories like The End of History following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States failed to recognize that significant national security threats posed by those who were losers in the emerging geopolitical global order still existed, and the United States did not plan properly for the global economic shift from Europe to Asia that would occur only a decade later. During the 1990s under Goldwater-Nichols, two simultaneous events occurred that were thought exclusive to the Act: budget cuts to defense and strategic drift in defense policy.

When seen through the eyes of Goldwater-Nichols, the use of American aircraft carriers to provide naval aviation for operations in Kosovo was an excellent example where duplicate capacity was leveraged in the interest of sharing roles and missions under a Joint construct, rather than streamlining roles and missions between the services during a period of budget cuts. Ultimately, each individual military service sacrificed many capabilities in the 1990s during budget cuts that had to be rebuilt later primarily because the individual military services felt entitled for inclusion in military activities under the Joint construct of Goldwater-Nichols as a way to justify their budgets. The reduction in capabilities of each service and the entitlement expressed by the individual services to be included in military operations should have been a red flag there was a flaw in Goldwater-Nichols, but the operational success credited to Goldwater-Nichols continued to provide spectacular results that served as a rationale for dismissing any criticism.

Throughout the 1990s leading into the 21st century, the United States failed to formulate a national defense strategy that tied COCOM strategic requirements for protecting national interests to the individual military services budget requirements strained under the politics of a world absent major nation conflicts. It wasn't until North Korea, Pakistan, and India started testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles did the US shake the malaise of a future without war between nation states, but by then it was too late - September 11, 2024 arrived.

The Last Ten years began ten years ago from this Sunday, on September 11, 2001. This Sunday will mark the ten year anniversary of many things, but from the perspective of Goldwater-Nichols, 9/11 marks the ten year anniversary of our ongoing land wars in Asia and air wars throughout Asia and Africa. Without a strategic vision of national defense articulated by both the political leaders of the nation since the Cold War, but also because the military services were never organized around a strategic vision for the defense of the nation, the United States responded to the attacks on 9/11 by 19 terrorists with the longest running military campaign in our nations history.

Obviously the strategic threat to the United States is bigger than the 19 individuals directly involved in 9/11, but it is noteworthy that the government of Afghanistan was toppled without any primary forces of the US Army. It wasn't until after the Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan that the US Army showed up, but we all knew they had to eventually show up - after all, Goldwater-Nichols insures that each service gets a piece of the action.

From a Goldwater-Nichols perspective though, the real justification for the Acts success came with the invasion of Iraq. From a purely military perspective, the invasion of Iraq proved that the Joint military approach the United States had perfected for the previous 14+ years was indeed brilliantly lethal and effective as a military force. The United States military today is unmatched in operational capabilities conducting the ugly, messy, and costly business of war. The precision lethality of military capabilities leveraged by the United States is indeed so capable that the United States today conducts six simultaneous wars in four theaters on two continents: Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia, Iraq in Asia, Yemen in Asia and Somalia in east Africa, and Libya in North Africa.

But the strategic drift continues. Because of the hollowing of military force within the individual services in the 1990s, and because today each service must get a piece of the action in each theater of war under the COCOM model for Joint services warfare, the defense budget has skyrocketed over the last ten years to support the various wartime capabilities desired by the individual services despite the wars themselves being paid for through a separate overseas contingency operations budget.

How is it possible that after ten years of war and after already suffering one major defense budget cut in the 1990s the US military is still accused of lacking a policy -> strategy -> tactics/training -> doctrine process by which to guide budget decisions? The answer, in part, is Goldwater-Nichols.

One of the consequences of Goldwater-Nichols, and what I believe to be the flaw of the Act, is that defense strategy was shifted from the services to the COCOMs while budget remained the responsibility of the services. By design Goldwater-Nichols separates defense strategy (COCOMS) from budget (the individual services). This problem is evident by the strategic drift the nation has been suffering for the last 25 years, but because Goldwater-Nichols also was instrumental in bringing together interoperability between the military services, the resulting operational brilliance of the US military as a result from Goldwater-Nichols has masked this rather serious flaw.

Defense policy in Washington drives COCOM strategies, who then must go back to Washington to the individual services for resources. From the services perspective, they do not budget policy or strategy, rather they budget the doctrine and tactics/training that will be developed by the individual services who are deployed in support of COCOM resource requests. Because tactics and training now integrate joint services coordination, by the time the units within the individual services arrive at the COCOM level to be leveraged within the context of a strategy driven by policy, those units from each of the US military services are individually and collectively prepared to be operationally excellent under the Joint model - and have proven it time and time again.

The leaders of the military services continue to say that their primary objective is not to repeat the mistakes of the impending budget cuts to defense that are set to begin in FY 2013, but I honestly don't see a scenario right now where any of the services can avoid repeating those mistakes. From the services perspective of budgeting, their focus is on insuring that the tactical/training/doctrinal aspect of each individual military services budget is protected because in the 1990s, that aspect of the defense budget was shorted, and it led to a hollowing of the force structure. From the services perspective, to handle this emerging budget crisis, each military service will contract itself with the primary intent of retaining that precious tactical/training/doctrinal capacity within each individual services budget. The expectation is that when combined with other elements of national power, the Joint force will be operationally brilliant even though there is no question it will be smaller.

I believe this is the second least efficient approach possible for national defense - second behind the least efficient approach, which is the same approach used today except with the higher budget.

The problem with the simple contraction approach to defense budget cuts is that it in no way aligns the budget for the national defense of the United States with the political policies or even the COCOM strategic execution of defense policy of the United States.

I have been told several times by several people that the sole instruction to OSD to date by the Obama administration regarding defense budget cuts is to prevent the services from competing with each other over defense funding. If that is true, that suggests to me the United States will absolutely repeat the mistakes of the 1990s, when the services were also prevented from competing with one another during budget cuts. By removing the obligation of the services to compete at the policy level for funding, the Obama administration is removing the burden from the services to match budget to policy - and furthermore retains the entitlement felt by the individual services to be included in operations overseas rather than matching the right capabilities to the challenges being addressed.

Goldwater Nichols has created a framework that intentionally separates defense strategy executed by the COCOMs from defense budget managed by the individual military services, and the accepted norms for political processes related to national defense policy exclude the individual military services from the obligations of thinking strategically as a Joint force at the budget planning level. As we move into the defense policy and budgeting process for what some are calling the so-called Sword of Damocles cuts, under Goldwater-Nichols the next ten years are very easy to predict.

The military services will remain operationally brilliant as they have been under Goldwater-Nichols, and at the same time the nation will continue to drift strategically as we have been under Goldwater-Nichols. The only way this changes is if the services are forced by the Obama administration, thus obligated, to compete at the strategic and policy level against each other for funding by making the case for what each service brings to the table for the national defense of the United States of America. Should the Obama administration fail to force that competition between the services, I strongly believe they would be insuring the nation will suffer strategic drift for another decade under a flawed Goldwater-Nichols system that disconnects the national defense policies of the United States from the national defense budget of the United States.

If Admiral Mullen is correct, and the national debt is the top national security threat to the United States, it seems to me that an appropriate political response to that top threat to national security would be to insure that any disconnect between defense budget and defense policy is corrected. In my mind that begins by taking a hard look at how Goldwater-Nichols has divided budget and strategy. How will someone measure success? For the Navy, I'd suggest we know things are changing when N5 is no longer a paper pushing afterthought in OPNAV and N8 isn't a ridiculously powerful authority within OPNAV.

---

If you, like me, have strong opinions on the impacts of Goldwater-Nichols towards the national defense of the United States 25 years later, I strongly encourage you to write up and submit to me via email an article on the subject that I can post on the blog during the month of October.

Rep. Paul Ryan's Budget Sets Stage for Much Needed Defense Reforms

Colin Clark has a story today for AOL News discussing the protections Republicans made for defense spending leading up to the release of the recently announced Paul Ryan budget plan. I have not taken a close look at the Paul Ryan budget details, but I am very encouraged that someone in Washington DC has become serious about the federal government fiscal situation and has put together a serious plan.

We have all been following various sources for coverage of the Paul Ryan budget release, and for me I've been watching Andrew Sullivan, who predictably, has been brilliant in recognizing that this is a serious plan for serious people during serious times. Sullivan has two complaints I strongly agree with, the lack of substance in the tax policies proposed and the lack of defense cuts. I think there are several ideas that can be debated regarding the tax policy, so that is another discussion, but I want to focus on the lack of defense cuts in Paul Ryan's plan.

According to the AOL article, the two House members influential in protecting the defense budget were House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon and Rep. Todd Akin, with Rep. Akin being the key figure. I like Todd Akin a lot, he is Chairman of the House Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee and has been a strong advocate for the Navy, but I have to be honest - when I read his blog post on the Heritage Foundation Foundry blog, I liked him less. He lists four reasons why he opposes defense cuts right now, and I think if the Democrats are smart, they will shoot holes through these arguments with no problems.

1. Our military is already stretched thin.
2. Disagrees that cutting the defense budget is reasonable because there is waste
3. The budget crisis is driven primarily by entitlement spending
4. The preamble of our Constitution talks about providing for a common defense and promoting the general welfare

This is intellectually weak stuff that represents boiler plate political talking points to an uninformed partisan audience, and certainly not the arguments found within the serious defense thinker community. For political reasons, Todd Akin has become married to the Heritage Foundation, and it strikes me that this is a tremendous weakness for the Republicans and the Navy specifically in the national security debate. Since 2006, and likely before, the defense wing of the Heritage Foundation (with one exception I know of) has been in decline primarily because they form a single conclusion of which all arguments are made to support.

MORE MONEY.

I believe Rep. Paul Ryan and many other Republicans will be ready to deal on the defense budget if the Democrats come back with a strong case of their own, because the Republicans will quickly realize that folks like Rep. Todd Akin will be standing on a ledge with James Carafano and no one else should a serious defense debate occur. The key though is whether Democrats are ready with a strong case for a serious defense debate. If Democrats are looking for a serious defense debate that works politically towards real reductions in defense spending, Democrats should start with the blue print already in the public by some of the leading conservative and libertarian thinkers in the national defense community, because a quick search will reveal these same arguments are made by liberals, progressives, and non-partisan think tanks (like CNAS (PDF)). For example:

Seth Cropsey

To prevent bureaucratic strife, the defense budget has for years been divided equally. This was not always the rule. As American grand strategy once made deliberate choices, the division of the defense budget once reflected them. In 1958, when the Eisenhower administration placed its hopes for strategic deterrence primarily in the Strategic Air Command, the Air Force received 48 percent of the budget. The Navy's portion was almost 29 percent, and the Army received 21 percent, down by nearly a half from its 39 percent share during the Korean War.

After Washington ends our large-scale commitment to wars in the Middle East, it must commit a division of the defense budget toward maintaining the current balance of power in Asia and the western Pacific region. This should of course include a stabilizing US presence carried out by the military services best situated to the task. If "strategy" has any meaning, it must choose among competing claims and place informed bets. Is the contentment of our three military services a greater good than an allocation of resources that sustains our power in Asia and prevents the continued rise of a rival regional hegemon? If the US cannot make such strategic decisions under the burden of increasingly straitened national resources, are we still capable of maintaining international leadership, much less our own security?

Better division of resources and cuts in the bloated network of centrally run defense agencies can also help fund strategic restructuring. The Defense Logistics Agency, for example, which purchases food, fuel, medical supplies, and a host of other items from spare parts to uniforms, employs 26,000 people, or 3,000 more than the number staffing the Pentagon. The Defense Contract Audit Agency operates more than 300 field offices with 4,000 employees. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which mails paychecks and travel reimbursements, employs 12,000 people. Another 10,000 work at the Defense Contract Management Agency. The Defense Commissary Agency, which sells groceries and household supplies to the military, has 6,000 employees. Taken together, that's 58,000 employees, or more than one-fourth the size of the Marine Corps.

Christopher A. Preble

Significant cuts in military spending must be on the table as the nation struggles to close its fiscal gap without saddling individuals and businesses with burdensome taxes and future generations with debt. Such cuts will also force a reappraisal of our military’s roles and missions that is long overdue.

The Pentagon’s base budget has nearly doubled during the past decade. Throw in the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy, and a smattering of other programs, and the total amount that Americans spend annually on our military exceeds $700 billion. These costs might come down slightly as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawn to a close—as they should be—but according to the Obama administration’s own projections, the U.S. government will still spend nearly $6.5 trillion on the military over the next decade. Surely Rep. Ryan could have found a way to cut…something from this amount?

Defense is an undisputed core function of government—any government—and spending for that purpose should not be treated on an equal basis with the many other dubious roles and missions that the U.S. federal government now performs. But please note the emphasis. The U.S. Department of Defense should be focused on that purpose: defending the United States. But by acting as the world’s de facto policeman, we have essentially twisted the concept of “the common defence” to include the defense of the whole world, including billions of people who are not parties to our unique social contract.

Bryan McGrath

Rather than unleashing debate within the Pentagon as to whether equal or near equal shares of the defense budget parceled out to the military departments--irrespective of the strategy pursued—makes sense, we will continue to spend massive amounts of money on defense inefficiently building, improving, and maintaining capabilities and capacities that sap our resources and do little to extend and sustain our position of global leadership. We will continue to pay for military power that has little or no use in peacetime, which begs the question as to whether that investment invariably contributes to its promiscuous use. All the while, we will wring our hands about the “massive expenditure” of 2% of the total defense budget on shipbuilding, assets which provide return on investment throughout their service lives...

I urge the House Armed Services Committee to begin a round of hearings to assess the status of our strategy/resources match, in a manner that leaves open the possibility of fundamental re-alignment. The HASC and the Administration should embrace "creative tension" in order to determine how best to protect, preserve and extend American leadership in a changing world, and the value and logic of equal or near equal shares of the budget pie to each of the Services should be on the table from Day 1.

Like the wise man in the Pentagon once told me, when you run out of money, it is time to think.

And

Perhaps now, the vapidity of the equal share budget formula will be exposed for the bureaucratic crutch that it is. Perhaps now, the budget will begin to reflect the reality of Secretary Gates' words at West Point, in which he told a group of cadets wondering if they had made a poor choice in Service academies that the nature of conflict in the future will be abidingly Naval and Air. Perhaps now, we'll recognize the fact of our drawdowns in Asian land wars even as our East Asian friends and allies nervously urge us to become more engaged in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The coming defense budget crisis offers opportunity to think anew, to recognize that we spend PLENTY on defense, but that it is spent inefficiently and without recourse to strategy. It is time to UNBALANCE the defense budget, to fund those elements of national power more central to preserving and sustaining our national power while modestly de-emphasizing those with little peacetime return on investment. Some believe this debate will be central to the 2013 Quadrennial Defense Review. I disagree. The debate is upon us. The only question is whether we will answer.

And

The coming strategic dialogue will take place amid the backdrop of three potentially irreconcilable considerations. The first will be a natural, increased hesitance toward land war after a costly decade or more in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many Americans will eventually ask what was gained by the expenditure of over 5,500 lives and over a trillion dollars. The second will be the growing appetite for domestic infrastructure investment and entitlement spending even as the nation confronts mounting debt. The final consideration will be the desire of the American public to play the leading role in a world increasingly marked by the rise of Asia and the emergence of Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC nations) as counterweights to US and EU influence.

The support of the American people for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been remarkably durable, but it would be unwise to think such support would extend to another land war of choice in the near term, a sentiment echoed by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who wrote that “The United States is unlikely to repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan -- that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire -- anytime soon.” While there are other foreseeable reasons the US might wish to employ massive land force, Afghanistan and Iraq appear emblematic of the chaos and untidiness many observers feel will mark the future strategic landscape. This landscape will grow ever more dangerous as sophisticated weapons continue to proliferate into the hands of insurgents and terrorists. If these types of conflicts are unlikely to summon similar US resolve, there is a question of continuing to sustain and resource those capabilities and capacities necessary to address such conflict at the same levels. Might the nation be better off working to preclude these situations before they erupt, rather than react at great cost to the Treasury?

Grand strategy discussions will also reflect fallout from the diminished state of the American economy as a result of the recent recession and financial crisis. Many economists are wary of growing levels of institutional debt in the US, and austerity measures are likely to be considered. These measures will almost certainly include aggressive efforts to cut the defense budget, as automatic entitlement costs as a proportion of the federal budget grow. Pressure to cut the defense budget is likely to result in equal or nearly equal shares being assigned each of the armed services, as such “Joint” burden sharing is the norm in a Pentagon bereft of inter-service rivalry in the post Goldwater-Nichols era. While the defense budget is not the cause of the nation’s economic situation, policy makers will be sorely tempted to include it in the solution, rather than by curbing dramatically rising entitlement spending. A final strategic consideration likely to color discussions will be the almost certain desire of Americans to continue to be the acknowledged global leader—diplomatically, militarily, and economically—even as the resources available to continue or exercise such leadership are in jeopardy. Political leaders in the US will pay a heavy price at the ballot box if seen by voters to be supporting or enabling a decline in US power and influence.

There is a very serious core group of about 300 highly respected civilian defense thinkers in Washington DC that fall along every kind of political fault line, and I believe all 300 would immediately agree that Seth Cropsey, Christopher A. Preble, and Bryan McGrath are three of the leading voices in defense in conservative and libertarian politics.

Of the twenty-one years that have passed since the United States invaded Panama, the US has been at war on the ground for fourteen years. The DoD has been conducting military operations in multiple theaters since 9/11. Funding for national defense has nearly doubled in the last decade alone, and almost none of this funding has been in response of rising powers like China or India, or a resurgent Russia. The allies that make up the strongest strategic alliance, NATO, have reduced their military budgets dramatically over the last decade. There is a global balance of power shift taking place from west to east as Asia rises economically, diplomatically, and militarily. From almost every serious defense thinker in the United States, there is a consistent drumbeat of published articles calling for a serious debate in Washington on roles and missions in the national security debate.

If the Democratic Party is serious about deficit reduction in the way that Paul Ryan is, and wants that serious discussion to include a serious debate on defense spending, then the President of the United States and Democrats on the Hill must address the "equal shares" model in Goldwater Nichols that divides the defense budget into equal shares for the three services.

If Republicans or Democrats cannot address this incredible flaw in our strategic thinking for developing military capabilities tailored to requirements, roles, and missions - then top line defense cuts will be politically impossible due to the treaty commitments already made that forms the backbone of US global posture today.

The Goldwater Nichols debate should happen over FY12 and FY13 so that the DoD can formulate budgets properly with the strategic reset opportunity that will come when the US draws down from Afghanistan. Today the top line DoD budget is around $700 billion. By cutting out the "equal shares" model in Goldwater Nichols, there is no reason why the DoD budget couldn't be reduced.

The United States is facing several major strategic challenges that should be driving this debate anyway, including Cybersecurity Defense and Nuclear Deterrent policy in a post cold war era. The Air Force is spending more on space and cyber security than they do on aircraft, and the Navy spends more on aircraft than the Air Force does. The global basing situation needs a thorough reexamination in the wake of recent events in the Middle East, South Korea, and Japan combined with the rise of China and decline of Europe, and it cannot be ignored that while global military power on land is in decline, global naval power and in particular lethal submarines is increasing.

The world is different in 2011 than it was in 1986, 1991, and 2001, and yet the defense budget is still operating under the "equal shares" model in Goldwater Nichols that was designed during the cold war. If neither Republicans and Democrats are unwilling to take on the lack of strategic flexibility built into the "equal shares" model in Goldwater Nichols, then our nations political leaders are not serious about defense cuts.

Goldwater Nichols is step one, without reform nothing changes for defense spending without very serious legitimate risk of clear political consequences related to both domestic and global perception of American decline.