Money for research and development is down. Money for building ships is slightly down. Even money for assembling new drones is somewhat down. Cash for maintaining the military’s aging and existing inventory of planes, trucks, guns and bombs is up. This is what happens when austerity comes to the Pentagon: an older, wheezing force — for the low, low price of $613.9 billion.
The outlines of the new defense budget, released in all its extensive detail on Monday morning, have been clear for at least a month. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the defense budget is down 2.5 percent from last year, and the ground forces — Army combat brigades, in particular — are going to take the biggest financial hit as the military becomes smaller, more oriented toward sea and air conflict, and more robotic.
But the details matter. And what they add up to is the first time in a decade that the military has been told to do more with less. As Bloomberg News notes, 40 percent of the cuts come from new weapons — even though those accounts (.pdf) make up less than fifth of the budget. Meanwhile, military maintenance spending is up six percent, the logical consequence on relying on decades-old planes and ships whose part-suppliers vanished long ago. When the Pentagon released an overview of this budget last month, it emphasized all the stuff it would buy in bulk. But today it’s clear that was cover for the thousand small cuts the budget contains.
Few marquee military projects are getting cancelled; even the controversial missile defense program still gets $13.3 billion in the new budget. But lots of them have bites taken out. That missile defense coffer has been shrunk by about 10 percent. The trillion-dollar Joint Strike Fighter family of jets, the most expensive (and problem-plagued) defense program in history, is getting cut by $15 billion over four years. Shipbuilding is down $13.1 billion over that time — from 57 ships to 41 — even though President Obama’s defense strategy heavily prioritizes the deep, blue Pacific.
Cash for more of the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornets — the service’s premiere manned fighter jets — is also getting trimmed, down from $2.5 billion to $2.2 billion. The Marines’ tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft is going from $2.78 billion to $1.95 billion. All the while, 11 squadrons of tactical aircraft — including the workhorse of the Afghan air war, the A-10 — are being mothballed.
Drones aren’t spared. Last year, the Pentagon built 91 of the armed Predator and Reapers that fly over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Next year, that production rate will be cut by more than half, to 43 aircraft. Money to build the smaller Raven and Shadow spy drones that ground forces take into combat are down to $228 million from last year’s $294.5 million.
Flesh-and-blood troops will see their ranks thinned, as well. Active duty and reserve forces will be cut by 125,000 people in the next four years, including eight Army brigades and and six Marine battalions.
Then there’s the future. Pentagon is asking for a research and development budget of $69.4 billion, including $2.1 billion for basic research, down from $71.4 billion last year. The Pentagon’s office for developing technologies to defeat homemade insurgent bombs, known as JIEDDO, is getting cut from $2.4 billion to $1.7 billion, even as the bombs proliferate worldwide.
Overall, the Pentagon isn’t immediately looking at deep cuts as it prepares to lose (at least) $487 billion over the next decade. But for the next year, it’s got to make do with slightly less. No wonder the mammoth operations and maintenance budget — essentially, how the military performs upkeep on all the stuff it already has — is rising. Last year Congress gave the military $197.2 billion for maintenance. This year the military wants $208.8 billion.
Of course, that’s if Congress goes along. The release of today’s budget formally inaugurates a battle with the legislature — many of whose members want the military to spend more. The Pentagon may be trying to buy a Ford Fiesta, but Congress might give it a Cadillac.
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